Tempestuous Fury

One of my roomies, Jim, was arrested last night by a pair of Winter Park policemen. He just got back this evening, and the whole experience was pretty stupid. I’m less than impressed by the performance.

Last night when I asked them, they told me that Jim was being arrested on a parole/probabation violation. Jim, upon coming back, has informed me that they arrested him over him supposedly owing ~$50 in court costs. So where do they get off issuing an arrest warrant for him? Well, the paperwork stated that a letter was sent to his home address in INDIANA mentioning the costs. Never mind that his sister who gets the mail didn’t get the letter, or she would have called. The other question that Jim asked was why didn’t they send the bill to his local address here? The reply was that they didn’t have his local address. So how’d the police know exactly which address to come to locally to find him? Response: “Uh, we don’t know.” And a review of the paperwork by the judge finds that the numbers are inconsistent, and the money was already paid on the first bond bailout Jim had. (This all stems from that car accident he had MONTHS ago. You’d think this shit was cleared up by now.)

So, the arresting officers lied to me about why they were here. And Jim tells me they thought I was mighty inquisitive. A little too inquisitive, if you get my drift. Jim says they asked him if they should run my name, and that the cops were considering questioning me, because of course when they arrest my roommate in the house where I’m living it’s “none of my business.”

They never did bother running my name, but I’m sure they would have interpreted its spotlessness as a red flag that I was the brains of a major drug operation or at worst a terrorist. Those were the kind of cops they were, and the type of attitude they had. They knew we were all guilty of something, they just had to find out what it was. After all, we lived in this house, didn’t we? It would have been fun chatting with them, to say the least. I bet the conversation would have died pretty quick when I figured out they were looking for some excuse to get me too, because at that point I probably would have started asking for their names, badge numbers, and their car number, as well as noting the time. In my short life, I’ve found that few things frighten people more than when you start documenting who they are and everything they’re doing.

So Jim basically got screwed out of bail money again to get out. It looks like a clip joint type operation by the local PD for a few hundred $$ worth of bail money to me. Theoretically Jim could get it back for the egregious stupidity of the department in a court scenario, but it’d take more than its worth. As if that wasn’t enough, when the cops picked up Jim, they took stock of the money in his wallet and counted it $100 short and then tried to get him to sign for that amount. Really slick; I suppose it might work if you’re dealing with some hopped up idiot who’s just scared out of his mind that the cops just busted him, but that isn’t Jim. It’s the kind of idiocy you read about in a bad thriller novel, except here it is unfolding in front of me in real life.

So as the title states, Winter Park PD got a little too creative in the wrong places. Not exactly good news, and rather unprofessional of them. Actually, it’s just plain stupid and incompetent. It’s a wonder that some talk about “supporting your local law enforcement.” Who’d want to support dickheads like these guys? Makes you wonder about things sometimes. I’m supposedly in the heart of civilization here; or am I? It looks more like I’m living out on the fringes of it, except without the benefit of less traffic. So then WTF am I doing here?