There is the letter of the law, there is the spirit of the law and there are fucking idiots.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/plymouth-police-cornhill-car-speeding-ticket-195237839.html?fr=yset_chr_syc_hp

Common sense isn’t common. We have arrived in an age where judgment and discretion are frowned upon.

I guess I saw it coming forty years ago. I was on midnight patrol in the middle of the week. It had been a quiet night. I came across a car at a traffic light. It sat through a couple of cycles. This is called a clue.

It could be that the car was abandoned. There was a possibility the the driver had suffered a medical emergency. Possibly ninjas had assassinated everybody in the car. Or it could be that the driver was passed out drunk.

Oh well, just another drunk college student. The only twist was his black lab dog. She didn’t object when I opened the door. There were no complaints from her when I dragged her master out of the car and handcuffed him.

But I had a problem. Animal control would not come out to take her. The student couldn’t come up with somebody to take the dog. The dog didn’t express a preference.

Not a problem, as far as I was concerned. She could take the ride with her owner. She climbed into the back seat of the patrol car and settled down. Once at the station, she exited the patrol car and peed on command.

My first roadblock was the dispatcher. I tried to convince her that the lab was a good dog. She would be good company. The dispatcher was a cat person, nothing doing.

Okay, drunk and dog could share the same cell. Neither seemed to object and the dog curled up in the bunk with her master. Victory!

I went back out on patrol. That lasted about an hour. What changed is that the swaggering bull dyke Sergeant took issue with the arrangement. She wasn’t about to take a chance on anything that confused her world view.

THE HORROR! A male prisoner and his female dog were in the same cell together! I was called back to the station so that I could get the full benefit of the shit hitting the fan.

I guess that a good little bureaucrat could take issue with putting a dog in a cell block designed and designated for people. I would have been hard pressed to tread that path. But that was not her concern.

How could I put a male human and a female dog in the same cell? It was sexually inappropriate. Males and females couldn’t be housed together. The first thing that popped into my mind was, “how did this silly pervert pass a psychological?” Then I remembered she was hired before psychological testing for cops was required.

We arrived at a solution. I took the dog out of the bed she shared with her master and put her in a separate cell. I also posted a sign on the door that the cell was occupied by a female.

Results don’t matter. The goal doesn’t have to make sense or be attainable. Process if everything. The modern pogue follows the process, without deviation. As long as the process is maintained, no blame is attached for screwed up results.