In defense of Pilgrim
I've read (and just reread) what Pilgrim wrote, and see nothing like bashing -- if anything, he's being restrained by a) accepting at face value the idea (which seems laughable to me) that 75% of the Dothan officers were neither involved in nor cognizant of this ongoing theft and b) even for the other 25%, affording them the presumption of innocence even as an observer (remember, that's a legal right of the accused, not a requirement for the general public to strain its credulity) despite seemingly clearcut evidence that there was some serious hankypanky going on in the Dothan evidence room.
I wonder how many of the guns that went missing belonged to people whose guns shouldn't have been taken in the first place.
Not to seem too strident, I could see this situation much differently if the evidence room's "fun" contents were converted to the benefit of the police force (nominally the good guys, and I'll join in with Pilgrim's magnaminity -- hey, that might even be a real word! -- by assuming that that's the case here, that Dothan's finest really are something close to Dothan's finest) under some better-designed system. For instance, a policy that firearms in the evidence room which have been carefully photographed, chronographed, forensically fingerprinted, etc, to the extent that could reasonably be expected to prove useful in court, *and* have been there for more than 24 months (or some other reasonable figure), *and* are in calibers in common use in the department, could be scrupulously checked out as backup weapons to active duty or retired officers of the department.
I'm certainly anything but a police officer; perhaps that idea is so wrong it's not even worth rebutting, but heck, from here is seems sort of reasonable. That is, the problem here (as I see it) is not that guns were taken from an evidence room, but that this happened willy nilly, with no respect for the rightful owners, for evidentiary value, or for the orderly and efficient administration of justice. Ahem.
timothy
