taking on what the untouchable police force

know this is going to come across as somewhat tone-deaf but I'm really starting to believe it, but in very sad way the memory of 9/11 has become the worst thing that has happened to the accountability of the  average cop walking the beat because when it comes to any form of criticism they have become completely untouchable.   There are thousands of great cops out there but there are also a ton of them who see protecting the lives of the citizens of this city as secondary to killing green-pigs or playing words with friends.

 I lived through 9/11 and obviously don't mean to imply it is at all a good thing but what the memory of it has done is that these cops walk around completely untouchable when it comes to their individual personal behavior.   I've lived in NYC for 10 years but it's getting completely ridiculous how they walk around now with this air of entitlement.  Every day I walk on the street, stand on a subway platform, wait in line at a restaurant and see a cop putzing around on his cellphone.    Today I saw a guy on the corner of Times Square playing Cut-The-Rope, yesterday I was almost run over by a cop driving his patrol car while on his cell-phone and every day I see a group of them congregate on one side of a subway platform shooting the shit..    I don't know another profession where it seems completely acceptable to spend most of your working day completely distracted.   I've said it before but you don't see a girl working at McDonalds on her phone her entire shift, I never catch the postman standing around reading a magazine and I don't see an elevator operator playing angry-birds and none of these guys have the responsibility to make sure that the citizens are safe.

But even if you accept that cops are a different animal, what gets me is that you can't say anything about it because you'll come across as unappreciative or unpatriotic even if the criticism is completely acceptable.   Take that ticket-fixing scandal which broke a few months ago.   The immediately response was not that of shame but was a bunch of cops wrapping themselves in their flag to defend heroic behavior on days like 9/11 to try to diffuse the fact that they were breaking the law.