Gee Officer Krupke, Krup You!

Somebody with a formidable sense of irony turned a little song that I listened to over and over again as a four-year-old into a video packed with tons of unspoken social commentary. Listen (and watch) anyway. Then we’ll meet again on the other side of the music.

So listen up. I'm certifiably a doddering geezer, but when I was a kid, this song, recorded and played on a 78 rpm shellac record, was practically my national anthem. It taught naive little me that the policeman was my friend. And, perhaps because I’m white and I was a cute kid, he was. I did get lost once, in Coney Island, at the age of five. And I did walk up to the nearest policeman. And he did indeed help me find my frantic uncle, who lost me on the crowded boardwalk.

It took a while for me to learn that the real world of grownups, particularly grownups of color, is a lot less rosy than I imagined as a little kid.

Bad apples, barrels, and cops

Y'see, a funny thing happened in the past few weeks, on the way toward exposing the bad apples that spoil the cop barrel. All the apples have begun spoiling sympathetically, and at a fearsome clip. The examples of police brutality, police sadism, and (pun intended) flatfooted police stupidity proliferate at warp speed. 

It’s not just cops shooting at people. It’s not even just male cops. For example, in San Antonio recently,  a woman, Natalie Simms was sitting on a curbstone waiting for her boyfriend when the cops came by. Well, clearly, by some lame brained logic that only a cop could understand, she had to be hiding drugs somewhere. Otherwise, why would she be sitting there? So a female police officer was summoned to search her.

A pat-down revealed nothing, so naturally, the cops concluded she had to be hiding the drugs (What drugs? On the basis of what rational probable cause?)…where was I? She had to be hiding the drugs in her vagina.

So the lady copy reached up there, felt around between the woman’s labia and among her pubic hair for a while, found a really, really suspicious string...and then yanked out a bloody Tampax. 

And when that search revealed nothing more than blood and  soggy cotton, the cop did an anal search next. Which yielded…surprise! Nada!

A cop can't be too suspicious
— or too stupid

And all this was happening on the street, with pedestrians passing by.

What was the lady cop thinking? Well here it is, in her own words, as reported by Insider. (Thanks for the tipoff, Bonnie Loewenstein.)

She claimed she needed to conduct the search because "you don't know what they have. I mean, they stick all kinds of stuff."

And because dumb, if not dumber-er, seems to be a a prerequisite for admission to everybody’s Police Academy these days, the police officer’s actions did not violate the department’s policies and were described as “exceeds expectations.” 

Ya think?

Trump shows us
how to do calculus

Then we have Donald Trump, Boy Electronics Genius, who is now trying to peddle the notion that that 75 year old man in Buffalo who got pushed over on the sidewalk and left unconscious and bleeding from his ears, by a platoon of cops on a mission to roust a couple of demonstrators, must be ANTIFA because…er, umm, uhhh…well, he just must have been. 

And furthermore, the old guy must be some kind of electronics whiz who was using a “scanner” (although it looks an awful lot like a cell phone to me) to black out police equipment. Trump knows this because umm, err, ahh, well, he just does. 

And furthermore, with his unerring ability  to do complex calculus problems in his head, Trump was able  conclude that the guy “fell harder than he was pushed…Could be a set up?”

Right, and the old guy deliberately fell on his head, gave himself a concussion, and deliberately bled from the ears, too. Don’t we all pull that trick when we want attention?

More post-Minneapolis cop mayhem here.

No wonder the cops think they can get away with murder.

No nincompoops wanted

As for what to do about the cops, I’m not sure. But I think I’d start all police academy admissions exams with an IQ test. Anyone scoring at "moron" or below would have to retake the exam.

The IQ test should be followed by a mandatory essay question, “What are cops for?” The long answer is in The New Republic.

And here’s a briefer, but far more digestible answer. Forgive the all-white cast. It's from another time, but the sentiment is still valid: