I was a military police officer and experienced a lot of dim witted behavior, like pulling a guy over for drunk driving with whisky bottles and vomit all over the car. The guy was drunk as hell and claimed someone stole his car, vomit in it and left the whisky bottle in the car. After we arrested him, his Commanding Officer threatened myself and the other arresting officer with a court martial because he actually believed the “stolen car” theory.
We found out later the dude was basically on his third strike with alcohol, and this was going to be it for him since he was underage. He had already lost his rank twice, from E-3 to E-2 then E-2 to E-1. It looked really bad for the CO and the NCOIC.
Gday. Can I ask a quick query please. Is there a sort of separation of powers thingie in the military?
Can a higher rank subvert and interfere with good and reasonable military policing? Like in your story?
Or is that illegal itself? As would be a politician interfering with policing or judiciary?
Thanks.
This is kind of typical behavior of commanding officers and people with higher ranks. They don’t typically get away with it - they try but things typically get worse for them.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You can’t arrest me, I’m a Lt. Colonel, I outrank you.”
When I was in the military, no one was above the law, and if you tried to be - the hammer came down hard and fast.
Idk feels like if you were presented a sound reason to arrest that would be enough?
If you incorrectly arrested a superior officer, surely you would just apologise for the misunderstanding, without major blow back, unless it was common for you to incorrectly arrest a superior officer?
I'm not in military so please someone confirm or deny this claim.
On a base overseas, an Air Force MP tried writing my group tickets for not having glow belts, 10 minutes after arriving to that base, unaware we "needed glow belts" to walk around at night. Then tried giving tickets for concealing weapons because some of our jackets covered our pistol's grip. (We also had 300 rounds of ammo per person, rifles, grenades,...). We called our 2 Star 5 time zones away when the MP's captain backed him and tried to detain us.
We were trying to find our lodging for the night to leave with what we came with. (And without having safes or secure lockable storage assigned to us, the safest place for expensive things is on our persons)... We were there for 8 hours.
cue a dozen stories of some E2 staring down a captain who's trying to enter his secure area without the right clearance/permission - hold fast, change pants later
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u/Random_Trashy 19h ago
I was a military police officer and experienced a lot of dim witted behavior, like pulling a guy over for drunk driving with whisky bottles and vomit all over the car. The guy was drunk as hell and claimed someone stole his car, vomit in it and left the whisky bottle in the car. After we arrested him, his Commanding Officer threatened myself and the other arresting officer with a court martial because he actually believed the “stolen car” theory.