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Oct. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:12
447 Full Disclosure Part 4: Cops (note, second official 'potty mouth' podcast!)
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Good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Bob, Bob the Cap.
And I'd like to welcome you to So You Might Want to Be a Cop.
You guys might want to be a cop kind of day.
And that's good.
Happy to see so many people in you here.
Normally not quite this number.
The army always goes first and then we get the leftovers.
And I guess... Colonel Steve this morning probably laid out a few things for you that maybe you didn't like so much, and it's good to see that we're packed to the rafters in the cop thing here, in the policeman thing, because I guess until they had to start telling the truth from this morning...
Excuse me. I take my gum out.
Until they had to start telling the truth this morning.
We didn't get so many people coming in.
They swore, you know, we'd go to the military and then we'd get the leftovers.
But I guess that, you know, hey, it doesn't serve them so much, but it serves us pretty good.
So that's nice.
That's nice. We like that.
So you're going to go over some of the basics about being a cop.
What we look for, what you can expect from the whole gig, and then we'll have some time for questions.
I sort of stuck my head in this morning.
You were talking to Steve, or Steve was yelling at you, and I noticed that you didn't get your questions in this morning.
That's fine. That's their job.
I guess that's their way of doing it.
I don't mind so much with the questions, so, you know, fire away.
Ha! That means something a little different from this morning, but fire away when I give you the signal.
Alright, so COP, we're going to do the whole full disclosure thing.
I guess we start with the whole philosophy, if you want a highfalutin sort of language that floats around COP, sort of like a camouflage, so we can't be seen too well.
And the first one, which you all have probably seen on the cop cars, hopefully from the outside, is that we have, you know, this thing on the side of the cars which says, serve and protect.
Serve and protect.
And sadly, we couldn't find a little cop elf with fingers small enough to paint the real message underneath the serve and protect, which is those in charge, right?
I mean, I guess a lot of people who were civilians look at the cop cars going by and say, ooh, to serve and protect, that must be me.
No. You may have been a couple of those civilians during the course of your life.
Some of you here, maybe most of you, certainly maybe the women.
Woman, sorry. You may have thought that the serve and protect was for you, but, you know, I've got to set you straight.
Bingo, bango. It's not.
It's for those in charge.
To serve and protect, I'd like to know, you know, what...
I'm not going to swear because I know you got some swearing this morning.
Let me just say I'm not going to swear much.
What fucking planet are you people from?
What fucking planet are you people from that you think serving and protecting means holding a gun to your head and taking your money?
I mean, Jesus Christ.
I mean, can you imagine Walmart?
We're all about service, right?
And you go in to buy something at Walmart.
Maybe you think you're going to buy, maybe you're not.
And bam! They take you down.
You've got the greeter's knee in the back of your neck.
You've got three fucking guys around with tasers and itchy trigger fingers.
And they're like, oh no, I think you're going to buy the Gymboree set.
I think you're going to buy three fucking Power Transformers, two Disney DVDs, and a Gymboree set.
And we'll take your money, and maybe, just maybe, we'll throw your shit out back and you can go pick it up later.
We don't know. Maybe, maybe yes, maybe no.
Can you imagine a fucking store that ran like that?
Here. We're here to serve you.
Imagine your goddamn waiter comes to you at dinner and says, I will be your server, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring out the fucking Dom Perignon, and I'm going to add 350 bucks to your bill and a $300 tip, and if you don't like it, bam!
Down you go. Tasered, maybe shot if you try to resist.
Because, you know, waiters, they're all about the service.
So, I just sort of want to break that shit down a little for you so it's not so fucking confusing, okay?
So, service is not holding you at gunpoint, right?
Taking your tax money, plying you with all the fucking regulations.
You think you get paperwork, we get even more, and I'm one of those cops who does like two-finger cop typing.
It takes me for fucking ever to write up this shit.
But, you know, service is not around cornering you and fencing you and holding you down and taking your money and stuffing you into prison and giving you tickets and giving you fines.
You know, that's not service, right?
So I don't know how you fucking mooks think that this is somehow something to do with serving you.
But hey, you know, I guess God don't make them too bright anyway.
So, yeah, serve who do we serve?
Well, we don't serve you, I've got to tell you.
