Stop joking around! You can’t take pictures of them! It’s not a laughing matter. I know you’ve been out of the country for awhile but trust me. Photos, video, even voice recording will get you in trouble. They don’t fuck around about it. If you upload a picture of one, they will trace it back to you. Web hosts are required to give them your information now, or the site goes down and they end up in jail. Nobody is gonna risk it to cover your ass. They will find you and you will be sorry.

You’re not even supposed to look at them directly anymore. I made that mistake once. I didn’t wanna give him my wallet. I had three broken ribs and a cracked tooth when they got tired of me. They took my wallet, and almost took my car too, but fortunately my car looks like shit. Not even worth taking.

They said it would restore public trust. That, this way, a few bad apples wouldn’t make us distrust all of them. Small embarrassments would no longer tarnish their ‘good name’. They said if we could record them, they would be endangered. That they would be targeted. They would be endangered. That’s almost funny now.

Sharing any info about them, even just that you saw one somewhere, will get you on a list and probably locked up for the night. If you mention that you were locked up for it, then you get locked up a bit longer and fined (and beaten, but that’s not official, just a bonus).

You don’t believe me? Well fine; let me tell you a story.

There was a guy named Terry, I knew him pretty well. He had a wearable mobile device, the glasses, and they had a camera in the frame. This was before those were illegal of course. He wasn’t recording, but he was wearing it when he turned a corner into an alley, just trying to get across town faster. There were three of ‘em in the alley, he never found out what they were doing there. They saw the glasses and they didn’t ask questions.

They grabbed him. They beat him. Hard. Not hard enough to put him in the hospital, but hard enough to make sure they got their message through. Then they took his glasses and said he was lucky they were ‘letting him off easy’.

Fucked up, right? Except it got worse.

This was before people knew better, so Terry decided to let people know about this. He put it all online the next day.

The day after that, we found him dead.

He had “shot himself”.

Nothing ever came of the ‘investigation.’ Despite the fact that there’s cctv all over that neighborhood and building. But guess who controls that.

Folks over fifty say it wasn’t always like this. My dad said that when he was a kid, they idolized those guys. That you were supposed to feel safe around them.

Can you imagine?