VEHICLE SEARCHES PROVIDE EVIDENCE

You're kidding me, right?

The lawsuit claiming that a police officer is not justified in
searching the vehicle of a person who has just been arrested is
outrageous. It is almost as silly as the woman that sued McDonald's
because she spilled coffee, that she happened to order, on herself
and claimed that the beverage was hot.

As an active duty police officer, protecting my homeland and every
citizen in it is what gets me up every morning, and I am certain
that goes for many of our fellow dedicated law enforcement officers.
(We all know that it is certainly not the pay!)

But with possible rulings such as these, why don't we just hand the
criminals empty Arizona Statute books and let them write some more
laws that will protect and assist them with performing their various
illegal activities and endangering innocent lives.

Having attended many cases in court, I have seen many criminals hide
behind lawyers (most of them provided by our tax money) to "clean
up" their wrongdoings, and there couldn't be another perfect example
of it than this issue.

The individual who believes that the officers were wrong in
searching the suspect's vehicle would have had a good defense if
those police officers had just strolled on by and told him, "Hey
you, we are going to search your vehicle for no apparent reason."

But that was certainly not the case. Instead, what we have here is
another person, caught with cocaine and drug paraphernalia, who does
not want to take the punishment for his bad decisions, and in turn,
decides to complain about it.

I can almost guarantee you that if this individual did not have any
illegal substances and/or paraphernalia in his vehicle at the time
of his arrest, he would not be bringing up this issue in the first place.

We must take into consideration all of the illegal drugs, terrorists
and victims found due to evidence and/or leads possibly contained
inside and arrestee's vehicles that would have otherwise gone
unnoticed if it wasn't for the search.

This issue has been around for a while and has two sides to it of
course, with both its good and bad points, but we should - no, we
MUST - acknowledge the one that outweighs the other in safety for
our officers and citizens, regardless of what Mr. "Bad Guy" wants to
whine about in order to escape from doing "the time for the crime."

JAMES THOMPSON, Yuma