The FBI took my salvage

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A friend of mine found the body of a young woman who had been murdered ... and was treated like she was the perpetrator ... said she would never report anything again ... hope you do not suffer the same consequences ...
 
At the rate your going the FBI could hire you and pay you to dive... mysteries of the area would be solved all because you happen to have this strange draw towards forensic evidence....... ;)
 
naturalsummer once bubbled...
A friend of mine found the body of a young woman who had been murdered ... and was treated like she was the perpetrator ... said she would never report anything again ... hope you do not suffer the same consequences ...

Most folks don't understand that law enforcement is just doing their job. I hope your friend reconsiders.
 
Rick Inman once bubbled...
You just never know what you’ll find in the water. People think they can just toss it in and it’s gone forever.

Yeah out of sight, out of mind right?

We do a clean up dive every year in a local river and diving around the bridges usually produces everything but the kitchen sink .... wait a minute, i think we founds one of those once too!:)
 
Wendy, I agree with what I think you are trying to say, but the way you are saying it is kind of a..."cop"out. Being in law enforcement and doing your job has nothing to do with having poor judgement or being insensitive just because you can.

In the department where I worked in the early 80's 90% of the complaints and situations like natural summer describes came from just two officers and the department would have been far better off without them.

There is a time and a place for hard charging law enforcement but a good officer knows when to park it and just serve the public and maintain order rather than blindly enforce the law.

In my experience some officers get too focused on making that big felony arrest and lose sight of the fact that WHO they arrest is more important. That approach, and in general the failure to use appropritate amounts of discretion, never fails to alienate the community and when that ahppens every one loses.
 
I would never have gone to the FBI.
With this Patriot Act (as well as the Patriot Act 2 being splintered and carefully imbedded into other laws) means they could have taken you away right there, no questions asked, no court, no phone call - NOTHING.
 
Rick Inman once bubbled...
What is it with me? A couple of months ago I found a 40 cal. launch grenade in the lake and the Air Force bomb squad came to my house and took it away (http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35209).
Saturday I found a red metal box (about 18”X12”X16”) in 12 foot of water in a local river. Inside, in a big trash bag, were a bunch of documents, half burned, some cut up. There were passports, Visas, Washington state drivers lic., social security cards (14 different ones, to be exact), cut up credit cards and more. There were computer disks burned and broken into pieces. The passports were issued in South Africa and it looked like the people entered the US through Canada. The names on the passports were not pronounceable by me. By the condition of the stuff I would guess it had not been in the river more than 24 hours. After a couple of calls, I was directed to the FBI. I went down to the local office with the red metal case, and of course, they took it away. They seemed VERY interested. They wanted to know exactly where I found it and exactly when. They wanted to know what I'd touched. They wanted all MY info including my social security number.
Probably nothing, but weird, huh? You just never know what you’ll find in the water. People think they can just toss it in and it’s gone forever.

See ya Rick. It's been a pleasure. How old will you be in 50 years? :)

R..
 
"they could have taken you away right there, no questions asked, no court, no phone call - NOTHING."

Sounds like a return to the dictatorship of the 1860's.
 
Wendy once bubbled...


Most folks don't understand that law enforcement is just doing their job. I hope your friend reconsiders.

There's doing your work and there's doing your work. A buddy of mine once found a pistol under a warf. He called it in and the police came, took the gun, wrote down his story word for word and said thanked him for his assistance. I'm sure behind the scenes they were checking to see if it was *his* gun but they didn't treat him like a criminal when they questioned him.

I've also heard other stories. Another friend of mine got some counterfeit money out of a bank machine of a major bank. He tried to pay with one of the bills somewhere and it showed up as fake under the ultraviolet light. The store called the police and my friend explained that he just got the bills from a bank machine around the corner. They didn't believe him and they locked him up for like a day or something. The bank insisted that their checks-and-controls were fool-proof and that no fake bills could possibly get into their machines and the my firend had to be lying. He was finally let go when a number of other people who he didn't know were also arrested after taking money from the same machine around the same ttime. At the time he was pretty unhappy about it but he could also understand that the police just needed to be thorough. His main trauma was getting publicly arrested and hauled away in handcuffs in a store he frequents. Now he's "that guy with the fake money" every time he goes in there. Surely there must be a way to deal more descretely with these kinds of things. Also to add injury to insult the bank refused to replace his fake bills, holding firm on the line that they didn't come from their machine. And of course suing the bank was going to be expensive and they were already setting-in on the "our word against what's-his-name's word" defense.

R..
 

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