And that sort of sucks when you're on that side of the cop car, looking at the outside.
But when you're inside, and assuming that you're in the front, of course, when you're inside the cop car, it's pretty fucking sweet.
I mean, except for the paperwork, but it's pretty fucking sweet.
And we'll get into that a little bit more later.
But, When you get the whole service thing, that the service is to your masters, the service is to the politicians, the service enemy, the politicians, they got their own masters to serve, but it sure as shit ain't John Q. Public, just in case you were wondering.
That's something which, under full disclosure, we need to kind of clear you up.
Sadly, though, if you decide not to be a cop, we're going to have to fucking shoot you.
Just maybe kidding.
Anyway. So that's the service part.
It's not service to the public.
They just don't put this shit together for reasons I can't figure out.
And as far as protection goes, well, who are we protecting?
Right? I mean, this is not fucking brain surgery here.
Who are we protecting?
Are we protecting the guy?
His property taxes get raised, and if he doesn't pay the fucking money, then we come to his door, and if he doesn't want to come out, we kick his door in, and we get one of those cool-ass battery grams and knock the door down.
Is it that part of the protection that people really think we're all about?
If you don't know your regulations for whatever fucking industry you're in, if you don't pay off the right people, if you happen to have a friend in your car who's got a bit of weed in his back pocket, maybe you even don't know about it, doesn't matter to us.
You know, is this the kind of protection that people think we're, you know, all fired up that we jump out of bed to protect their asses?
You know, I'm just asking.
I'm just axing. I'm just axing.
So, the protection, you know, not for the taxpayer.
You know, whenever you hear the word taxpayer, do not think service, do not think protection.
That's bullshit. Service ain't shooting people.
Protecting people ain't shooting people.
So serve and protect, absolutely.
Just not you if you don't become a cop.
If you do become a cop, we're tight.
You don't fuck around with your brothers.
You don't squeal on your brothers.
Anybody got a disciplinary case, you shut the fuck up and back them up.
Worst thing that can happen to you, you accidentally shoot some African-American in the back.
You get a couple of days suspended without pay.
Maybe they send you home or they'll still pay you.
You still get all your benefits.
You still get your retirement package.
Cops don't get fired, right?
You don't get fired when you're a cop.
You don't get fired when you're a teacher.
It's pretty fucking hard to get fired if you're a bureaucrat and you can't get fired You get fired on, but you can't get fired if you're a soldier.
And politicians don't really give a fucking...
We don't give a flying fucking rolling donut.
Politicians, they don't care if they get fired because they got gold-plated pensions for life just being in for a couple of years.
So, you know, we watch our own.
We cover our own.
We back up our own.
It's you and me and every other god in blue that is out there.
Not against the criminals.
I mean, we'll get to the criminals in a little bit.
You know, the yang to our fucking ying, so to speak.
But no, we're against any civilian goddamn libertarian assholes who come in and say they want to kind of control our powers.
Like they want to cast a fucking little thin...
Pansy-ass twine fucking thread net around a bullshock.
And it's just funny, but these assholes are around trying to put all these restraints on us all the goddamn time like we're not supposed to make a living.
And, you know, these fuckwits up in their ivory tower saying, oh, it's bad if the cop does this, and it's bad the cop does that.
Here's your fucking Miranda rights.
If I've got to say those things one more time in my whole career, I think I'm going to shoot someone.
While reading them, they're Miranda rights, so I'm sure that Amnesty International won't have a problem.
But yeah, we're tight with the people who make the rules because, you know, that's who we work for.
We're tight, tight, tight with each other.
If you've got a problem with that, do not even think about signing up because it's not that hard to accidentally get shot in the line of duty or to get sent into pretty bad situations.
So you better stay fucking tight, not just with your buddy, but with everybody in blue.
And we stick together around that.
The enemies are the piss-ass reporters, the intellectuals, the libertarians, and all those assholes who want to put reins on us and give us, take away our ability to just do our fucking job.
So, you know, it's just important that you get your head straight about where your loyalties lie and get this fucking shit out of your head about serve and protect the people, right?
The people, they're like...
It's like saying to the farmer, we want you to go cuddle your corn before you cut it down, right?
These people are livestock to us.
They're a source of income to us.
