SWAT Teams for the Well Heeled

Keeping the Peace In Ferguson

Ross Douthat writing in the New York Times about the police in Ferguson, Missouri, who showed up on the streets of that St. Louis suburb with machine guns and armaments which made them look like they could out gun the 101st Airborne on D-Day.

Police Assert Themselves in Missouri

It reminded Mad Dog of a story one of his neighbors told about the police on an island in Maine, where the residents got around in golf carts and the police, on this island of privilege and wealth really had very little crime to chase, but they had jobs and equipment, so they followed local teenagers around, hoping to see some malfeasance on which they could pounce. 

It's the old Alice's Restaurant thing--so well described by Arlo Guthrie, after he dumped his trash at dump of a small Massachusetts town without having his resident's permit and this excited the local constabulary greatly, because this was the biggest crime ever in that small village. So, all the equipment which had sat idly by got put into use by police who may have wondered when it would occur to the town fathers that a police force equipped to solve murder and to thwart mayhem may not be needed in a small town.

Keene, N.H., it turns out has equipped its police with an armored Bear cat, just in case Al Qaeda or ISIS or the Weathermen should decide to make a last stand in that town.

The Hampton police occasionally strike one as having too many units with too little to do, but presumably, during the summer at Hampton Beach, all that police presence may thwart mischief. Not so for the idle hands in the North Hampton force, who seem to specialize in harassing adolescents who may be driving around with alcoholic drinks in their automobiles, whether or not those drinks have been opened, much less imbibed.

These are, Mad Dog supposes, good problems to have--places in America where the problem is not uncontrolled demoralizing crime but bored police.