Originally Posted by
The name is Porter
You, and anybody else that propagates this view really are an idiot. You clearly haven't spent any time in the US. That, or you just love your nanny state existence.
No. I have spent considerable time in the United States and I've seen the behavior of Law Enforcement there first hand.
This is a country, where as a sample, I have witnessed the following:
1. A family visiting Disneyland on the trip of a lifetime failed to notice that on the mother's passport which included one of the children had a valid US Visa but a 'handwritten' almost unnoticeable biro mark through the S on 'bearers'.
The entire family were taken under armed guard to a hotel, guarded overnight by an officer who watched them go to the toilet, etc then were escorted back the next day and deported.
2. A country like the United States, POST 9/11 wondering why it happened maintained as their records of entry/exit of the country a small green stub from the I94 card stapled to a passport page. The system was totally reliant on a low paid check in agent remembering to remove the stub and passing it to immigration.
An airline employee escorting a group of travel industry personnel to promote the US as a destination who had previously visited the US had left and the check-in agent had obviously lost the stub on her last trip.
The employee traveling on this occasion, was bullied and reduced to tears in front of the guests of the airline and accused of illegally living in the United States. She was hounded and accused of being an illegal immigrant and at no point did it occur to the officious, overbearing imbecile that was putting her through the ringer that the boarding pass she was holding, the exit stamp from Australia, the evidence of crew on the aircraft and any number of their own damn video surveillance could have verified that she arrived on the flight that day from Sydney but NOOOO let's not think, let's just act like a bunch of fascists and do the same as to the family above, assign an armed guard to watch her shower, toilet and strip search her then deport her the next day leaving a group of agents stranded on their own. It was only after representations from the Australian government to the US Embassy in Canberra after the airline (a foreign airline that back then operated SYD-LAX) that she was allowed to return a day later and received an apology from the US.
These are not isolated incidents I saw many examples of this in my years. How does the most powerful nation on earth have the gall to act like this while maintaining a system from the 19th century for recording departures from the country.
On top of this, when visiting Washington DC I was standing drinking a coffee talking to my then wife, next to the seat she was sitting on in the middle of a concourse that was at least 25 metres wide and a DC Cop come barrelling down the concourse and gave me a mouth full of abuse because she had to take one step of about 6 inches to the right to walk around me... I remember thinking at the time "and they let that person carry a firearm???".
I'm not saying that it's like this in every neighborhood and at every shopping mall but if you think that 13,000+ gun deaths every year and a Police shooting (usually of a non-white person) for no apparent reason isn't a sign of (and I acknowledge there are many good Police I'm sure) something seriously wrong with the general law enforcement culture and the culture in general then you are the idiot.
And it's been like this for decades. My father visited for the first time in 1973. He was held up at Customs because he had a bottle of Duty Free Scotch which he had bought to consume at night before bed in his hotel room... the Customs office held him for 20 minutes trying to convince him to admit that it was a gift for someone which it wasn't... I mean, this was a case of 'Don't you have something more important to do???' and in the end he let him go because he said "Look, we can discuss this for the next week if you like but the story is not going to change, I bought it for my own consumption".