League Of Outlaw Bloggers: police

Showing posts with label police. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Words Fail Me Dept.

For how many years, how many decades, have we and our minor children been harangued that “the police are your friends” -- ?

     It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib.
     Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed.
     The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.
     Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.
     In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.
     This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.

This sort of self-exculpating fantasy on the part of a gaggle of uniformed, armed civil servants whose nominal charter is to protect the rest of us from predation is the direct and immediate consequence of two things:

The War on Drugs;
The militarization of the police and the police mentality.

...and we let them get away with it.

The outrages have been multiplying faster than I can report on them. Particularly egregious are the many instances of outright theft by law enforcers, under the guise of “civil asset forfeiture.” Here’s a recent case:

     It happened, [Joseph] Rivers said, to him on April 15 as he was traveling on Amtrak from Dearborn, Mich., near his hometown of Romulus, Mich., to Los Angeles to fulfill his dream of making a music video. Rivers, in an email, said he had saved his money for years, and his mother and other relatives scraped together the rest of the $16,000.
     Rivers said he carried his savings in cash because he has had problems in the past with taking out large sums of money from out-of-state banks.
     A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.
     Rivers was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents – and the only black person on his portion of the train, Pancer said.
     In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope.
     “I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story,” Rivers said. “Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity.”
     Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.
     “These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me,” Rivers said in his email. “I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that.”

Apparently, there are municipalities that make a practice of this sort of seizure, using threats of jail and the separation of families to coerce their targets into complying. Combine that sort of “policing” with local police departments’ steady acquisition of military-grade weaponry and the scheduling of exercises such as “Jade Helm,” and perfectly law-abiding, patriotic Americans can’t help but wonder about the real motivations of our “protectors.”

Given Supreme Court decisions that ruled that the police have “no duty to protect,” and others that have denied the law-abiding citizen the right to resist unlawful police orders and intrusions, I no longer wonder. Indeed, I ceased to wonder quite a while ago.

The edifice is rotten to the core. It has pitted us against one another, especially those of us who work for government versus those who don’t, in a multitude of ways. It cannot be saved.

However, it cannot be replaced until it has first been demolished. How that is to be achieved, given the overwhelming preponderance of force in the hands of the State, I cannot say. More, and more ominous, there is no guarantee that the replacement would improve on its predecessor. Moralities and mentalities have changed too greatly since our Founding Era for any prediction to be sanguine –and that’s to say nothing of the hostile and alien sub-populations America has acquired these past few decades.

Of one thing we may be sure: a man acting “under color of law,” whether he wears a uniform, bears a weapon, both, or neither, is not there to serve you. Don’t talk to him. Don’t allow him into your home or onto your property. Don’t permit any member of your family to do differently. Whatever he might do to you, he must do under visibly coercive conditions, such that the outrage will be plain to every eye. Perhaps a sufficient amount of public furor will protect you, at least a posteriori.

When you see or hear “protect and serve,” think of the “Internal Revenue Service.” Act accordingly.

Monday, April 27, 2015

A Quiet Riot

(Say, wasn’t there a band named Quiet Riot?)

From the national news media, you might not think matters in Baltimore were much different from their usual. From the national news media, you might infer that the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody is generally regarded as an explainable, if tragic occurrence – i.e., no big deal. From the national news media, you might assume that the political authorities and law enforcement agencies of Baltimore had the situation well in hand.

You might. You’d be wrong.

I expected there to be at least some unrest, and many strident calls for an independent inquiry, into why a young man who was healthy (apart from asthma) when the Baltimore police detained him should have died with his spine 80% severed. After all, he was black, and these days that’s considered cause enough to disrupt an American city.

The reports I’ve read say that Freddie Gray was transported to detention in a police van, shackled but not seat-belted or otherwise secured. This appears to be the cause of the fatal spinal cord injury that took Gray’s life. But for the life of me, I can’t find the reason for which he was originally arrested. Apparently, the Baltimore police were out in force in a part of the city known for drug traffic, but I can’t find any information beyond that.

