In which Arizonians continue to take the law into their own hands

This type of stuff pisses me off, mostly because it display a (thankfully fairly rare) combination of idiocy and arrogance that you really can only find in America. So when I saw an AP headline about more people in Arizona starting some sort of civilian patrol, I admit I was relieved to see that rather than hunting down the evil menace of thirsty, poor Mexicans, they're trying to protect their fellow citizens from serial killers.

Okay: I can't really argue with that, because it feels like sort if I argue against what their doing, then I'm coming down in support of serial killers. I'm not in any way pro-mass-murders, and murder in general is one of the very few things I will willingly say is completely and totally morally wrong.

That said, this bothers me. I don't know why, but something about the seemingly-inate American desire to take the law into your own hands, even in the best-intentioned, least-offensive way possible, irks me. It seems like a cultural holdover from the Wild West, I guess, and I personally would like to think that America has evolved past mindless lawlessness where it was basically every man for themselves, into a a slightly more mature society with laws and clear definitions of who's allowed to enforce the law and who's not.

Another part of my objection, of course, is where the hell are the police? If some situation is bad enough that a group of citizens literally take to the street in order to try to fix it, the police are very clearly not doing their job. Maybe that's actually why this story grates on me the way it does.

While I'm making this a long post: A police anecdote from yesterday. I was on the tube coming home, on the Picadilly line. I got on at Russell Square, which now has a plaque commemorating those killed between Russell Square and the next stop last July. At some stop, I'm not certain which one but it was somewhere between there and mine, I noticed a whole flock of London cops on the platform. They're imossible to miss, as they more often than not are wearing neon-yellow reflective visability vests. There were, I believe, about six of them, waiting in a group amongst the crowd on the platform. Then as the train stopped and the doors opened, they spread out and entered the train, seemingly one or two per car.

Well, huh, I thought. That's...interesting. And slightly unsettling. I'm not one prone to hysterical paranoia (I recall getting yelled at in high school for laughing at our lockdown drills), but when a large group of police suddenly spread out and get onto the train your own, it can lead one to think that perhaps it's not the best place to be.

Then I realized I suddenly had a problem. I'd been lucky enough to snag a seat, and it was the end seat, next to the glass barrier between the seats and the doors. The officer who had just stepped on was standing right next to me, mere inches away. Suddenly, my mind started into one of those stupid-yet-uncontrollable spirals: Okay, I'm a little nervous because the train is now full of cops and one is standing right next to me. Oh, crap, do I look nervous all the sudden? What if he looks down at me and sees that I look nervous? And my CD player is in my purse, so what if he's watching me obviously messing with something in my bag as I try to find the track I want, and he thinks *I'm* suspicious? Dammit, now I *DO* look nervous because I really don't want him to suddenly decide I'm a terrorist and arrest me or something!

The end result is fairly anticlimactic: He stood there and mostly ignored me, and I got off the train at my stop and walked home. I also had a perverse little voice in my mind telling me to just ride the train a bit further, and see if I could figure out why so many cops had gotten on, what were they up to and where were they going, but I decided against it. Probably wisely.

(Bonus unrelated anecdote: I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now and apparently Google thinks I'm in Germany. Why? It is a mystery.)