Excellent post.Ultratwinkie said:The American justice system merely performs the duty of its office. Like it or not, America is nothing like Europe. A UK cop in America would be a body bag by the end of the day.
What Europeans never realize is that American crime is FAR different from European crime. European cops never have to deal with the brutality of Mexican cartels nor American gangs. You see a cop decked out in SWAT gear with a heavily armored APC? That isn't American nationalism, that is NECESSARY. The influence of the cartels extend far into the American school system. Its a recruiting pool. As a result, juvenile crime is a very real. The idea of a teen getting his hands of an gun (even as much as an assault rifle) from a gang gun runner is not unheard of, and can be very common depending on locale. The nearer to the border you are, the worse the violence becomes.
Why foreigners have such a hard time understanding this, I will never know.
For anyone else wanting education along the topic lines from the quoted post, I would highlight this section of history...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
That is the sort of crime and violence our police face, but also was 15 years ago. Cartels and other crime organizations haven't exactly gone away in that time span either. Key notes...
The North Hollywood shootout was an armed confrontation between two heavily armed bank robbers and officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles on February 28, 1997. Both perpetrators were killed, eleven police officers and seven civilians were injured, and numerous vehicles and other property were damaged or destroyed by the nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the perpetrators and the police.
That is why our police have a zero-tolerance policy towards hostile threats.Local patrol officers at the time were typically armed with 9 mm or .38 Special pistols on their person, with some having a 12-gauge shotgun available in their cars. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu carried fully automatic rifles, with ammunition capable of penetrating police body armor, and wore military grade body armor of their own. Since the police handguns could not penetrate the bank robbers' body armor, the patrol officers' efforts were ineffective. SWAT eventually arrived with weapons that could penetrate and several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer. The incident sparked debate on the appropriate firepower for patrol officers to have available in similar situations in the future.