No one in authority in Baltimore has yet said whether Gray was about to be charged with any crime. This might have been an arrest-on-suspicion. Suspicion of what is not definite, though the region’s reputation for drug activity seems most likely.

One way or another, the police arrested a man for reasons they haven’t disclosed, and that man died in their hands. There’s a good chance that this was a fatal miscarriage of justice.

But there’s no chance whatsoever that whatever happened can justify widespread violence and the destruction and looting of private property. Yet that’s what’s happening – and with the open connivance of the political authorities.

Hearken to Sara Noble:

Former DC detective Rod Wheeler joined Fox & Friends this morning to explain what went on. Mr. Wheeler is a great guy but his promotion of the new policing techniques needs to be challenged.
The police deliberately allowed the protesters to do this, Mr. Wheeler observed. They stayed out of the picture. There were no military-type uniforms. There were no armored cars, he said.
Some officers didn’t wear helmets, he reported as if it was a positive step.
That seems to be putting the police in grave danger.
After they destroyed some cars and committed crimes, the police started moving in.
It’s similar to what went on in Ferguson when the mayor allowed 28 stores to burn down to keep the criminals calm.
Mr. Wheeler said the new tactics generated a different response from the crowd. It’s what they learned from Ferguson.
The crowd gets more aggressive if the police do, so now the police confine them to an area but when “they really start becoming destructive, we start moving in.”
“For the most part,” Wheeler said, “it wasn’t that bad.”

I wonder if the persons injured in the riots and the proprietors of the stores that were looted and destroyed feel “it wasn’t that bad.”

It’s beyond dispute that when a sufficient number of persons concurrently become inclined to violence and disorder, there will not be enough police to restrain them. Even an overtly totalitarian society can’t afford that much enforcement power. So under contemporary conditions, in which heavily propagandized American Negroes are easily provoked to mass violence, the police are effectively neutralized. An effective organized response would be on the order of a military invasion, which Americans are unwilling to tolerate.

The only effective diffuse response would be for law-abiding citizens to go to their guns. But Baltimore is in Maryland, and Maryland is among the states most hostile to the private ownership of firearms. Atop that, should a store owner kill a rioter, upon whom do you think the authorities of the city would descend with the full weight of the “law?” To assist you in arriving at your answer, here’s a picture of the current Mayor of Baltimore:

And here is what she said to the press about the tactics the police were instructed to adopt:

"I made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech.
"It's a very delicate balancing act. Because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."

That came from the mayor of a major American city – a city that, among other things, is the birthplace of Catholicism in the United States. It’s perfectly clear what she’d think of a private citizen who would dare to defend his property with force. A white store owner shot a black looter who was merely exercising his “right to free speech” by trashing the white man’s place of business? Unthinkable!

But I don’t write merely to note a horrific development and express my disapproval. I’ve made it my mission to forecast what will come of it.

I predict an outward migration of whites, especially white small-business owners, from the city of Baltimore. I predict that the cost of living in Baltimore will rise as insurers add “risk premiums” to their commercial coverage policies and the remaining businesses pass those cost increments down to their customers. I predict that as blacks in other cities “learn” from Baltimore’s example of laid-back riot “control,” the events there will be reproduced elsewhere, with similar demographic and economic consequences. I predict that racialist mouthpieces, starting with Al Sharpton, will blame the further deterioration in majority-black urban neighborhoods on “white greed.” And I predict that the national media, to the extent that they deign to cover those phenomena at all, will rationalize the violence as “to be expected” and deplore the flight of whites to safer, less racially mixed regions as “racist.”

Who would like to bet against me?

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Creeping Totalitarianism Report

This disturbing article from David French demonstrates factual reporting as it was once practiced:

“They came with a battering ram.”
Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking.

She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.

She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door.

“I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.

“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”

She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.

“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.

The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”

Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

Disturbing? Indeed, terrifying. But why?

Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.

That’s why.

