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Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

My son's a cop. He said what I was thinking. There is far more going on here than what the story states and the reporter is not asking the right questions or the agents can't say. In either case, the girl got caught up in something bigger than the writer says by mistake.

Nothing to see here. Move on.

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Unless you're suggesting that the girl actually was up to something nefarious, there absolutely is something to see here. Police should not be drawing weapons for anything other than an imminate danger to human life.

Watching the police in action is the one negative experience that I have had in the US. You guys really need to calm your (oversized) police force down - they're thugs in uniform.

So maybe there was some sort of bust going down on the place she bought the water, after a suspected chain of underage sales.

You still don't pull guns on people you suspect may be carrying a case of beer, then lock them up and file felony charges when it turns out they haven't done anything more than get scared by your paramilitary tactics and try to escape from unknown, out of uniform assailants.

Sure. I'll buy that - and in that case, when the cops saw that she was not part of the bigger something, then the professional thing to do would have been to apologize for the inconvenience, explain what had happened, and send her on her way.

Instead, they applied maximum governmental force in order to show her her true place in society - to bow to armed thugs.

I hope your son has better training. But there is most definitely something to be seen here, and moving on is not the appropriate response of a civil society.

"[S]omething bigger..." eh? That's conveniently non-specific.

All I can do is echo the other comments, that regardless of whether or not something "bigger" is going on, the response is absolutely disproportionate, and also remind you that Virginia does have actual police to handle "bigger" problems than busting underage alcohol possession.

icantthinkofone: You have just committed a federal felony by using a fake name on the internet. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030)

When the FBI kicks down your door, shoots your dog, smashes every bit of technology that you own, takes all your hard drives and removable media to search for more evidence (It is way hard to distinguish that picture your mom sent you of you flopping in the pool naked to porn.), please understand that them doing this is not a mistake and there would be nothing to see here, so do not post. Move on and accept a life in prison.

That's just bs. If the cops could say anything in their defense there would have been an "anonymous source without permission to speak to the media" who would have delivered the excuse.

You know this how? You're son isn't more familiar with this case than we are is he? The fact that the charges are dropped is somewhat telling.

I don't think so. They work for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. This is about as exciting as their job gets.

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