Welcome.

Good afternoon and thanks for stopping by.  My nom de cyber for this blog until I'm either outed or retire will be Detective Darkness.  I admit that it is a tad melodramatic and stupid, but it's what I came up with after staring at the Blogger login page for 15 minutes. 

I'm going with an alias (for now) in an admittedly half- assed attempt to keep my identity private for a little while.  My professional obligations (i.e., my department's General Orders) make it so that if I want to be candid about some subjects, I need a little bit of plausible deniability if (when) Internal Affairs comes looking.

I'm not especially worried about it.  It's not my intention to use this blog as a forum to spout crazy racist things or wild conspiracy theories that I wouldn't say in public.  For one thing, I don't believe any crazy racist things or hold to any wild conspiracy theories.  I'm not going to be using it to publish pornography or other lewd material.  I'm not going to divulge facts about open cases or publish crime scene photos or anything like that.  There shouldn't be any "real" reason for anyone at my department to come after me.

Except...

Except that what I will be doing is giving my unvarnished opinion about things involving the criminal justice system, the internal workings of police departments, the internal workings of the court system.  Such opinions may not be appreciated by the powers that be in my agency.  Hence the need to remain anonymous, at least for as long as I can. 

At the end of the day, I'm not going to sweat it too much.  I have enough time in that I can retire from my department tomorrow if I needed to.  I don't want to do that, mind you.  I still have a few years left in me and would like to pad my pension out a bit more.  But at the end of the day, the worst thing that can happen to me as far as my agency is concerned is that I would retire and the pension system would pay me just under $40K a year for the rest of my life.  Every 90 days that number gets a little bit bigger, which means that the salary I would want from a second career in order to maintain my current lifestyle gets a little bit smaller.  I no longer have any incentive to keep my mouth shut just to protect my livelihood. 

I don't intend to only talk about crime and policing.  I have other interests as well.  I see this as a possible place to self- publish some of my writings, be they fictional or opinion pieces.  I may do some reviews, particularly of things automotive.  We'll see where it takes us. 

I don't have any real posting schedule planned or anything like that.  I figure that if this blog turns into anything, it's going to be a slow process.  This post and the next couple I do have planned for today might be the only things on it for awhile.  Hopefully you'll eventually  find something on here to keep bringing you back. For now, thanks again for stopping by.