Want to be a cop for a day? Well of course not. (You could get terribly murdered!) But if you want to be a cop for free because, who knows, maybe you're bored being unemployed and sitting at home playing Xbox, the process is pretty easy now. Just ask one lady!
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has given Police Chief Cathy Lanier sweeping new authority to appoint ordinary citizens as “volunteer” police officers, The Examiner has learned.
Under an order signed by Fenty, Lanier and “her subordinate officials” are allowed to appoint “special privates” during an “emergency.”
The unpaid citizen-cops “shall possess all the powers and privileges and perform all the duties of the privates of the standing police force of the District,” the order states.
The *one question* that everyone has after reading this goes unanswered in the rest of the Examiner article: do the unpaid citizen-cops get guns? Specifically, those AR-15 assault rifles the police department had last year? Because that would just be... dangerous. Guns!
Mayor Adrian "Dubai" Fenty signed this law on Jan. 16, and it was promptly posted to the city's Web site in early March. The city Internet managers were too busy, you know, stealing.
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles tells the Examiner that "the order was necessary to deal with the hundreds of out-of-town cops brought in for President Barack Obama’s inauguration." Here we go with these government types again, always putting Barry Obama's shining face over some terrible police state scandal.
Also, Nickles?
So why hasn’t the order been rescinded?
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
Eh, why bother? Take a vacation, go play golf, no rush.
Jim Newell locks people up for Wonkette and IvyGate.