To the best of my knowledge, the Gestapo-like raids above, all of which targeted conservative activists in Wisconsin, have not been reported by any major media organ. There’s been no mention of them in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Philadelphia Enquirer. Why?

I’m afraid you already know why.

The raids above were conceived by Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm, a highly partisan Democrat whose wife is a shop steward in a Wisconsin teachers’ union. They were judicially approved by Judge Barbara Kluka, another Democrat. And of course, they were carried out by unionized Wisconsin police.

The motivation could not be clearer. Democrats only believe in free speech for Democrats. They’re particularly disturbed by the ascendancy of conservative Republican governor Scott Walker. That Walker has rationalized the state’s budget, turning a habitual deficit into an annual surplus, and his actions to reduce the bargaining privileges of Wisconsin’s municipal and state unions, have enraged Wisconsin Democrats beyond all description.

God help the conservative who dares to challenge the power of Wisconsin unions.

Will district attorney Chisholm face any legal penalties for his utterly unfounded “John Doe” investigations and the terrorization of Wisconsin conservatives by use of police power? Will Judge Kluka face any penalties for facilitating those SWAT-style raids? What about the happily cooperative Wisconsin police? For that matter, now that National Review has publicized the affair, will the Main Stream Media take an interest in this blatant use of political power to suppress the free speech and organizing rights of Americans?

Don’t bet the rent money on it.

I’ve written before about the evils attendant to prosecutorial discretion and sovereign immunity.

The combination of grand jury biddability and prosecutorial discretion has given rise to an assembly-line character in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors tend to be as ambitious for advancement as anyone else in "public service," and in their case the road to higher positions is paved with copious convictions, whether or not those convicted deserve their fates. Inasmuch as the luxuriance of criminal law has created a state of affairs in which every one of us, whether wittingly or not, is "guilty" of something, an aggressive prosecutor can "rack 'em up" by pursuing a simple strategy:

Look around for "suspicious" behavior -- i.e., behavior on the part of a private citizen that can be made to appear suspicious;
Ruthlessly probe every element of the "suspect's" life, using the effectively infinite resources of the State, until enough "suspicious" behavior has been amassed;
Assemble a huge list of charges to place before a grand jury;
Present the case in such a fashion as to promote the more plausible accusations and obscure the less plausible ones, thus securing a grab-bag indictment;
Offer the indicted person a plea bargain that will spare him centuries in prison and complete pauperization at the bargain price of a few years and/or a few thousand dollars.

There is no brake to this strategy. Excessive law plus complete prosecutorial discretion plus a competent prosecutor's ability to lead a grand jury by the nose combine to put even a simon-pure citizen at the mercy of the criminal justice system. And what a system it is! Had it been consciously designed to put the maximum number of persons in prison regardless of guilt or innocence, it could not have been done better.

Those evils are on vivid display in David French’s article. Yet it would be foolish to expect any correction to them. The State never willingly surrenders power. It only takes; it does not give. And when persons whose ideology tells them that:

Their politics makes them morally superior to those who disagree; and:
The ends justify the means; and:
They will face no penalties for whatever they do;

...have the opportunity to wield State power for their political benefit, no Earthly force is sufficient to restrain them.

I’ve ranted about this more than once:

Prosecutorial discretion, when coupled to sovereign immunity -- doctrines absolutely anathema to the Anglo-American legal tradition -- make it possible for statists to conceal evil motives behind a cloak of righteousness. No one can come out against "law enforcement" without exposing himself to pillory as an "anarchist." Worse, when the evil motives are revealed and the pressure is removed from the statists' targets, no remedy is applied and no restitution is offered to the victims.
A long time ago, in commenting on a similar case that occurred in Florida, the legendary Russell Baker wrote that "When the government says it is going to get you, it is going to get you." It appears that nothing has changed since then, except for the identities and political orientations of the prosecutors and their targets.

Need I say more?

