Yeah, it definitely can. I've lived in Europe all my life, and traveled over Europe since I was kid, and I've seen mainland European police openly abusing peopl

Yeah, it definitely can. I've lived in Europe all my life, and traveled over Europe since I was kid, and I've seen mainland European police openly abusing people on the street. I've seen cops randomly firing their firearms in the air as 'crowd control' (the crowd in question was three old women trying to get on a boat, this was in Greece), policing openly punching someone in the face for some remark they didn't like (again, Greece), police demanding a person's passport papers at a port and refusing to return them until UK police got involved (France), and so on. The only countries where I've never seen any open abuse by police so far have been Britain and Germany, and I haven't spent a lot of time in Germany. EDIT: Actually, there has recently been a famous case in Britain where a police officer shoved a citizen to the floor and the citizen died of internal injuries [0]. I didn't actually witness the abuse, but it proves that even the UK isn't immune. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson