Cops - class traitors?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Cops - class traitors?

so naieve question then.

[ursus arctos]

Cops - class traitors?

Well, it depends.

In some places (like much of Mexico), they are essentially muscle for hire by the highest bidder.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Cops - class traitors?

well now you have local government in large parts of the US using them to rob black people, with their fantastic forfeiture laws.

Was there much fuss when the godfather showed exactly how bent cops were in the 40's.

[ursus arctos]

Cops - class traitors?

Yeah, was going to mention that, though that role isn't incompatible with being the biggest gang.

Every now and then, I find myself talking to some new lawyer and being completely blown away by the fact that they don't view the police as inherently suspicious and untrustworthy. I don't know where or how these people grew up.

[Sam]

Cops - class traitors?

I don't think the police are the biggest gang in Buenos Aires, but they might very well become so if the seat of government ever moves to another city.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Cops - class traitors?

hah, I heard a great line about how an Irish court case was essentially a vehicle for everyone involved to perjure themselves, and then a jury decides based on who they disliked the most.

When my dad arrived in our town back in the sixties, there were a couple of older gardai, who were coming to the end of their service, which had started in the post civil war period, and they were by and large really terrible people. They fitted up a local man for the murder of the village prostitute in New Inn, and that is still rumbling on, with the poor man recently getting a pardon.

There was a bunch of gardai who arrived at the same time as my dad, and he was quite friendly with some of them who were very decent, and never really went anywhere in the force, because we lived in a very quiet, peaceful town, and they just became very settled.

But there was one or two who were involved in all sorts of little side scams. So say you are a garda, and you catch someone driving without tax or insurance, or so drunk that it was even a crime in Ireland, you could be prosecuted. Or, there was always another alternative.

One day my dad was hitchhiking back from Cork, and he was picked up outside Mitchelstown by a local garda, and as they drove back, they took a diversion down four or five side roads while the garda went in to check on a couple of cattle he would have 'boarded' with various small farmers who were caught up to no good. They would have to feed and keep the cow, until they reached the age where they could be sold, and the garda in question would make a huge profit.

Then there was the issue of unpaid labour. My dad once saw another garda, who had a field of potatoes to pick, going around raiding various pubs before opening time to gather up the towns alcoholics, who had a day of unscheduled potato picking ahead of them.

But the most lucrative version of this involved the first garda I mentioned, who would buy a site, get planning permission, and then essentially catch every tradesman he needed to build the house, which he would then sell, and turn a huge profit, before going on to repeat the trick.

said garda eventually left the force because he was ready to buy a pub, this extended to another pub in the neighbouring town, along with various bits of land all around the place. This all went very well, unfortunately, pretty much the only part of Irish life that was ever really bothered by the Revenue commisioners (outside of the waged sector) was the pub sector, and well...... there were many tears shed over the end of a meteoric business career.

I don't know really what scope there is for this sort of carry on at the moment. I mean it is distinctly possible that this is still going on, but surely not to the same degree. You'd have to assume that there is less low to medium level stuff, with a core going in for hardcore criminality. There was one garda in the nineties whose chain of brothels had gone completely unnoticed until he turned up for work in a bigger car than the superintendent.

[EIM]

Cops - class traitors?

Ginger Yellow wrote: That said, Serpico. Also, while I'm in no way endorsing its politics, even within Dirty Harry, Magnum Force had him pitted against vigilante cops.

Serpico was a cop AND a grass.

[MsD]

Cops - class traitors?

Cor, Galway sounds really exciting.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Cops - class traitors?

tipperary. The police have to be better behaved in Connemara, they burned down the police station in carna a couple of years ago when they tried to enforce the drink driving laws.

[Geoffrey de Ste. Croix]

Cops - class traitors?

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."- Jay Gould.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Cops - class traitors?

oh wait, I almost forgot. One day when I was off in college, a past pupil turned up on my fathers door, with tales of how the gardai were out to get him. He really didn't know how to respond, because this was a garda. His name was Jim White. He had been a relatively quiet dilligent pupil, and he went off to templemore and became a garda.

During the northern troubles, infiltration of the gardai by the IRA and MI5 reached such a level that the gardai essentially stopped writing things about northern Ireland down, and instead switched to a system of human repositories of knowledge. They had a bunch of gardai of sergeant rank, who basically had to memorise everything and carry it around in their heads.

This lad was one of them. He was stationed up in Donegal, where things got.....Really fucking weird

our friend is mentioned in section five there. In order to avoid prosecution he started to leak information about how the Omagh Bombing may have been less unexpected than we thought, and how the gardai had been monitoring the Real IRA, and the bombing happened in a breakdown in surveillance.

A very very dirty business.