The Arrogance of the Badge

Many police are nothing more than thugs with guns.  Please don't make the mistake of thinking that they are on your side or care about you at all.  Obviously some are decent and honest but if you assume one is and they're not, they could hurt you.  Badly.

Even An Elderly, Grieving Husband Is A Potential Drug Criminal
Radley Balko writes at Huff Post about how utterly out of hand the paranoia has become that someone will pop a pill they were not prescribed and get high. He quotes this story from Utah, by Dennis Romboy, in the Deseret News:

A man says Vernal police disrupted an intimate moment of mourning with his deceased wife of 58 years when they searched his house for her prescription medication without a warrant within minutes of her death.Barbara Alice Mahaffey died of colon cancer in her bedroom last May. Ben D. Mahaffey, 80, said he was distraught and trying to make sure his wife's body would be taken to the funeral home with dignity, when he says officers insisted he help them look for the drugs.
"I was holding her hand saying goodbye when all the intrusion happened," he told the Deseret News.
Barbara Mahaffey died at 12:35 a.m. with Mahaffey, a Navy medic in the Korean War, and his friend, an EMT, at her side. In addition to police, a mortician and a hospice worker arrived at the home about 12:45 a.m., Mahaffey said. He said he doesn't know how police came to be there.
"I was indignant to think you can't even have a private moment. All these people were there and they're not concerned about her or me. They're concerned about the damn drugs. Isn't that something?" Mahaffey said.
Mahaffey said he was treated as if he were going to sell the painkillers, which included OxyContin, oxycodone and morphine, on the street.

Balko puts it in perspective:

Note the utter lack of compassion, the inability to see a grieving husband as anything other than a potential drug dealer. Note the priorities on display. The most important thing the cops had to do that day was get those drugs out of that house. Preventing someone from using Barbara Mahaffey's pills to get high, or preventing Ben Mahaffey from--God forbid--using pain medication not prescribed to him at some point in the future, was more important than giving a widower a last moment of dignity to say goodbye to his wife of 58 years.

Related: Bloomberg practicing "legislative medicine" to keep pain pills out of the hands of people poor enough to go to public hospitals