What’s a little torture between colleagues?
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
From the West Australian government’s police force comes this story of a team of government cops using tasers to haze and punish other cops. Because there’s nothing like hazing to reinforce a culture of hypermasculine violence, and nothing like electrical torture to brutalize your victims into unit cohesion:
Two senior West Australian police officers have been stood down and two others sidelined amid allegations they Tasered junior officers as part of an initiation ritual at the Rockingham Police Station south of Perth. . . .
It’s understood the unlawful practice had become part of subculture within a team of uniformed officers at the Rockingham Police Station. Tasers were being used as a punishment or initiation ritual. Officers, some of them senior, were drive stunning other staff with the guns delivering a shock without deploying the probes.
It’s believed there were multiple victims, some of them female officers, over a number of months.
Russell Armstrong, a rep from the pigs’ union, has this to say:
We’re disappointed that it’s happened, it’s an isolated incident, but we are supporting the officers and we are cooperating with internal investigators.
After all, nothing says isolated incident
like multiple victims
and part of a subculture within a team of uniformed officers.
Anyway, while the Incident is being Internally Investigated, Armstrong wants you to know that, when an investigation uncovers a gang of abusive government cops who get their jollies by torturing victims with high-voltate, paralyzingly painful electric shocks, he would certainly hope that [the Police Commissioner] doesn’t sack any police officer over this incident.
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Every time I start to doubt a fact like “The Fed is the monopoly counterfeiter” or “Coercion doesn’t work”, some statists come along and prove how flawed their positions are. In this case, not only do officers wear uniforms like a gang, cover for each other like a gang, act like members of a gang, patrol their territory like a gang, but they even conduct initiation hazing like a gang!
Discussed at topsy.com /#
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