As if it takes a cop to wave a flag.

Police details rape the state budget. Police officers work their regular shift, then they do the details at overtime rate.

Snort: This annoys me more than anything about cops. Its protecting their pay more than people.

Always shocked me they have cops doing this. Every other state I lived in had your usual hung over working stiff doing it because they were too drunk or incompetent to do the real work.

Our state's contractors often have some connected dude's twenty-something daughter doing the flagging, so we got that going for us.

And here I was, thinking that the mafia thread was down a few...


/a pig is a pig and that's that

Do these cops actually think this is more or less likely to make the public respect them and the authority they wield?

Nobody wants to pay someone $40/hr to flag traffic when $20 (which is still way high, IMO) will get people stampeding to do the work. Expecting the public to pay for that is just disrespectful. If a community is going to pay sworn police officer wages, that officer needs to be doing something only they can do. Even just running speed control in the work site- they will be doing the work they should be doing, they'll still find the criminals they've been claiming to find, and work zone fines will more than pay for his time. One ticket an hour will cover the costs of his pay and equipment.

Back in the 90's utility companies stopped routinely hiring off-duty MSP troopers when they worked near roads which pissed them off. There was a telephone lineman who was injured when a state trooper rammed his cruiser into the ladder.

/Too lazy to go Google this, just trust me.

JesseL: I can't believe how many people (cops, journalists, and farkers) don't realize that POLICE ARE ostensibly CIVILIANS! (with the exception of military police of course)

FTFM