A number of the bloggers who entered the fray around the time I did have gone silent or near to it. Consider Mike Hendrix and Emperor Misha, two old favorites of the DextroSphere. Several others have gotten by mostly on reposts.

I miss their regular emissions, but I can understand the trend. We’re tired. We’re getting old. And we’ve been repeating ourselves rather a lot.

That’s what happens when outrage follows outrage with neither redress nor remorse. We’re still angry, but we’re beginning to feel that there’s little point to continuing on. And we dislike to think we’re huddled in an otherwise empty room, with no one listening to us but one another.

The American people appear to have been enervated to the point of surrender. The Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayevsky’s screenplay for Network captured my sense of it perfectly:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad — worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'

Is it really this way? Are we unwilling to rear up on our hind legs and roar defiance into our oppressors’ faces?

Do you want your freedom back? Do you want to feel reasonably safe from “your” government? Voting every two or four years ain’t gonna do it, people. It will take actual resistance to the tyrants by persons brave enough to do so – and staunch support of those brave ones, political, legal, financial, and moral, by the rest of us.

I know, I know: Who bells the cat? It’s the old question, the one we use to paralyze ourselves. It’s more effective than ever. The State in our time can target individuals with frightening accuracy, and can bring overwhelming power to bear against them, as David French has told us. The Redcoats didn’t even have rifled barrels on their muskets.

Is there a Patrick Henry in the house?

Never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m just an old man who claims to remember what it was like to be free. We didn’t even have color TVs back then, so how good could it have been, really?

All rise for Flag salute. Here are your internal passport, your work permit, and your ration card. Now sit down and pay attention to the political officer. He’s here to serve!

Thursday, March 26, 2015

The Cowing

“The State is based on threat.” – Robert Anton Wilson

“I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State.” – Henry David Thoreau

Every government demands immediate, unresisting obedience from every one of its subjects at every instant of every day. No, not every government gets such total submission, and not all of them expect it at all times, but they all demand it...and they have their ways of working toward it.

In the majority of cases, the key element of the government’s strategy is fear:

Fear of the government’s agents;
Fear of the opinions of other subjects;
Fear of those from whom the government claims to “protect” us.

All three of those varieties of fear are being deployed here in the Land of the Formerly Free.

Concerning fear of the agents of the State, John Whitehead provides an example from the words of a generally decent man:

Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to put your hands in the air, you put your hands in the air. If a police officer tells you to lay down face first with your hands behind your back, you lay down face first with your hands behind your back. It’s as simple as that. Even if you think the police officer is wrong—YOU OBEY. [Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham]

Needless to say, the government is happy to have Reverend Graham’s assistance in cowing the public. Here’s a little self-exculpation for police wrongdoing from a Los Angeles cop:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?
...While most citizens are courteous and law abiding, the subset of people we generally interact with everyday are not the genteel types. You don’t know what is in my mind when I stop you. Did I just get a radio call of a shooting moments ago? Am I looking for a murderer or an armed fugitive? For you, this might be a “simple” traffic stop, for me each traffic stop is a potentially dangerous encounter. Show some empathy for an officer’s safety concerns. Don’t make our job more difficult than it already is.

Interpret that however you will.

Prosecutors’ offices are masters of the fine art of untraceable slander: spreading accusations about a targeted citizen that causes his neighbors and friends to view him unfavorably. Thus the second technique for cowing us comes into play: The willingness to believe an accusation from an “official” source.

Consider the number of recent cases of false accusations of rape. Rape is a particularly horrible crime; back when we were more civilized, it was punishable by death. Surely it’s an accusation no one should take – or make – lightly.

