Police
I was extremely impressed by the police response to my attempted mugging in new haven a few years ago - ~4 cars arrived within about a minute of my calling, and they immediately started a sweep of the area looking for the teens who approached me. That said, I keep reading accounts of police abusing their powers and antagonizing the people they are supposed to protect. I believe that they think they're doing the right things, and that their actions are serving the common good, but I think they just have a fundamental distrust of much of society and of the people in the communities that effects their judgement. An amazing example of this was the "Bait and switch" episode of This American Life last week - one of the stories described the misadventures of a couple in Texas... in brief, the man came home to find a strange car parked outside his home with the windows down and keys in the ignition. There were only his house and his neighbor's house on the street, so he went and knocked on his neighbor's door and told them that their guest had left their key in the ignition, but they said that they didn't know who's car it was. He waited a few hours, then called the police to report it as suspicious. An officer arrived and said that "he sees weird things like that" all the time, and to not worry about it, and that they'd take care of it. A week passed and the car was still there - the man was pissed that the police hadn't done anything about it and hadn't taken him seriously, and he thought that someone had gone missing or something and that it was a crime scene, so he decided to at least see if he could find a title or something with someone's name on it so he could try to figure out who it belonged to. In case it was a crime scene, he decided to wear gloves to not leave finger prints, and proceeded to look through the glove box and try to open the trunk. After 20 minutes of rumaging around trying to find documentation, the police arrive, sirens wailing, and tell him to get out of the car, hands against the vehicle, etc. Long story short, the car was a trap to catch joy-riders, and despite him calilng 911, the officer arriving and lying to him, and video of him rumaging through the glove box looking for documentation, they decide to press charges. How is that not an abuse of power? How is that legal? What good does that serve?
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=394
Another article from surveillence society, UK... they take DNA from everyone who is arrested, and keep it indefinitely, regardless of whether there are any charges, much less convictions. The result is that police have been arresting people just because they looked "suspicious," and regardless of whether they were doing anything wrong, or if the thing they were doing warranted arrest or just a ticket, so they could get the DNA and try to match it, or hold it for future matches. There are currently 5,000,000 entries in their database, 40% from just the last 2 years, and surprise-surprise, minorities are "very highly over-represented"...
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