The Jack-Booted Thug(s) of the Week...

... are the three Maryland Transit Administration "officers" who detained a man for over 40 minutes and threatened him with arrest (under some nebulous and super-secret provision of the Patriot Act that only cops apparently know about.  We are personally very familiar with that particular dead-wrong argument) for taking some pictures at the Baltimore Cultural Light Rail Station (we're assuming that the word "cultural" is in there implies there's some sort of painting or display worth photographing in the first place):



"The MTA acknowledges that additional training is in order.

'We’ll look at our training processes, we’ll look at whether any administrative situations need to occur with those officers,' [MTA Administrator Ralign] Wells said."

We figured something along the lines of "We were completely wrong, the officers involved will be appropriately sanctioned and we will immediately take the proper steps to make sure no innocent citizen engaged in legal activities will ever again be unlawfully detained" would have been too much to hope for, but that particular mealy-mouthed statement is just pathetic.

Based on Mr. Wells's response (and the fact that this is not the first time the MTA has been guilty of this practice), we sadly predict that it's going to take yet another ACLU lawsuit, with the concomitant paying out of thousands of dollars of peasant-funded money in damages, to force that agency into halting the abusive behavior of its employees.