The Only Doughnuts

Those are some expensive doughnuts.

No one begrudges a cop his or her doughnuts, but questions are being asked in Albuquerque about one recent case in which a pair of the city's finest dropped in for a box of Krispy Kremes in a police helicopter.

At the taxpayers' expense of course.

Eyewitnesses said a Kiowa OH-58 chopper owned by the Albuquerque Police Department -- which reportedly costs taxpayers about $80 an hour to fuel and fly, not including salaries and benefits for two crew members -- came swooping in out of the night sky one recent evening. It circled several times around its intended target, then alighted in a nearby lot while a passenger went in for a box of doughnuts. Mission accomplished, the chopper buzzed off, sounding the siren by way of bidding onlookers adieu.

Naturally the local PD will be cracking down on this flagrant abuse of police property- not to mention the fact that perhaps these people should have been working, not going for shopping trips. Um, well, not really.

"Between the two of them, I don't know how they decided that was a good idea," a police-department official told the newspaper. "If they violated policy or procedure, they're going to get disciplined for it. We've worked too hard to make this a professional unit to let lack of common sense tear us down."

If- is he seriously trying to say that there's some doubt that using a police chopper to go buy doughnuts isn't a violation? Expect the anonymous cops to receive the usual "only ones" treatment- a slap on the wrist, if at all.