From Pine View Farm

Pay to Play, Cops and Robbers Dept. 5

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5 comments

  1. George Smith

    April 21, 2015 at 5:24 pm

    Have you noticed that more and more police seem to be sporting these types of menacing tattoos? My hunch is that this is another outgrowth of the militarization of the police force. Veterans of the forever wars in the Middle, all younger men, had a fondness for tattoos of this nature. And some police forces have used the home from the war as a promising hiring pool. If you Google the above fellow, you’ll find he’s one of these and a lot of other things you really don’t want to see. My larger argument is that menacing tattoos make the police look, uh, menacing, like the thugs they complain about with prison “art”. And if one believes in community policing rather than occupying force in hostile country, hiring people who look like this, or who want to, makes no sense at all. Google again, you’ll see many police departments scrambling to enact law that requires tattoos to be covered, regulations that have caused many internal complaints, usually always based on spurious and trivial objections like: “It’s really hot in the summertime and if I have to wear long sleeves it will be hard and maybe less guys will want to work in policing.”

    Perhaps we should again have a fruitless national discussion on why the public servants in a community safety role wish to appear so dangerous and hostile.

     
  2. Frank

    April 21, 2015 at 5:41 pm

    Actually, I had not noticed that. You may a point. I suspect that the tattoos’ becoming fashionable was a factor, but the person does choose the design he or she wants.

    We don’t need a “discussion.” We need sanity.

     
  3. George Smith

    April 21, 2015 at 8:49 pm

    Yes, as an old person I know tattoos have become much more fashionable. But there are still some jobs, note I’m not using the word “profession”, were instilling confidence in the public is a necessity. Or -used- to be a necessity. Not so much if you accept we live in a corporate dictatorship and the police have a new role as intimidators and on-the-spot executioners. If you look up this particular fellow’s resume, he’s in no way and example of a professional in anything. Former Army. “Army-ing” in the Middle East or Afghanistan or wherever isn’t, to my mind, any kind of qualification for policing in a suburb of Tulsa although it may indeed be good to hire veterans. And a 30-credit hour certificate in policing from the U of Phoenix, not so much either. But menacing tattoo, able to kneel on head of bleeding, dying man, that he could do.

     
  4. Frank

    April 22, 2015 at 10:42 am

    Agreed. Being a cop is not an excuse to play macho man. That’s what motorcycle gangs are for.

    My objection to tattoos is a practical one. No matter how pretty they might be when you first get them, eventually they all turn blue.

     
  5. George Smith

    April 24, 2015 at 5:36 pm

    You may be aware of this already but I suspect Tattoo is about to have his career in law enforcement destroyed by collateral damage. His name is Michael Huckeby and he is the son of a man also in the Tulsa dept, Thomas Huckeby, who has just been exposed as someone who forged reports on Bates’ training, insisting the underlings initial them as authors. It will bring down the department. I knew something was fishy about Tattoo when I saw his resume on LinkedIn. And you would, too. He’s a nepotism hire. So maybe he’ll be given the boot, or quietly asked to go elsewhere, when his father is eventually cashiered along with the rest in the rotten place.