And frankly, they're...
They're a source of a pretty fucking savage rush of power when they're cowering and lying and running away and afraid.
And you've got to, oh man, I've got to tell you, this is a side benefit, but you know, we're being totally open here.
You know, you put your whoop-whoop on and you ride some fucker's tail down the highway.
Oh boy, oh boy, you love to get the guys in the nice cars with a suit too.
I mean, as long as they're not politicians or somebody with any clout.
Or women. I mean, women are so much fucking fun, it's ridiculous, right?
Oh, they're batting their eyes.
Oh, officer, I didn't know.
I was just passing.
Oh, it's fun.
It is fun, fun, fun.
I mean, because, you know, I'll be perfectly fucking honest with you.
We don't have a clue what the rules are anymore.
I mean, you know, we got just a few more than the Ten Commandments going on.
Like, I gotta, you know, just understand this.
You don't have a fucking clue what the rules are.
You don't know what's legal.
You don't know what's optional.
You don't know who's got power.
You don't know who you're going to piss off by arresting.
You don't know what the fuck's going on.
Look at the fucking tax code.
It's like 50 volumes of thick fucking small print shit.
Someone tells you to go arrest some guy for tax evasion?
Do you have a fucking clue what that means?
No. You just go and you arrest the guy for his tax evasion.
Someone says, oh...
This mofo, he went off and he broke an OSHA regulation.
So, go collect his fucking fine.
You have any clue? No.
They could be making this shit up, right?
So, I could go on and on about that, but things are a little bit different than they were, you know, I don't know, never, I guess, but at least a hundred years ago, maybe there were fewer fucking laws, but...
We don't have a fucking clue what's legal and what's not legal.
You know, it's like, you know how many fucking laws get passed every week, every month, every year?
You think we're taking night courses and studying on the fucking internet to figure out what's legal and what's not legal?
Fucking 100,000 regulations passed each year by the Fed?
Think we have a fucking clue about them?
We don't. You know, we're fucking pit bulls.
You know, we're the enforcers.
Someone says, hey, this son of a bitch did something wrong.
We go and we stick a gun in his neck and we bring him in.
Well, like fucking cowboys with the lassoes.
We don't ask.
I mean, you can ask, but who cares?
Somebody will explain it to you.
You don't know if they're telling the truth or not, and it doesn't fucking matter because you do what you're told to do, right?
Some asshole at the top, who knows?
It doesn't even matter. You just look at the guy one level up from you, and he says, go pick this guy up.
You go pick him up. And you don't go around arresting people just because you fucking feel like it because they could be somebody who's powerful.
You go arrest some kid for pot smoking and he turns out to be the son of a senator.
Fuck, your ass is grass, my friend.
So, you know, when you're a cop, you want to do some shit.
You want to keep your numbers up and you want to shake your truncheon and you want to pull your gun.
You want to have a little bit of fun with people.
So, what you want to do is you want to look for the markers, right?
You don't want to fuck with people who might have some political clout, right?
For sure, you don't want to get involved in that stuff.
So, you know, you're going to look for, you know, the fucking African Americans are all, oh, we are always getting arrested.
It's like, well, fuck yeah, because you people don't have any political clout, and we've got to arrest somebody.
You know, it's not much fun chasing down illegal aliens.
They just fucking run away.
What's the point, right? You either got to hold them in the cell.
The moment you let them go, they just vanish again.
So who cares about that?
It's like shooting fish from a helicopter.
Excuse me.
Hey, you want a Kleenex? Sorry.
Anyway, yeah, so you don't want to fuck around with the illegal immigrant stuff.
Plus, those fuckers can be kind of mean, right?
What have they got to lose? So, you don't want any of that.
So, that's why there are so many of them, because it doesn't help.
Who cares about arresting them?
And, of course, they're outside the law.
You don't know what weapons they're carrying.
And so you want to screw with people who are visibly not part of the power people, right?
So you arrest some rich guy, he might have somebody he knows, so you don't do that.
You've got to go through a process of elimination.
It's kind of like a profiling.
Who can I fuck with that can't fuck with me back?
That's... Kind of all it comes down to, right?
So it's not that complicated.
You just learn to look for the markers, right?
No point roughing up some homeless people, though it is kind of fun to watch them shuffling away when you order them off a street for no fucking reason other than you're bored.
But, yeah, you want to go for African Americans, you want to go for Latinos, you want to go for poor-looking people, you want to go for people in crappy cars.
You know, this is who you're going to pick on.
You're going to pick on the powerless, right?
I mean, we're like fucking jackals, right?
You don't try and bring down the...
You know, you're a jackal, you don't attack a lion, you attack like a wounded gazelle or some fucking shit.
I don't know, my wife watches that near fucking Pete's Pond or something like that.
But, yeah, I mean, that's sort of what we do.
We don't have a fucking clue. We do what we're told.
We go bring in the people we're supposed to bring in.
We don't know what the hell the laws are.
They're way too fucking complicated now.
You know, we do a lot of paperwork, and we pick on people who ain't gonna fight back.
I mean, pick on people who ain't gonna give you no grief, right?
That's the deal. That's what you do.
Now, you all probably seen a lot of shit going down in movies, like we're all about fighting drugs and, you know, all that lethal weapon shit, and Miami Vice.
We're all about fighting the drugs, right?
Which, you know, please, give us a little fucking credit, okay?
Give us a little fucking credit.
I mean, we're not fucking stupid, you know?
I don't get this.
Like, people think we're there to serve and protect them, and that we're some sort of, like, we can't fucking put two and two together and think our own self-interest through, right?
So, let me tell you a little bit about the drug war.
One, frankly, there's a fuckable lot of money in it, and it's mostly untraceable, right?
So all that Serpico shit you see where there's a corrupt apartment and one cop comes along and cleans the whole goddamn thing up, well, put that shit out of your mind, because that ain't how it goes down in the real world, okay?
In the real world, we don't like to mess too much with the drug dealers because they're pretty well-armed, and they know a lot of people, and they pay...
They pay a lot of money, right, to the people.
I'm not saying who, but, you know, nice fucking watch, don't you think?
So, we got all these people out in the street.
They got money, right? You want to pick on the people who don't have money.
You go for the shitty cars and stuff like that.
You don't want to pick on the people who got money because, I mean, you'll pick on them, you know, introduce yourself and say, hey, I'm the new officer on the block.
I don't know how things work around here.
What kind of arrangements do we have?
You know, just work it out, right?
You'll probably get a good tip off from the guy going out.
When it comes to the drug war, what you want to do is keep your numbers up, and the drug guys know this just fine.
You can keep your numbers up, like who you gotta arrest and shit like that.
You know, you look for the...
You go arrest the lookout guys and go arrest the runners and all these people that don't fucking add up to a fart in a thunderstorm.
Go pick those guys up.
You can claim you're fighting a big battle for the war on drugs because a couple of crackheads gave up turning tricks and started running drugs or being lookout guys for, you know, the important guys.
Don't go for the kingpins, right?
Because they... I mean, A, they're good sources of money, and B, they're pretty fucking well-armed, right?
I mean, they make the pea-shooters we've got look like, you know, I guess fucking pea-shooters.
So, yeah, I mean, there's a strong upside.
Like, you don't want to fight the war on drugs, like, for real, because that's really dangerous.
And if you just kind of nibble at the edges, it's an innocent bystander kind of attrition rate that everybody's pretty comfortable with.
So you can do that and keep some numbers up and, you know, every now and then you'll find some heroin, you'll find some blow or some horse or whatever.
And, you know, you can hold it up and they'll take some fucking pictures like you getting.000000 to fucking infinity 1% of the drug trade means a lot.
So, yeah, it's like a PR kind of thing, and the great thing is that, you know, we like all of these movies, and they're pretty funny, right?
You look at fucking Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in these movies, just wading in to shoot guys who can shoot you back, and you look at fucking, you know, my hero, Elliot Nash, funniest fucking guy in the history of movies, right?
The Untouchables, right?
Yeah. You know, he's a fucking robot, right?
He's out there blowing guys away, shooting the shit out of people, and some reporter at the end says, hey, what are you going to do if they repeal Prohibition?
Probably have a fucking drink.
That's my kind of cop.
Whatever the fuck you program me to do, you put a little outline in my head, I'll go shoot that guy.
Bully that guy. We don't really need to shoot him.
