A police chief answers to somebody, and the people he answers to are allowed to ask hard questions about how the department runs, how the money gets spent, and whether the town is getting what it expects. That part isn’t the problem. The problem starts when the question stops being about the department and becomes…
You see something happening in your neighborhood, call the police, and explain the problem. An officer comes out, talks to a few people, and leaves without arresting anyone. From your side, it may look like nothing happened. Sometimes the officer could have explained the response better. But there are also times when we know something…
When you call the police, the officer who shows up usually knows a lot less about what’s happening than you think he does. Dispatch may have given him an address, a name, and a couple of sentences about why somebody called. Meanwhile, you’ve been standing in the middle of the problem for twenty minutes, two…