leftmath.blogg.se

I’m going to settle it so well that the next time some law professor at a braai pops up with this you can literally chirp him “Hey don’t come with that shit here!” and then throw your half finished beer at him. I am going to settle this little problem once and for all. “You can’t have hollow point ammunition!” Then, the story goes, he either proceeds to confiscate the ammunition or a scenario of your choice. The policeman then swings out the cylinder of you revolver or pops out your magazine and sees your ammunition.

I admit I have a licenced firearm and he asks to inspect it (which he is well in his powers to do) and you SAFELY produce the firearm and licence. What happens if I’m at a roadblock and a policeman asks if I have anything to declare. So with that out of the way let’s examine the question, as it is posed. These are the guys who lean back in their deck chair, scratch their gut, and tell you how things were done “in the old days”, and how they should be done now, and will be nowhere to be seen when you end up in trouble after taking their advice. I hold a slightly higher level of contempt for what I call Castle Lager professors. Allow me to very gently announce that nothing you see on television has any shred of credence to real life, in South Africa. What is more alarming is that in the high 90 percentile that information and procedure is gleaned from watching American television. It’s quite amazing to the contrary how many people tell me how things are supposed to be done, with an alarming amount of confidence. Then comes the mystical, black magic world of Police Procedure. The unfortunate thing is that as many people who may insist they know their rights as enshrined in the Constitution fail to list more than three or four. Exercised correctly, you will find, hearing something for the first time, will be able to deduce to a reasonable amount of accuracy whether the story is true, false, or maybe we need to look into this further.Īmong the tricky questions that come my way, which I have to apply a certain amount of seriousness to, is when law and people’s rights come in to play. Eliminate emotion, hysteria, bias, prejudice and superstition, and add some established facts and deductions, along with, often in our case, actual law. What that in practice means is the ability to take an account, break down the facts as they are presented, and apply a test of “reasonable man” and plausibility. So encountering these anecdotes at a rate comparable to a minigun hanging off the side of a Blackhawk over Somalia, I have developed over the years a skill called “critical thinking”. If you ever ask me about burning hyena tails or CDs I will resort to Japanese insults of a magnitude unheard of since they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

or was that asphyxiate and get dumped on the landfill….? Whatever. You must at some stage have come across the law that says a woman can’t be arrested after 6pm? You know, and if she is, has to be taken to an all-women police station? Surely you heard about the one that says putting your ATM PIN number in backwards if you are held up? No? Well one of the true, true ones is about the hijacker who hides inside a garbage bag outside your house and jumps out at you as you leave…. This blog post (or else you wouldn’t be reading it, I’m not that entertaining) will challenge some of these myths and mysteries. Some are statements like “ Hay craam us laak aat aff kontrol hay!” or similar enquiries of varying degrees of irritation due to misbeliefs, sheer ignorance, or sometimes because they have nothing better to say than repeating some random rumour. Usually at these sociable events, someone always comes up to me and asks some police-related question. Another attribute is that even when off-duty, with a cooler box in my hand and a Chesterfield in my mouth, I’ll also get the standard, “Watch out, here come the cops!” Like it was funny for the first 18 years I heard it.

If like me, you’re a policeman, you have to understand that at social occasions you will be introduced as such every bloody time. It’s one of the features of my profession.