Ebowed
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E: 4.13, S: 2.09
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« on: December 28, 2014, 04:07:15 PM » |
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I have an intense dislike of airport security, stemming from an incident when I would have been about six or seven years old, flying from Los Angeles to Auckland, and the sniffer dog went crazy over my backpack, spilling my belongings all over the floor, some items getting broken, all to find a grape that had been served to us on the airplane. The woman who explained why this was a 'good thing' as I was noticeably distraught, ignoring the fact that they were breaking my stuff. It cemented in me that authority figures lack a certain respect for the regular joe.
But as an adult in Australia, my experiences have generally been ok, although the police do treat you with a certain callous disrespect that is hard to ignore. A friend of mine was walking around the central train station at 3:30 am and just happened to have a spray paint can in his bag (after searching through it for drugs just because he was out late) - they accused him of graffiti even though they had no evidence that he had done any graffiti in that area, and he is still being dragged through court as he pleaded innocent.
The most personally important incident to me is something that I went into detail about in another thread the other day - when I was mugged a few years ago, and the police kept asking me what he looked like, and I gave them a highly thorough description, but they kept asking me "what did he look like" and smirking a little bit. "He's indigenous if that's what you're asking," I replied, and like that the conversation went severely downhill. "It's okay to call him Aboriginal," the policeman responds, and that was probably our last point of agreement. I won't relay the rest of it here but suffice it to say that these pricks were delighted that two white boys had been mugged by this fellow. We ended up dropping the charges before the evening concluded, but they raided his home anyway.
We knew the perpetrator, as he lived three or four houses down from us. We'd moved to the neighborhood 4 months ago and felt unsafe that evening (as he did threaten to return to us), but in retrospect, it was an isolated incident and if I had had any idea what the police were going to do (basically look for any possible combination of charges to ensure that he got a prison sentence) I think I would have approached it differently - perhaps tried to talk to him the next day when the alcohol had worn off, and see why the original misunderstanding had occurred. Yes, I realise this is not a luxury one normally possesses when they have been mugged, but the guy didn't need to be separated from his kids and family for another six months or year. Going into the station, we were hoping for a restraining order or something. The police made it sound like only real pieces of shit had protective orders against other people, and didn't help us with that, instead trying to book the guy for as many things as they possibly could.
These days, as I watch the police walking around with guns strapped to their waists just to check whether you have a valid train ticket, I am reminded of this encounter and feel a sense of discomfort. It is common for me to suddenly go from feeling safe to unsafe when I see a police officer, and I generally don't have anything to hide.
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