can’t find a cop in Boston to beat him up

I'm sure you wouldn't have the same problem.

He can't find a cop in Boston to beat him up, b/c they're such professionals ... so Bandit has to satisfy his masochism in less direct fashion.

Sorry - just more of your condescending bullshit.

And yet here you are, subjecting yourself to it time after time after time.

I must admit, I’m not sure what point you are making.

I thought I was pretty clear - I could go back to other posts but whenever you refer to people who work in non white collar jobs you condescend to them as ignorant and uneducated.

Boston's rank-and-file police officers brought home $78,906 on average in 2002, and those who earned higher-education degrees made considerably more.

Since this was prior to the contractagreement prior to the '04 convention where the union negotiated a 14.5%/4yr increase - I would ask what you would consider this poorly paid in compared to what? And I guess those higher-education degrees are more evidence of lack of education and poor training.

Are there well-trained local cops out there? Sure. Do some cities pay their cops reasonably well? Yes. Are both those the exceptions to the rule? Yup

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Sorry - just more of your condescending bullshit.

US Intelligence is becoming a larger entity based on what already exists, not that there's no overlap or double checking anymore, but that's really not important...........

I must admit, I'm not sure what point you are making. Are there well-trained local cops out there? Sure. Do some cities pay their cops reasonably well? Yes. Are both those the exceptions to the rule? Yup.

Am I absolutely comfortable with the idea of people with nothing more than a high school education (or GED) and a few hours of training being put out on the street with firearms and awesome discretionary powers? No, I'm not.

Remember Rear Admiral John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness project? Well, according to the Washington Post, there is a similar program underway at the Justice Department. Talkleft notes that This is an intrusive program that should be st...

Oh, I'm sure it will be done badly at first, but that's an inescapable prelude to doing it well eventually. I still think we could've thrown a wrench into 9/11, or stopped it, with a pretty basic level of info sharing & computerization.

As for Bandit and Boston's finest, I am happy to concede that Boston cops are the guardians straight out of Plato's Republic, if Bandit says so; but down here in the provinces, we are evidently not attracting fine minds or characters to our police forces. The happy exceptions do not prove the rule.

Your article is misleading in that one reason why the Boston cops get paid so much is more overtime. Hence their base pay is in line with the rest of the country. From your article,

Base pay for Boston patrolmen is similar to that in other big departments around the country -- about $53,426 annually. But Boston officers supplement their salaries with more overtime on average than officers in nine of the nation's 10 largest police departments; only New York City's $16,000 per officer topped Boston's $8,520 in 2002, the most recent year for which data are widely available.

And even if it were true that Boston cops were paid the most on an hourly basis that doesn't negate Anderson's point necessarily. If we are paying a wage rate that gets poorly trained/poorly educated police officers, then it doesn't have to be the case that a slightly higher hourly wage would improve the situation all that much.

In regards to this system, my general view is that more information is generally better. One reason why institutions like markets fail is incomplete and asymmetrical information. Of course, bad information doesn't help this situation and I am doubtful of the government's ability to provide clean data. So, I guess I'm more on the fence on this issue than Anderson or James.

we get the cops we pay for.

The great thing about you is you never let not knowing wtf you're talking about get in your way

The fact is that this doesn't change anything other than state and local law enforcement's logistical ability to access the information they are already entitled to view (and that they should be viewing so they can do their jobs correctly). Of course that makes certain abuses a bit easier to commit, but no more so than does access to the internet make certain crimes (e.g., financial) easier. If state and local officials will abuse this system, they're already abusing the current one and this won't change that.

I'm as afraid of overreach by law enforcement as anyone I know, but this is just common sense.

Bandit, we get the cops we pay for.

Of course I'm worried about abuses of this system; but I'm *more* worried about not having it in place. Let's make it a federal crime w/ hard time to misuse this system for personal reasons, & move on with it.

The system, known as “OneDOJ,” already holds approximately 1 million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

And this is being done by the same DoJ that still can't get even moderately-obsolete PCs onto the desktop of every FBI agent? Or build a enterprise network to connect them to basic resources? I'll stop worrying now.