That doesn’t mean such an accusation, once made, should be immediately and uncritically believed:

In March 2006, Crystal Gail Mangum, an African-American student at North Carolina Central University[1][2] who worked as a stripper,[3] dancer and escort, falsely accused three white students, members of the Duke Blue Devils men's lacrosse team, of raping her at a party held at the house of two of the team's captains in Durham, North Carolina, on March 13, 2006. Many people involved in, or commenting on the case, including prosecutor Michael "Mike" Nifong, either called the alleged assault a hate crime or suggested it might be one.[4][5][6][7]
In response to the allegations Duke University suspended the lacrosse team for two games on March 28, 2006. On April 5, 2006, Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler was forced to resign under threat by athletic director Joe Alleva and Duke President Richard Brodhead canceled the remainder of the 2006 season. On April 11, 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players innocent. Cooper stated that the charged players – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans – were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse."[8] The initial prosecutor, Durham County, North Carolina District Attorney Michael Nifong, labeled a "rogue prosecutor" by Cooper, withdrew from the case in January 2007 after the North Carolina state Bar filed ethics charges against him. In June 2007, Nifong was disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation", making him the first prosecutor in North Carolina disbarred for trial conduct. Nifong served one day in jail for lying about sharing DNA tests (criminal contempt); the lab director said it was a misunderstanding and Nifong claimed it was due to weak memory.[9] Mangum faced no charges for her false accusations as Cooper declined to prosecute her.[10]
Cooper pointed to several inconsistencies in Mangum's accounts of the evening and Seligmann and Finnerty's alibi evidence, in the findings report's summary. The Durham Police Department came under fire for violating their own policies by allowing Nifong to act as the de facto head of the investigation; giving a suspect-only photo identification procedure to Mangum; pursuing the case despite vast discrepancies in notes taken by Investigator Benjamin Himan and Sgt. Mark Gottlieb; and distributing a poster presuming the guilt of the suspects shortly after the allegations.[11] The ex-players are seeking unspecified damages and new criminal justice reform laws in a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the City of Durham.[11] The case sparked varied responses from the media, faculty groups, students, the community, and others.

Nor are prosecutors the only ones who exploit the power of a charge of rape:

Tawana Glenda Brawley (born 1972) is an African-American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York, who gained notoriety in 1987–88 for falsely accusing six white men of having raped her. The charges received widespread national attention because of her age (15), the persons accused (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney), and the shocking state in which Brawley was found after the alleged rape (in a trash bag, with racial slurs written on her body and covered in feces). Brawley's accusations were given widespread media attention in part from the involvement of her advisers, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason.[1]
After hearing evidence, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she herself may have created the appearance of such an attack.[2] The New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as one of her alleged assailants successfully sued Brawley and her three advisers for defamation.[3]

That case made the odious Al Sharpton a national celebrity of the order (and variety) of Jesse Jackson.

If we can be induced to fear others, particularly those nearest to us, the more credulous among us will be more likely to look to the government for “protection.” The government is quite amenable to such developments. In fact, it strives to help them along:

Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression "mass shooting" incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.
The bureau's annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.
“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of "More Guns, Less Crime." “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”

About half of the population of the United States owns one or more firearms. The government is laboring mightily to make the other half suspicious of us. Fraudulent statistics that can be blared out by anti-gun-rights media organs make a major contribution to the government’s efforts. One need only look at the hysteria the state of Connecticut engendered after the Newtown massacre, or the comparable aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, to grasp the utility to the government of having our neighbors fear us.

One final thought before I close for today. The government’s efforts at cowing us have intensified greatly in the last few years. The reason might seem counter-intuitive: it’s a response to the upsurge in political activism by Americans unhappy with the direction the country has taken and determined to reverse its course. The government and its hangers-on could have adopted an attitude of conciliation, which will strike many a Gentle Reader as the more sensible approach. However, those in its driver’s seat find such an approach unpalatable, as it would imply a willingness to admit to errors and to make concessions, at least on conditions: an attitude any power-worshipper would deem anathema.

But if the government must struggle to make us fear, by implication we have little objective reason to fear. Indeed, we might be in far less danger – from anyone or anything – than we’ve long supposed. It suggests that our response to the government’s efforts should be to redouble our own.

