This article from the now hacked newlondontimes[dot]com website shows how disrespectful NLPD policy can be toward American veterans. It was preserved live by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine here:
A Best Friend
Anton Lavalais put his life at risk when he accepted what he was told. He believed to the fullest extent a person can, that he should be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice and do other things to protect more than just the values we share, a lot more. He would get on a plane and protect our freedom and our safety. That word again. And I didn’t say much the night he packed. I didn’t try to stop him. I hardly recognized the person who returned a year later. I was cautious with my words. I didn’t ask. And he caught me off guard one day when I realized he was talking about his time in Iraq. I’ll write what he told me because it was brief and it surfaces at times in this City.
A Cleanup
Anton had cleanup duty after an incoming shell, some artillery piece had just hit inside and he told me, with no loss of composure that his best Marine friend’s brains looked like ramen noodles with that red cinnamon dental floss, “You know?” he asked.
He was still there, always there. I don’t remember what I said. He wanted me to know. And knowing like any friend would, that whatever happened to him had killed him in a way that left him hurting and longing to finish it, I sensed something else. This was his way of saying goodbye. And that was correct.
And it requires me to speak correctly and with honesty to our elected officials. Keep our voices and questions banned from our community’s police page, keep the catch all hacker feature active on our City email server, so that no message bounces back, keep residents in the dark.
A Death Grip
For the moment we accept this. Keep hurting resident after resident after resident by posting the accused to social media, keep the power to abuse women with sleep deprivation, keep forcing women to spend sleepless nights on flat steel for beds, just to prep them for your twisted mug shots, keep posting those on Facebook. Keep making up the charges to get other things you want, find a young black doctor from the Bahamas, murder him, get his lifeless body in a death grip, like the one you use on this City, and play tug-o-war while holding that body at one end to overpower a grief stricken mother who pulls back at a her sons’ legs, trying to loosen your death grip, Mr. Chief. Do not stop, for you are unstoppable. Keep pulling on the corpse, officers, I’ve read the story – she’s trying and trying to bury the body of her dead son in an unauthorized manner – before you’ve finished scrubbing down the corpse for evidence. Imagine.
And please officers, scream as loud as adult men do at this mother who pulls the corpse from you, command that she stop resisting and Taser any mother to teach all mothers who should disobey you. Teach those mothers what they get after taking everything from them. Continue to torture a City, talk about safety and release another FB PSA about bullies before your next warrantless home entry. Keep, cleansing the city page of unauthorized questions, of ideas unlike your own, which is to say: keep up the stream of urine you deliver as a public service because you have many many graves of our troops to cover, before getting to the memories of the founders
A Rule
And to your observed behavior, Mr. Chief, the one that looks American law in the face and yells “make me!” and spits: I offer you two things in the way you honor our troops. The name of my best friend, Anton Lavalais, US Marine. And a bowl of ramen noodles to carry to an unmarked grave of liars in the end. And should you ever be near me, remember that you may never speak his name in a place where I can hear you. Because an American atheist warns, God have mercy on your soul should you ever forget that rule.
This is why NLPD can’t force vets to sleep on hard steal. They’d get better treatment in Feluja, Iraq as prisoners of war under State law and under the International Geneva Conventions. NLPD needs to adopt the use of detainee mattresses to avoid further class actions by US combat vets and others. The City of New London, CT already pays out far too much in civil settlements in place of meaningful policing practice reforms.
Agree.