Overzealous

A 12 year old girl got caught writing on her desk at school with a marker. Her overzealous teacher summarily dragged her to the overzealous principal's office who decided only the police could properly handle such an outrage. When the overzealous officers arrived, they cuffed her and did a perp walk out to the car. She was tried and convicted in a 'Family Court', sentenced to 8 hours of community service and an essay about what she's learned from the ordeal.

Having been chapped from being so spanked, our little graffiti artist got her overzealous father to call some overzealous lawyers to sue both the school district and police department. All the pain and suffering endured by this poor girl must be worth at least $1 MILLION. After all, she was in custody almost the whole day!

The head lawyer in the case Joseph "Opportunity Knocks" Rosenthal, wants to be clear: "We want to stop this from happening to other young children in the future."
Because it has nothing to do with the MILLION bucks...

Overzealous government staffers open the door for overzealous lawyers. And I haven't even mentioned the janitor's time involved in cleaning the desk...

THIS is whynewyorkerspaytaxes.

read more: US girl sues for $1m over arrest for desk scribble(bbc)

Say you're sorry with cheescake

A visit and apology from the New York Police Commissioner, a cheesecake, and countless man hours harassing an elderly couple are just some of the unexpected costs of an IT glitch.

Rose and Walter Martin were visited by the police 50 times in the last eight years because their address had been randomly entered during the testing phase of a new 'crime tracking' system. Having never correctly purged the information, the police were fed the same bad information each time and blindly followed their orders.

Rather than investing the money in better paid and well-trained officers and investigators, the city has found it much easier to just buy a computer that randomly spits out addresses for them to bust in on. I'll bet they call this system The Judge and it automatically prints out a signed search warrant with each address it provides.

Screaming "Police! Open Up!" at 80 year old folks rather than investigating crime...

THIS is whyNEWYORKERSpaytaxes.

Assault with a deadly... Snowball?

In what should have been nothing more than a guy getting his Hummer stuck in the snow and paying for a tow truck to get him free quickly turned into an event that required the dispatch of several cops who probably could have better served the public in a state of emergency snow storm.

Detective Bailer (The correct spelling of the officer's last name was not give at the scene or by those 'investigating' the incident) got his Hummer stuck in the snow in Washington D.C. near a group of locals enjoying a friendly snowball fight. As you can imagine, having just witnessed a Hummer driver dumb enough to get his gigantic truck stuck in a few inches of snow, the snowballers decided he needed to be a part of the fight.

Little did they know that this guy was an armed off-duty police officer with a hair-trigger temper about to have a tantrum. After getting pelted with snowballs, he figures the only way to fight back is by waving his gun around to really let these unarmed civilians know who is boss.

What really blows my mind is that by the end of the video, it appears they intend to arrest a guy. If you watch closely, I can almost guarantee the detective was unable to tell who actually threw snowballs at him and who were actually innocent bystanders. Evidence be damned, somebody had to get arrested...

THIS is whyDCpaystaxes.

watch it happen: DC - Cop Waves Gun at Snowball Fight! (YouTube)

When 72 year old great grandmothers go bad

Much like the 70 year old woman who got beat down in Utah last year because her lawn was not the appropriate shade of green, a cop in Texas recently tasered a 72 year old woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket even though she was not required to do so by law.

Well, she started swearing enough to make the cop blush. And what else is a cop supposed to do when he is driven to blushing? The Taser, yeah yeah, the Taser.

In a situation where a fully grown man, trained to handle himself in emergencies, decides to incapacitate a little old lady with tens of thousands of volts of electricity, its the 72 year old woman who goes to jail for resisting arrest.

Testosterone befuddled police salaries and the court cases and jail terms they create...

THIS is whyipaytaxes.