If cops are fragile enough to burst into tears over a late Egg McMuffin,

[Aristus]

no wonder they're so deathly terrified of innocent, unarmed citizens...

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. That one certainly needs a vacation. Or shouldn't have been a cop in the first place.

[grumpyduck]

2. I still say she was a fake.

[snowybirdie]

13. I agree

No regulation uniform, story is from an unknown site and the area she supposedly patrols is extremely rural with no major crime. I never believe so called news from anything but a major source.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

17. Stacy Talbert, deputy from McIntosh County, Georgia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officer-viral-video-complaining-about-fast-food-order-draws-ire-n1231353

Stacy Talbert, a sheriff's deputy in McIntosh County, Georgia, told NBC News that she recorded herself in a Facebook Live video Monday morning after an overnight shift, not out of fear but to share her frustration.

"It's not that people are waiting in the wings to hurt us," she said Wednesday. "It's that people don't trust us."

(snip)

In an interview Wednesday night, Talbert said the video had nothing to do with McDonald's, which she said she visits frequently. She said she has been to the McDonald's in question more than 100 times and has always been treated well.

"Everybody lost the whole point of the video," she said. "I'm just so sick of people being mean."

[WhiskeyGrinder]

16. Stacy Talbert, deputy from McIntosh County, Georgia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officer-viral-video-complaining-about-fast-food-order-draws-ire-n1231353

Stacy Talbert, a sheriff's deputy in McIntosh County, Georgia, told NBC News that she recorded herself in a Facebook Live video Monday morning after an overnight shift, not out of fear but to share her frustration.

"It's not that people are waiting in the wings to hurt us," she said Wednesday. "It's that people don't trust us."

(snip)

In an interview Wednesday night, Talbert said the video had nothing to do with McDonald's, which she said she visits frequently. She said she has been to the McDonald's in question more than 100 times and has always been treated well.

"Everybody lost the whole point of the video," she said. "I'm just so sick of people being mean."

[grumpyduck]

19. Thank you both. I sit corrected.

[Jirel]

20. Soooooo many people want to wish this away.

"It's a fake." (No, it's not. See NBC News.)

"She's just tired from the stress of the virus and the protests." (Tough cookies. There are people doing much more important jobs than she is, and they're still going. You don't let a surgeon whose brain has cracked operate on you, and you certainly don't let a cop whose brain has cracked keep her gun and badge. She can go do another, MORE essential job by stocking grocery shelves at Walmart where she can't do any harm.)

[dalton99a]

3. Their time is precious and they have important work to do

like killing black people and beating up protesters

[Buckeye_Democrat]

4. I suspect that she was crying over the general sense...

... that cops aren't always viewed favorably, especially now.

[Aristus]

5. Gee, I wonder why.

While you're shedding your tears instead of doing something substantive to get rid of all those 'bad apples', lady, your colleagues are getting away with murder...

[Buckeye_Democrat]

7. Yeah, some people live in a fantasy world.

Like most Republicans and their many "feel good" myths.

[Cracklin Charlie]

6. Not only that...

She’s now scared of all McMuffins.

All of them!

[customerserviceguy]

8. It wasn't over it being late

It was about being paranoid as to why it was late, that one or more employees were looking around for something to taint it with. Individual law enforcement officers are feeling under siege right now, and when you pile that on top of 3-4 months worth of C-19 fatigue, you're bound to see a few of them start to crack under the pressure.

I take no delight in seeing her distress, unlike a few other people here. And, no, I'm not talking about you, Aristus. I feel as much empathy for her as I do for the healthcare workers who have made similar videos describing their stress at recent events.

[Aristus]

9. We can't afford cops who crack under pressure.

Any more than we can afford commercial airline pilots who crack under pressure, or nuclear reactor technicians who crack under pressure. It's hard to imagine people under greater pressure than the Apollo 13 astronauts and the Mission Control technicians who helped bring them home. They never cracked under pressure.

We need to stop offering law enforcement as a career for otherwise unemployable people.

[customerserviceguy]

10. I agree

she needs some time off from the job. But she doesn't need to be "Karenized".

[delisen]

11. Tears are not a sign of cracking under pressure.

If more men understood that we would have a much less authoritarian culture.

[Aristus]

12. Convincing oneself that people are poisoning your Egg McMuffin kind of is...

n/t

[cwydro]

14. I don't have a link to the post, but someone posted verified cases of food tampering done to cops.

It was in a thread yesterday, and I sure wouldn't eat out if I were a cop.

Hell, I eat fast food once in a blue moon anyway.

But it's still wrong.

[Aristus]

15. I know the incident with the milkshakes in NYC turned out to be a poorly-cleaned

milkshake machine.

It shouldn't require rumors of tampered food to get the cops up off their asses and do something about their bad apples (a kind of spoiled food they don't seem to have a problem with...)

[treestar]

21. Hugely different circumstances

It is not a job offered to otherwise unemployable people. That is just not a fact. They have to pass physical tests, mental tests, have a certain amount of education, depending on the agency.

It's a different kind of pressure than any type of professional career. It's to be ready on the spot pressure.

Right not, a lot of cops don't want to arrest anybody. It appears the right to resist arrest is being developed. It was normally rare for a cop to have to handle that. And then getting judge on split second decisions afterward by people with an agenda to find the resistor to be have victimized.

[Aristus]

23. This is not an intractable problem.

Cops in other countries don't do this kind of thing.

If we adopt the same standards they abide by, we can improve law enforcement tremendously.

Yes, cops have to have a certain level of education. But it's obvious that that level is not sufficient to produce cops with better decision-making faculties. We need to increase that level.

[treestar]

27. Most of them aren't involved in these things

Most of them make decisions that are perfectly fine. When you want to zero in on the bad, you can always find it, but it's another matter to generalize to everyone. There are bad lawyers out there yet nobody blames the good ones for them. Other professions don't get this.

And what they do in other countries might be an idea for changes, but some seem to be judging the cops now as it these types of changes were already made. This is the country with the war on drugs, the war on crime and the war on terrorism. The same country that lionized law enforcement and security for two decades and now blaming the cops for the results, all the money spent on them and all the military equipment given them. As a society, we did that.

[Aristus]

28. And we can undo it.

But none of those ancillary factors should serve as an excuse for an individual cop to abandon his or her good judgment. If you knowingly do something wrong because you're going along to get along, then you're in the wrong vocation.

And lawyers, to address your comparison, tend to succeed or fail to a certain degree on market considerations; a bad lawyer is eventually going to lose all of his clients, and have to consider changing professions.

Whereas cops are part of a public trust, and there are huge numbers of organizations devoted to keeping bad cops on the beat. Police unions and benevolent societies, racist or bigoted communities, and of course, people who think cops can do no wrong.

[Jirel]

18. Screw her.

You don't keep a cop on the force that cracks, and Karen the Kop seems like she cracked long before the virus. This is decades of indecency and entitlement talking.

Oh, and the "incident" of cops being "poisoned" was proven to be a lie cooked up by the police union. This is just entitlement and bullying on entitlement and bullying.

[treestar]

22. Talked to one last night

A young one. They do feel under siege. And unfairly so, as millions of cop interactions with people that go fine are ignored for the rare cases that don't.

[Aristus]

24. It's not as though the bad cops are flying under the radar.

A lot of these guys have prior write-ups for excessive force. It just gets swept under the rug. If good cops don't want to feel like they're under siege, they're welcome to take the fight to the enemy. Which, for the record, is bad cops, not innocent citizens.

[treestar]

25. This is a very new, young one

No bad record. The agency he belongs to has no bad record.

[Aristus]

26. If you don't commit a crime, then you have nothing to worry about.

Isn't that what the pro-police-brutality brigade is always telling the rest of us?

[treestar]

29. Not really the same

Police brutality can be against people who are innocent, but also people who are being arrested based on probable cause, not every arrest is wrong. I'm not one to say don't commit crimes and nothing will go wrong, and even those who commit crimes don't deserve brutality. But then I am one to say resisting arrest is stupid. How is a cop supposed to be a pussy cat then? And accidents will happen in that melee. Decisions will be under pressure and therefore not as good.

There is no pro-police brutality brigade, or if there is, they are right wingers.

But it is possible to be a cop who does not brutalize others, and that seems overlooked in the intemperate view some have on cops. Most of them are OK.

I asked my cop friend how they are trained about people running away - if they are supposed to let them run away as demanded by so many on DU. They are not supposed to call a cab for a DUI or let him run away (actually suggested), they are supposed to book him.

There has been a major reform that has been overlooked - when high speed chases caused some accidents that killed people, the policy as changed. He tells me they are now supposed to let the suspect get away if they are in a vehicle. No high speed chases, at least by this police department.

The guy in Atlanta should have just chased the guy. But it was in in a second that he turned his back and he'd just fought with him and taken his taser. Tasers can have more than one cartridge. So it seems like people are harshly judging the cop, because they want him to be wrong more than that he is.

[Aristus]

30. Once again, it comes down to how group-think can influence individual decision-making.

It's become all too common to see videos of cops making an arrest of a suspect who is clearly not resisting, and the cops start yelling "Stop resisting! Stop resisting!" right before beating the crap out of him. This is, of course, supposed to indemnify them against disciplinary action for police brutality.

That, and the not-always-objective claim: "I was in fear for my life!", which brings us back to the original argument; if a cop 'fears for his life' when no deadly action on the part of the suspect is being taken, then that cop is not fit for law enforcement. No cop should be utterly fearless; that leads to a different kind of rash decision-making. But cops should be imbued with the idea that not every situation requires deadly action, and that the empowerment to take deadly action is, or ought to be, a heavy responsibility. If a cop is not capable of shouldering that responsibility, he/she should turn in their badge.

[Raine]

31. Way too mentally unstable 👎

to deal with the public and have access to lethal weapons and the power of life and death