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Consider the plight of the deputy sheriff who pulled over a vehicle in Douglas County last week. He had reliable information that it contained four men, all toting potent sidearms, and that in the past two hours, the men consumed 19 shots of hard liquor and half a dozen pitchers of beer.
The deputy let them go on. There are accusations that
the deputy extended professional courtesy
toward
these armed and rowdy drunks, since they were DEA
agents.
But I doubt that. In 20 years of rural journalism, I've known many deputies. They generally hate federal agents.
If the feds make a bust, they take all the glory, and there's the implication that the local guys were too inept to notice a major crime ring.
Further, the feds usually move on after their moment of glory, leaving the resident deputies to deal with the aftermath. Since sheriffs are elected and need to maintain good community relations -- as opposed to secret agents who come and go and don't seem to be accountable to anyone -- this does not endear federal secret police to sheriff's departments, either.
So it's probably safe to assume that if the Douglas County deputy could have figured out any safe way to pop the four DEA drunks, he would have.
But there's the matter of raw fear -- four guns against one. A dead deputy, and four agents of the world's only superpower who might state under oath that said deputy had started firing at them and they returned fire only in self-defense. Further, the late deputy had compromised a long investigation involving confidential informants.
By the time the DEA finished explaining the situation, the late deputy would not have been a hero dying in performance of his sworn duties, but some corrupt scumbag who was probably in cahoots with a drug ring and tried to disrupt up a major bust.
So the Douglas County deputy apparently did what any reasonable person would have done -- as little as possible.
If all sheriffs and their deputies took seriously their oaths to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, the DEA would be shut down tomorrow morning: find one word in the Constitution which makes it any business of the federal government what plants you might be cultivating in your garden.
The Douglas County incident is another direct result of
the martial rhetoric that our politicians employ. It isn't
enough for police to serve and protect.
Instead,
we've got to have a War on Drugs.
In a war, we cut soldiers a lot of slack that we wouldn't tolerate in peacetime. War means putting up with collateral damage, such as the old man in Boston the DEA scared to death a few months ago when the agents got the wrong address. In times of war, we ignore the constitution.
Someday we may decide that the cure is worse than the disease. But until then, it's not fair to blame one deputy sheriff in Douglas County for winking at the antics of some heroic front-line soldiers in the War on Drugs. Our political system made that decision a long time ago.
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