So, yeah, so the drug war, you know, give us some credit.
You know, the drug war is funny, right?
It's a lot of fucking cash rolling around.
I'm not just being on the criminal side.
It's like hundreds of billions of dollars to fight it on our side.
And nobody wants to see that kind of fucking money dry up, okay?
So, you know, there's the cash money.
There's the money flowing in from the government.
There's all the expanded powers.
We don't have to fuck around with paperwork nearly as much as we used to.
We don't, you know, you can get search and seizure for just about anything.
We get a... Excuse me, I probably did a bit too much blow last night.
I think I'm going to sneeze again. The sinus is a little thin, you know, that stuff eats through you like acid.
You know, we get this asset forfeiture, we get to take whatever shit we want, if we want, and the great thing about it, oh man, I mean, this is the best thing about the drug war, is some asshole's giving you some problem, all you gotta do is keep a little bit of fucking weed in your pocket, go search his car, and say, hey, look what I found under your floor mats.
And suddenly he's like begging to suck your dick.
You know, he's yours.
I mean, it's the funniest thing in the world.
That's a little bit fucking tougher to do when it used to be like murder and theft, right?
Because then you'd have to like, I don't know, all the fucking color TV into the guy's house and say, Oh, hey, I burst my back open and look what I found in your front hallway.
A little tougher, right? So, you know, you palm a little piece, a little bit of weed, a little bit of blow, and you got him.
I mean, guy's looking at years in prison.
He'll do whatever the fuck you want.
It's, you know, but give us some credit.
If we wanted to get rid of the drugs, we could get rid of the drugs, right?
I mean, the fact that we're not is, you know, we're smart enough to know where the drugs are and how to get rid of them, but we don't.
I mean, would you go fucking wading into people who are paying you good money under the table and get blown away?
I mean, we're not fucking stupid, right?
Would you? If you said yes, you better go back and talk to Colonel Steve and get in the fucking military because you're all too fucking trigger-happy for us.
You know, this is kind of like a show, right, we do here.
So that's important to understand.
You know, you got a lot of fun from harassing the prostitutes.
That's fun. You know, it's always a little bit of fun to watch the Johns, you know, all red-faced and, oh, my wife and my fucking kids and my fucking church and so on and, you know, watching them beg and plead and I don't know.
I mean, if you like that kind of shit, it's fine.
You know, there's lots of it.
So you get to kind of hang around these slutty chicks and, I guess, a couple of gay boys.
And that's not bad.
You harass them, too. And, you know, you walk in on people having sex.
You know, shit like that. Gambling, eh, it's fine, you know.
With the gambling, a little bit more so on the gambling with the prostitution.
You get a little bit more of the Cosa Nostra, whatever the fuck they call it these days, the Godfatherlies, a little bit of the Soprano world.
You know, you get involved in that sort of shit, and we get guys moving in and out of those worlds all the time.
We get guys who used to be in the Mafia, they become cops for a while, then they go back to the Mafia, vice versa.
The skills that you learn, you know, you got parallel career paths, I think is how it's sometimes put.
So, you know, you got a lot in common.
You know what to do.
Who knows what the fucking rules are there either, but they say, go whack this guy.
That's what you do. So, you know, it's not that far off.
And, uh, what else?
What else can I tell you?
Eh, it's a, you know, it's a good gig, good pay, uh, good pension, uh, and, uh, you know, you get these night gigs where you can go to the fucking, uh, high school and, uh, you know, bust the kids for drinking vodka out of their, uh, Fucking oranges or whatever.
That's a good gig. That's a good gig.
The work's not too hard.
You get a little bit of shift work at the beginning.
But yeah, it's good.
It's a good life.
And if you guys got any questions, that's sort of all I really wanted to talk about just now.
You'll get more as you go forward in the orientation.
But you guys got any questions for me?
Anyone? Anyone at all?
No? No fucking curiosity at all?
Oh, okay. Alright, well, good.
I guess you all can come to the front.
If you've got any more questions, you can talk to me one-on-one.
You know, fill out your forms.
You just put your fucking X if you don't have much more to do with a pen.
And we'll get you fitted up.
We'll get you sorted out. And you can join the Thin Blue News.
Sorry. I think that was a bit too honest.
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