What are your local police like?

[hunter]

17. trigger happy, overworked, and understaffed.

Our city ranks rather high in gun violence and murders.

When we lived in a rougher part of town I saw too much gun violence, including a police shooting. And our next door neighbor then, his oldest kid was killed in a drug deal gone bad. He wasn't a good kid, but nobody deserves that. The "war on drugs" is stupid. It only empowers the meanest, most corrupting gangsters. Our neighbor was a drunk before that but after he'd stand in his backyard naked except for an open bathrobe, staring vacantly at the car parts he'd collected, and pissing wherever. (My kids never saw that, they were not tall enough to see over the fence.)

Whenever the guns came out my wife and I would take our kids to the back bedroom and we'd play on the floor until it was over.

If there's anything nice about living in such a place, it's that the police don't sweat the small stuff so I've got loads of stories about eccentric neighbors who couldn't possibly exist in more orderly places where the police are bored and respond to trivial disturbances. There are no Officer Obies here with "27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us," not that I'm illegally dumping garbage or anything.

But I am eccentric.