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monday, February 9, 2015

Police State NYC

New York State residents outside the five boroughs of New York City tend to regard political developments there with a certain detachment. After all, city ordinances and practices don't affect us directly. The city can't tax or regulate us. The city is fairly well confined to its current boundaries. Were it to attempt to annex portions of the nearby counties, as has occurred around other major cities, the reaction would be swift and terrible to behold.

But developments in the two leading cities of these United States, New York and Los Angeles, can never be safely ignored. They set too many trends -- and some of the trends are very unpleasant.

Here's one that should disturb you:

Attempting to further bolster a de facto monopoly of violence in New York City, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton proposed additional edicts to tip the power scales even more in favor of enforcers over citizens, the New York Observer reported Wednesday. In addition to stiffening penalties for things like wearing protective body armor, tinting windows and holding police to similar information disclosures that “civilians” (a telling attitude in itself ) are subjected to, Bratton said it would be “very helpful” if charges of resisting arrest were upped from misdemeanors to felonies....
“NYPD Has a Plan to Magically Turn Anyone It Wants Into a Felon,” Gawker Justice observes in a more hard-edged assessment that includes examples of resisting arrest charges being deliberately unjustly applied. And it’s that felony rap that should most outrage right to keep and bear arms advocates, because such convictions will result in lifetime prohibitions against owning guns, outcomes Bratton and his boss, socialist mayor Bill de Blasio, wouldn't mind seeing more of. Understand, these are people who want to deploy with machine guns to control protesters, a wish they've apparently publicly backed down from -- for now.

Ponder that for a moment.

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote:

What is a policeman, in the American context of our time? He’s a municipal or state employee, protected by a powerful union and laws akin to those that protect civilian Civil Service employees, and effectively answerable only to his superiors in the police hierarchy. He’s been granted certain legal privileges – already we’re in murky waters – and a default presumption of justification regarding his uses of coercive force. He may have had some training in police procedure and the restrictions on his activities, though the smaller the district and its police force, the less certain that will be.
What does this policeman do? More to the point:

What must he do?
What may he do?
What must he not do?
...ex officio?
The “must” part has grown very slender. Recent Supreme Court decisions have decreed that, regardless of the prevalent conceptions, the police have no “duty to protect” and no “duty to intervene.” If you deem yourself to be in danger, the problem is yours, even if the police agree with your assessment. You can be in the midst of an actual criminal victimization, yet the police have no duty to intervene to stop it or to protect you, even if they can see it happening before their own eyes.
The “may” part has become very broad. For example, numerous court decisions have ruled that all a policeman needs to detain you is “reasonable suspicion” that you are or have been involved in a crime. What constitutes “reasonable suspicion” has proved remarkably flexible. A cop who wants to search your car can simply say “I smell marijuana,” and suddenly the most invasive imaginable search is “reasonable,” no matter what his original reason was for detaining you. Regardless of any and all circumstances, you are not allowed to refuse his “lawful order” – yet another serious departure from American norms.
The “must not” part has effectively vanished. State and local police forces have become quasi-military bodies. They’ve been equipped with large amounts of military-grade hardware that no private citizen would be permitted to own. They frequently stage violent intrusions and “no-knock” raids on private institutions and private homes. Most of the time, they have court authorizations for those activities...but often on suppositions that later prove to have been wrong, or based on testimony or “evidence” that was convenient but fictitious. Despite all that, courts have ruled that persons subjected to such treatment do not have a right to resist it – that any violence committed in the process of resistance will be held against the citizen, not the police.

Does that seem relevant to Commissioner Bratton's request that "resisting arrest" be upgraded to a felony count -- a charge that the police could use a posteriori to justify killing a "resister?" Bear in mind that the cop's claim that he ordered you to halt, and that you refused, is deemed sufficient foundation for a charge of "resisting arrest," even if no other offense was ever charged to you.

There's been a lot of discussion about the burgeoning of police-state tactics in the United States these past few years. Skeptics have dismissed it as just "loose talk" that tries to elevate "isolated incidents" into patterns of abuse of power. Now that you've been apprised of Commissioner Bratton's latest request, does it seem all that loose to you?

