An acquaintance of mine was recently arrested on suspicion of stealing a double bass from in front of a conservatory of music. Evidently, a bass was reported as

An acquaintance of mine was recently arrested on suspicion of stealing a double bass from in front of a conservatory of music. Evidently, a bass was reported as stolen, and a complete description of the instrument was provided to police. Surveillance footage showed him leaving the conservatory carrying a bass, and that was sufficient to obtain a search warrant for his home. Never mind that he's a bassist, and the footage showed him carrying his own instrument. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and the one on the surveillance tape must be it. Upon searching his apartment, the police found not one, but two double basses in his possession. Never mind that he had documentation to show that they both belonged to him, and never mind that neither one fit the description of the instrument that had been stolen. There can clearly be only one bass in existence, and these ... two ... basses, somehow, are ... it? I dunno, these aren't the same maker, and they don't have the same identifying marks, but hey, they have four strings! The one that's missing has four strings! Good enough, he must have just hidden the stolen bass under a rug or something. (They're easy to hide, right?) Let's just make an arrest and go home. So they arrested him, and (again, despite having conclusive proof that neither was the instrument in question) seized both basses, along with his cell phone, and held him on $100,000 bail. Astonishingly, charges were ultimately dropped for lack of evidence. This was in San Francisco -- about as un-podunk, un-middle-America, and un-Republican as you can get without showing a passport. Lazy police work is everywhere. It has nothing to do with politics or ignorance, and it doesn't really even have to do particularly with the war on drugs (although that certainly gives the police more opportunities to brandish their laziness publicly). It's a combination of pressure to show action by making arrests and an utter lack of accountability when those arrests turn out to be specious, and those two factors exist everywhere in this country.