I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System
I'm sorry to be a curmudgeon but I don't like this guy at all.  He wasted valuable city resources on an experiment the outcome of which he should have predicted, being a criminal attorney in Roxbury.<p>Why were the police and the criminal justice officials apparently angry with him?  Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people and to "prove" that getting arrested and jailed can be a violent and unfair experience, someone else was getting away with a purse snatching, or beating up an ex-girlfriend, or playing the knock-out game, or emptying a cash register.<p>It's not so much that he prevented one of these other cases from being pursued, but that he seems so oblivious of the effects of his actions.  Thus, it seems perfectly natural and reasonable for them to say, "OK, you make twice the salary we make yet you wanna be a petty criminal?  Poof, you're a petty criminal.  Enjoy sleeping in the bed you made, and here's hoping you will be permanently cured of f##king with us in the future, a##hole."<p>The police are set upon from all sides.  If they bend the rules, they are severely punished.  If they don't bend the rules, and the rules don't always apply the way liberal suburban white folks might imagine they do on the street, then they get castigated for not "doing their job" i.e. catching the bad guys.  At the end of the day, not catching the bad guys is the biggest sin in law enforcement, because it's the mission.  If you fail the mission, you're facing demotion, punishment, deprivation of public support and sufficient budget, and the public will view you with contempt and disgust.<p>I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills.  I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared.  I'm not justifying racial profiling.<p>Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.<p>Just my 2 cents.