Thursday, September 22, 2011

I'm a Police Officer, I Know Best!

The police "flying squad" (or whatever they are called) of "liquor compliance" officers are in town. These police operate independently to the actual Liquor Licencing dept.

Liquor Licencing cannot be happy with this police squad going around creating havoc, leaving it its wake the impression that it is in cahoots with the Liquor Licencing Division.

The bar manager is at the door, in conversation with the two police "liquor compliance" officers.

A young man fronts up to the door, ready to come in.

One of the "flying squad" officers steps forward & declares the young man "too intoxicated" to be served, and that we must not let him into the pub.

It was a stupid call. The young man had certainly been drinking, but unduly intoxicated he was not. He was a nice young country fellow, wouldn't have been a problem in a pink fit.

We could have ignored the police officer's "suggestion", and enforced our decision to admit the young man. But in the interests of good police relations we didn't.

The only outcome? A decent young man had his evening ruined.

Not only did the police officer have an abrasive attitude and a nasty mentality, he had poor judgement.

Almost every staff member saw what happened. None of them believed the young man was intoxicated.

"And they wonder why they are called Pigs" summed up one of the girls, under her breath.

What the staff saw was a police officer too stupid to judge if someone was blithering drunk.
The astute staff saw a police officer callously lying, then using his badge to enforce that lie.

1 comment:

Dave from Tacoma said...

Two officers? Only two officers? Your government employees down in Australia are lightweights when it comes to bothering bar-owners.

A couple of weeks ago my little neighborhood tavern was hit by a "compliance patrol". They showed up on a friday night, one of the tavs busiest nights. Said patrol consisted of:

- An electrician from the city power dept. looking for electrical and wiring violations.

- An employee of the county health dept. looking for food preparation and health violations.

- An agent from the state liquor board looking for violations of the state liquor laws.

- A firefighter from the city fire dept. looking for violations of the fire code.

- FOUR policeman backing up the above listed inspectors. Compliance patrol is obviously easy duty as they were either 3-stripers (SGT) or 2-stripers (police style CPL).

Thankfully the couple that owns the tav was there at the time and could deal with them. (Rather than the two busy bartenders having to.)

After an hour in the place what heinous violations did they find? One. The owner received a citation b/c the licenses that he is required by law to display (state liquor license, city business licence, county food service license, and state tax license) were behind the the front door that was wedged open. If the front door had been closed at the time the licenses would have been viewable and they wouldn't have got a citation.

The fine? Nothing. Just a warning. That's 8 people, earning between $60,000 and $120,000 a year, spending over an hour bothering a small neighborhood tavern on a busy friday night.

F**k each and everyone of those useless people that came in that night. Particularly those useless fat slobs of cops. If they were REAL cops they'd be up on Hilltop or over in Shacktown trying to stop the gang wars.