This Week In The Police State

We've got some great entries in "This Week In The Police State":

1. This is from 2004, but it's still a good story: Sheriff Joe Arpaio sent his crack SWAT team to an upscale neighborhood in Phoenix to "seize illegal weapons". They instead burnt down the house they were attacking, killing the dog inside, and arresting one of the inhabitants for a traffic violation. After the raid, one of Sheriff Joe's men drove the tank they took with them over a neighbor's car. Full story here.
2. Police arrested a worker at McDonalds for serving an "oversalty burger". The burger's been turned over to the crime lab for investigation. Story here.
3. Police in Singapore arrived in four riot vehicles to put down a protest being staged by tiny plastic figurines. Story here.
4. A Police Office in Missouri became enraged when a motorist refused to explain why he parked in an empty parking lot at 2am. So the officer kindly offered to create bogus charges for an arrest. Read the transcript and watch the video: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/19/1961.asp
5. Mounted police in Washington DC stormed into a press conference and protest against the war in Iraq arresting the organizers. Story here: http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Police_break_up_anti_war_meeting_in_09062007.html
6. And a few stories from Australia, which just had the APEC summit, which George Bush attended. Police were warned that they should expect "level of violence not previously experienced in Sydney", and that groups of protestors would unleash...well...hell on Earth. So they had snipers everywhere, they had police assaulting fathers in front of their children because they had the AUDACITY to walk across the street to go to lunch. They even had their officers remove their "required" identification badges moments before the police stormed protestors and beat them. Of course, all of this was worth it because, as we found out, the biggest security threat at APEC was the comedy troupe "The Chaser", who were able to infiltrate security posing as a group of Canadian delegates. I guess The Chaser folks didn't know that APEC is strictly a no-mirth zone.

Ah, such helpful tactics from the police you can almost smell the love on the tips of their batons.