On last night's 8:30PM episode of Cops you wouldn't believe what Joe Arpaio instills in his deputies

I watched last night's 8:30PM episode of Cops on Fox. That episode, "Resisting Arrest #5", focused on suspects who showed resistance to being arrested, as the title states. Watch it online on Fox.com.

On the third segment of the episode, Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff's Deputy Jeff Lessard pulled over a teenage boy who was driving a car with covered taillights. The boy also had a suspended driver's license. When he got pulled over, the teenager called his parents; the family lived just a few houses away. Because Deputy Lessard smelled marijuana from the car, Lessard handcuffed the driver, who became very emotional.

The boy's mother came out, and Deputy Lessard explained what happened and asked her to go home. The father arrives and takes his wife back home. The boy pleads "dad, dad, dad", and then the father turns and asks officer not to take son to jail. Officer responds: "Go home." Mother also told father to go home. The father headed back home and turned around to say something. As father turned back home after saying whatever he said, officer said: "Go home NOW."

But then here's the problem I have. Right after saying "go home NOW" and as the father is walking toward his house, the officer follows the father and proceeds to handcuff him. The officer says "STOP IT" because apparently father was resisting then seats the father down at a curb. When the camera returns to another conversation between Lessard and the father it shows that the father is most definitely not handcuffed because his arms appear to be touching his legs. Lessard tells the father that he just committed a "class 6 felony".

Sigh. This just symbolizes many many issues with the American criminal justice system that are all too prevalent today:
- Arrests for profit (police departments that are featured on Cops get profits): Read Michelle Alexander's new book The New Jim Crow. During the 1990s police departments began mass arrests for drug cases in order to get federal grants for law enforcement no matter how baseless or unwarranted the arrest was.
- Arrests because the cop just didn't like one's attitude. I doubt the merit of the father having to get handcuffed/go to jail along with his marijuana-toting son just because the sheriff's deputy disagreed with his attitude. Had the family been of a minority race, this would've been more violent. One of my friends (he's Southeast Asian) was a victim of police brutality, and his mother got beat up by the cops at the scene even though mother came just to find out what happened to her son. In another case, a student on my college campus got beaten and Tased simply because he disobeyed order from police not to follow them. Guess what? IN all 3 aforementioned cases the people who got cuffed/beaten did not present physical threats to any of the officers!
- And need I not mention Arizona's very own racist idiotic SB1070???

I did try to check if there was a law about "interfering with the cops", and I found a law in Missouri that makes it a crime to interfere with one's arrest by "threatening the use of violence, physical force or physical interference." But certainly the father in the Cops episode didn't threaten Lessard (as far as I could hear).

If you already dislike Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, this is yet another reason to dislike him. Clearly what the Cops episode showed was police abuse set up for entertainment just because a TV camera crew was around.

I no longer have a TV, but that show was really irritating. Wussie pigs harassing hookers and potheads, and acting like heroes.

I had to stop watching it. I do love the intro and outro 'Bad Boys' by the great reggae band Inner Circle, but that's it, and I have their CDs.