I knew Sal Culosi.

He was a nice enough guy that used to hang out at Fast Eddies Sports Bar in Fairfax, VA. I saw him there often just tending a beer and minding his own business.

If you can believe it, he was an optometrist at a Wal-Mart that just measured eyeballs and wrote prescriptions. If he was a bookie (as alleged) then I never saw anything that gave him away.

I followed his story in the paper and was surprised to hear that a 17-year veteran of the Fairfax County Police was the one that shot him. Apparently, he said he was bumped and accidentally discharged his gun DIRECTLY INTO SAL'S CHEST.

The police department eventually settled with the family for negligent homicide. That was only after they fought tooth and nail to protect a cop that didn't know how to control a deadly weapon.

In the end, I think the cop got a 3 week suspension. AFAIK, he's still on the FCPD.

It's shit like this that flies in the face of all those "but most cops are not bad guys" arguments.

If an organization fights to protect bad guys, I don't care how much good they do: they are complicit in furthering criminal behavior. And they're in a position of trust, at that!

It's an open secret that cops lie to protect other cops.

Why do we allow this? Any other person in a special position of trust and responsibility that contravenes their duty gets _extra_ punishment.

Lon Horiuchi was an FBI sniper that shot Vicki Weaver in the back while holding her infant daughter in her arms: case dismissed. That cop that pepper sprayed those protesting kids at UC Davis, John Pike, was never even charged for "lack of evidence" (nevermind that video of him doing so was on every news show in the country that week). The FBI and BATFE set the Branch Davidians' home on fire, burning up the children inside.

Instead of meaningful outrage, we simply let cops get away with murder, literally.

Fuck the police.

Is this really the America that America wants?

The article mentions one case where a judge refused to issue a search warrant for a narcotics investigation and instead the police brought representatives from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and raided the place with a swat team to conduct an alcohol inspection. What did they find?

Two sample bottles of beer that weren't labeled as samples and a bottle of vodka in the office. The fourth circuit court of appeals upheld the search. According to the article: So for now, in the Fourth Circuit, sending a SWAT team to make sure a bar’s beer is labeled correctly is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

It may sound trite, but the real reason is -- why would they?

The engineers are all busy working on new things. What product manager is going to say, hey, Fred, take off two weeks and take this random product from 1997 and see if it still builds at all, find the old dependencies, clean it up, talk to legal to see if we still own the rights to (x, y, z), and throw it up on GitHub -- just to expose some of our shoddy programming, last-minute hacks, vulgar comments cursing out other programmers, and maybe even some proprietary company information that we had no idea was in that code base.

There's no upside, but possibly plenty of unknown downside.