I live in Orange County and we have a horrible reputation with our law enforcement.

Look at Sheriff Mike Corona. Everyone knew Mike Corona was a criminal, but they kept him on.....he's had serious allegations since I was in high school! I remember him getting away with stuff because of his social connections and it was not until the FBI stepped in that he finally was put in jail.

Cops strive to maximize the amount of money they extract from the taxpayer. Everything else is incidental.

One thing I find hilarious about reading copblock and other places that catalogue cops caught in criminal acts: the VAST majority of cases where cops are prosecuted for theft is when they're thieving from either the police department or other cops.

Color me cynical, but based on my own experiences and stories I've heard from cops and lawyers, the VAST majority of thefts that cops do on the job are against non-cops: confiscating liquor from kids (and taking it home), confiscating guns from citizens (and selling them to a friend), etc.

...and yet, the only ones we EVER see prosecuted are the cops who steal from other cops' lockers?

One might almost come to the conclusion that crimes against "the little people" don't matter at all, and only crimes against the "important people" carry any weight.

I bet you dollars to donuts that a cop who has a $300 BBQ stolen from his yard gets more resources on his case than you or I do for a $30,000 car stolen.

My uncle was murdered 2 years ago. His boss found him in his apartment after he didn't show up for a carpool. His boss called 911 and waited outside. A half hour later, he had to call them back.

TJIC - "I bet you dollars to donuts . . . "

Donuts? really? Oh, you did not just make that pun, did you? Donuts? Ha, as The Bangles say:

"If you want to find all the cops, they're hanging out in the donut shop"

In my experience it's very hard to get someone arrested. I've worked retail in a store with very good cctv. Doesn't matter. Deputies go out of their way to find a reason not to arrest. Sometimes I couldn't correctly ID all the things I saw them stuff inside the front of their pants. Other times I called to report people fighting. Well if one of them leaves then the other can't be arrested. Never mind they caused quite a scene if one leaves then there's "no victim no case."

I liked TJIC's comment about police maximizing taxpayer time. Yeah, they do that here. They are really big onto getting overtime. Every year or two a local newspaper will do a story on it. It's wasteful, it costs us too much, but it never changes.

I keep a gun. If I call the cops because someone is breaking into my house, if they don't come and arrest the guy, they'll have to come get the body later.

I feel your pain. I've never had any satisfaction from any police force ... ever.

I got a late night call from my ex-wife one night saying that a prowler was peering into her window as she was preparing for bed. While I hurried over there, about a ten minute drive (which, that night, I made in about five), I thought she was stupid for calling me before calling 911. It turns out that I beat the police there by a full two hours.

The prowler had thankfully been scared off by her screams, so we were sitting in the kitchen safely awaiting the arrival of the police to begin the investigation. After a half an hour or so, we called back to say, "what the fuck?" We were told that an officer had reported that he had driven by and reported that everything was fine. He couldn't find the house and had decided to just "close the trouble ticket".

Another half an hour passed and we get a call from an officer saying that he can't find the house. This was not a house that was out in the country somewhere where the directions were hard to follow. You wouldn't have even needed a GPS to find it. By the way, why didn't they have a simple GPS in their car? It was on the equivalent of a numbered street. Gee, where's 20th street? Perhaps it's between 19th and 21st? Okay, to be fair, the streets were named after U.S. presidents in order of their service. You may need an elementary school education to puzzle it out. By the way, shouldn't someone who is policing a town, a very small town at that, be familiar with the way the town is laid out?

Anyway, after an hour and a half, I'm able to guide this fucking guy to the elusive address while I'm on the phone with him. He seems to be about sixteen years old and is swimming around in his oversized policeman's uniform. I say that he seems to be about sixteen, but the vacant look in his eyes says that he can't possibly have accumulated the wisdom of a sixteen year old.

In spite of clear hand prints on the window, he says that those can't be lifted, but he'll call a detective. He demonstrates what a good fingerprint might look like by mashing his own finger into the dust on the window (a desert town -- lots of dust everywhere).

When the detective arrived nearly an hour later, she agreed that the handprints on the window were useless but said, "Oh, wait! There's a good one!" while pointing out the one that was left by the other policeman.

My ex-wife and I looked at each other and paused before letting her know that the cop left that particular fingerprint. That would have been funny.

I tell this as a funny story, but she was a single woman living alone with two of our children, daughters even. Anyone who has ever delivered pizza can find your fucking house right away. If this perverts intentions were more evil than they already were, what could he have done in the hour and a half that it took the first policeman to arrive? Also, how many speeding tickets were issued in that exact same hour and a half?

I called 911 the other night when we were at my neighbors backyard and her son fell off and broke the tar out of his arm. His mom was in no position to drive him to the hospital, he was having to be restrained to keep from hurting himself worse (he was flatout panicking and trying to rip off the broken half of his arm), I couldn't fit her, her kids, and my kids in the car. 15 minutes later, I was still on the phone with the idiot dispatcher and they weren't there. Her husband had gotten home from work, fortunately he had left early serendipitously, otherwise he would have taken much loinger to get home after the call.

We live in the burbs. There weren't a ton of other calls fo them then. I'm very glad we are 2 miles from the hospital. No matter what happens, if my family member needs to go we'll drive.

Another aspect is this:

"Melich and Osborne relied on Internet data from the computer’s Internet Explorer browser – one Casey Anthony apparently stopped using months earlier. Since March, she preferred the computer’s Mozilla Firefox browser, as investigators already knew."

And on my computer, I admit that I do leave the IE and Firefox icons available and obvious even though I use Chrome 99% of the time, and the reason I've done this is to lead snoopers away from my real Internet use.

Computer forensics isn't that hard if you think about it and have a little bit of knowledge.

I just visited family back in PA and my mother had problems distinguishing between browsers and websites. That was understandable.

My sister (3 years older) had problems understanding how to do scanning, but could actually surf. Her boyfriend had installed Chrome and FF by mistake, but couldn't understand the "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?" pop-up for over three months.

Just fucking google it.

I've called the cops twice, and both times it was pointless. The first time was when someone broke into my father's house. The police came and did their thing, but they didn't find anything. The second was when a family member assaulted me. Since the two witnesses there claimed to not see anything, the cops chalked it up to a chick fight and threatened to arrest both of us. That was "fun." I generally respect the work police do, but for the most part they can't or won't help.

My husband was hit by a hit-and-run driver last week. He rolled off the hood but was fine. His friend was hit, too, and injured his wrist. Not much the police could do about that, either, but to be fair, my husband and his friend couldn't give them much info. They couldn't even agree on the color of the car, which was a personal lesson in how worthless eyewitness accounts can be. My husband didn't want to call, but for medical insurance purposes, they needed to file a report with the police.