Mrs. bumper saw my new business cards and thought the red letters that say “(a nationally accredited agency)” were some kind of big joke I had put on there purposefully. “What does that mean? do they make you quit arresting people if you’re not ‘accredited’?“
So I had to explain what little I knew about accreditation. And that is not much. I do know that plenty of departments go along swimmingly without being accredited. I also know we spend a lot of time and effort on things that don’t have anything to do with anything but getting and maintaining the mighty accreditation. I’m pretty sure ‘accreditation’ gets us some of our money back from the Feds, but I don’t really know. Nevertheless it makes me a little queasy.
I’m really not too high on the Feds being involved in local law enforcement. Our Narcs really love to “go federal” on a guy because the bad guy will actually spend real time in prison. Of course to ‘go federal’ you have to follow the federal sportsmanship rules, like not doing a search warrant until daylight, -About the time the school buses are picking up kids is nice, or knocking and waiting a polite 13 seconds before you break a door. I’m sure Keith’s widow feels warm inside knowing her husband went out because he was playing like a true gentleman.
Aside from being bitter, though, I think it’s just wrong.

Fence Update: If you haven’t been keeping up, or you got hit in the head and have amnesia, you can look here, here, here, and finally; here.
Friday the Constable was out to serve us with the papers the city filed. They still think they have an “Easement by Prescription” despite the fact that nobody but me was using the durn thing anyway, but now they want me to pay their lawyer and, oh, $20,000.00 for their trouble. *shrug*
Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems completely insane. I guess we’ll see. [Update 15JAN03: Fixed stupid links to a box behind my firewall. (thanks Tom)]