tunaFish

Glad to hear she is recovering, thoughts and prayers. I've worked and been a patient at WMC, so if you have a question about something like food in the area that's not Au Bon Pain let me know.

Ive read this post many times and I still fail to see the reason for posting it but it most certainly requires a response.
From what I know of you, you have no background in Law Enforcement so your ideas of how cops should feel about being cops and what they should do on duty may be how it is in a perfect world but in reality thats not how it works. This would be like me who knows nothing of fire fighting making critical observations about the fire service and putting all over the post " No offense guys" and " this is not a knock to firefighters".
As far as I've seen, you're the only member on here from texas so you are the only one who could answer your own question of " why are police officers down here so different ?"
I've been a cop for 12 years and I go balls to the wall every day I go into work as do most cops I know. Would it be nice to follow up with every crime victim we deal with ? Yes but we don't have the time or the manpower to do that stuff. How do you know that cops up here don't know their post as well as cops in Texas ?
Cops are in a unique situation to be cross trained in rescue, where as FD's can't be trained in law enforcement specific things... thats just the way it is.
You ask why is there competition ? There always has and always will be competiton in the emergency services and it's healthy to a degree.
You ask why are there not more hudson river patrols ? There are in the summer but not so much in the winter but what does one thing have to do with the other ?
The bottom line is that expanding the scope of your working capabilities means more job security and possibly more state and federal funding.
The biggest difference between cops up here and cops in texas is that maybe cops in texas enjoy a lot more community support than cops in the north east get.

You people are the best!
I followed the news both on here and the t.v. about the fires in W.P.
Sorry to hear that so many required medical attention, but glad there were no serious injuries.
Keep up the good work!
Tuna

Because you have not seen it before, does not mean you should not know about it, you say? C'mon, we are not walking books of knowledge.
Common place event? Calling people's customs "weird?" Ignorance? Semantics? Read the comments on here and see how many have actually seen someone wearing one of these. Not very common.
I think we drove this in the ground already, next... Rain tomorrow?