We have police that hang out at WaWa for hours, drink free coffee, and do nothing. Granted, I live in a resort town and its winter.
As for this fireman I'm on the fence. Yea, it's only $8. That's not the point. It's the act and he was committing theft. Also, he's a civil servent and his actions are a reflection on the community. Why the hell did he steal $8 worth of merchandise. Don't people think about the repercussions? Stupid.
that's the question, isn't it? But I still stand by my argument: He was in uniform; he did it while he was on the job. He would have been apprehended while in uniform and on the job. There's the reflection on the public service.
Suppose he was not in uniform, not on the job, and he gets stopped for the first time with the blood-alcohol level over the legal limit? I think it's at least the same level of crime -- a misdemeanor.
And that recalls this recent case in Texas, with the public prosecutor in Austin who was caught driving drunk. She refused to resign, and that led to a budget slug-fest between her investigative outfit and the governor.
In our town and back in the '70s, we had a City Manager who was considered tops. Caught driving drunk. I can't remember what happened.
But you'll find people in these high-profile positions so that their misdemeanor becomes at least local news. Which again begs the question.
Ordinarily, these run-of-the-mill misdemeanors -- shoplifts and DWI -- aren't newsworthy for the average violator. They are certainly newsworthy when a celebrity like Winona Ryder or Lindsay Lohan gets caught, or in Ryder's case it was a matter of grand theft for what she attempted to shoplift. $4K or $5K worth of stuff.
Back in '06, I was elected as treasurer for a local political club -- a PAC. The outgoing treasurer became president. There were reporting requirements and deadlines, and I wanted to see bank statements, check registers -- all of it. Her books were a total ruse. The club accounts were not supposed to be personal accounts -- she'd been told at the beginning what to do. But she put the accounts in her own name. We had to go to the county central committee to force the issue.
She said she'd left us with a balance of some $2,200. It was $200. we got an audit committee together, solicited all the bank records going back to her first month in office, and determined that she'd embezzled $5,000+. We were determined to file charges. I don't know what the central committee did or how they might have influenced things, but the case was "null-processed." They didn't want it in the papers, ya see.
And the irony of it: she was an employee in her day-job for an association or union of correction officers.
But we got our act together. A few years afterward, we were a client of the Kindee-Durkee accounting firm, which handled Diane Feinstein's campaign fund. And, unlike the other clients, we were insisting on bank statements. Since we actually "caught" the disappearance of some $4,000, it was restored and Durkee offered an excuse. A year later, the s*** hit the fan; FBI had frozen all the accounts. Durkee went to prison. Feinstein lost millions. I think our account was restored as it was.
And folks, that's not shoplifting a bag of Skittles.