Cops Who Ate Pot Burger Unhappy with Cooks' Sentences

By Charlotte Innes, AlterNet. Posted February 13, 2008.

Sly attempts at fun in this country are a serious matter often resolved with mace and tasers. Some Burger King cooks served burgers spiked with pot to two cops in Albuquerque, NM. The cops got high, the cooks got caught -- and now the officers are mad that the perps received only probationary sentences:

Henry Gabaldón and a fellow Isleta pueblo officer ate those burgers while on duty. Both got high and could have hurt themselves or someone else that night, he said. Gabaldón called the crime a personal attack that had no consequences for the attackers. "The message was it's OK to hurt an officer," Gabaldón said. At first Gabaldón was very matter of fact about what happened on that October night in 2006. He [exaplined] how he and a fellow officer went to the Los Lunas Burger King and got Whoppers that had secretly been filled with pot."There was a lot of marijuana on the hamburgers," he said. But it quickly became apparent how personal this is to Gabaldón. "In the end we have to go home, too," he said. "We have families, and that is what it was, to all police officers, just a slap in the face."

The mindset that produces statements like "we have to go home, too .... We have families" is an extreme and amateur example of the victim culture that cops typically deride. But calling the event a "slap in the face" to "all police officers" is a level of self-pity that even Tyra Banks could laugh at.

              

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