It's hard for me to comprehend that there are police officers that are like this. My father and the men and women that worked for him and with him are all excellent, I would trust any of them with my life and my children's lives.

I have a dear friend who lives out west, who has serious medical problems (Lupus, fibro, and several others I cannot remember right now) and is almost deaf. She is nearly 60 years old, and one of the kindest most generous people that you'd ever meet in your life.

Her son has a hobby of riding in the rodeo. They set up their trailer (oddly also in OK), son competed that day and went with some others to an antique gun show when they were finished. He bought an antique revolver, LEGALLY. He took the gun out to show his mother. He was telling her about other things that he saw that day using a lot of gestures because of her hearing problem.

They were sitting at the table in their camper with the main door open having only the screen door closed. They began talking about something else, the gun was still sitting on her son's lap. They decided to get ready to cook dinner and he was going to put the gun back in the lock box. What they had not realized was that because the son was talking loudly and gesturing (again because of her hearing problem) they attracted the attention of the rent-a-cops (off duty state troopers or whatever they call them there).

Once the son reached for the gun, security demanded they put the gun on the floor and leave the camper with their hands up. She still had no idea what was going on because she couldn't hear, she saw her son going out of the camper with his hands up and she was following him clueless. They threw her to the ground, her son kept trying to explain that she couldn't hear them, she wasn't resisting, she just didn't know what was going on, which resulted in some pretty severe treatment of her son. She of course reacted to that. She told me later she had no idea what the heck was going on, these men were not in any type of uniform, one had a T-shirt that said security on the back, but she didn't see it at that time. All she saw was many men with their guns pointed at her son.

It's quite a long, frustrating story. Including the fact that they found excederine tablets and thought they were "E" because of the "E" on them. They charged her with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and (believe it or not) with possession of drugs with intent to distribute. The last charge was of course dropped once testing was done on the tablets. She was forced to sit in jail for several days until her husband was able to get there from Utah to bail them out.

Here's the frustrating part, they did NOTHING illegal to warrant the arrest to begin with. The police made an assumption based upon loud voices and hand gestures. Even when her medical records were faxed to the police (because they thought she was faking) they never admitted any wrong doing. Had they merely appologized and dropped the case she would have forgiven them immediately. Since they decided to continue on with the resisting and disorderly, she filed suit against the police department and won.