David Codrea, the author of the article quoted above, is a long-time activist for the right to keep and bear arms. His observation about the special danger to firearms enthusiasts:

And it’s that felony rap that should most outrage right to keep and bear arms advocates, because such convictions will result in lifetime prohibitions against owning guns, outcomes Bratton and his boss, socialist mayor Bill de Blasio, wouldn't mind seeing more of.

...should alarm any city dweller with a legally owned firearm. City authorities, not just in New York City but in many other cities as well, are passionate about disarming their subjects. Exceptions among them are few. New York City is merely the "leader" in this regard: except for the well connected and very well-heeled, it's become all but impossible to get a permit to possess a firearm -- handgun or long gun -- within the five boroughs.

Were city residents who possess already-registered and permitted firearms to be targeted with "no-knock" raids under specious justifications, and killed for daring to appear at their own doors with their guns, what would the popular reaction be? That the police have become an instrument of tyranny? Or that one foolish enough to "resist arrest" deserves whatever happens to him?

Opinion is sharply divided on this subject. The geographical cleavage is plain, but the political cleavage is more interesting, as it defies party affiliation. Staunch conservatives passionate about the right to keep and bear arms become queasy when confronted with a case of police overreach. Their natural tendency is to support and defend the police as "the forces of law and order." Conversely, staunch liberals generally hostile to private ownership of firearms are more likely to judge the police harshly for such tactics...at least, when the victim isn't a prominent conservative.

New York State has already made severe incursions upon the right to keep and bear arms. Yet city and county police forces are accumulating military-grade weapons and equipment at a record rate. Should the City Council look with favor upon Bratton's suggestion, and should the state legislature proclaim the change in law state-wide, Andrew Cuomo's campaign against privately owned firearms could receive a significant boost.

It's been said that a state in which only the police have weapons is the essence of a police state. Perhaps that's not quite enough, but when we add the provisions that "resisting arrest" shall constitute a felony and that a "civilian" may not refuse a cop's "lawful order," we're getting very close. Given that the definition of such a "lawful order" is effectively "whatever a cop tells you to do," I'd say we've arrived.

No, it's not safe to ignore developments in the Big Apple. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Cop Conundrum

What with Ferguson, Eric Garner, and the assassinations of Liu and Ramos, we’ve certainly heard enough about the police this year...or have we?

There’s a problem here. We don’t really know, objectively, about the quality of America’s police forces or whether they use their authority generally within the parameters of the law. It’s becoming one of the most discussed subjects in the Commentariat, though the typical opinion-monger seems reluctant to come down firmly on one side or the other. Consider the following statement from our favorite Graybeard:

“On balance, though, I come down with the guys who say that most cops are not bad cops...”

Graybeard may be right, but he may be wrong – and there are institutional barriers that prevent anyone outside them from knowing which position is more accurate.

What is a policeman, in the American context of our time? He’s a municipal or state employee, protected by a powerful union and laws akin to those that protect civilian Civil Service employees, and effectively answerable only to his superiors in the police hierarchy. He’s been granted certain legal privileges – already we’re in murky waters – and a default presumption of justification regarding his uses of coercive force. He may have had some training in police procedure and the restrictions on his activities, though the smaller the district and its police force, the less certain that will be.

What does this policeman do? More to the point:

What must he do?
What may he do?
What must he not do?

...ex officio?

The “must” part has grown very slender. Recent Supreme Court decisions have decreed that, regardless of the prevalent conceptions, the police have no “duty to protect” and no “duty to intervene.” If you deem yourself to be in danger, the problem is yours, even if the police agree with your assessment. You can be in the midst of an actual criminal victimization, yet the police have no duty to intervene to stop it or to protect you, even if they can see it happening before their own eyes.

The “may” part has become very broad. For example, numerous court decisions have ruled that all a policeman needs to detain you is “reasonable suspicion” that you are or have been involved in a crime. What constitutes “reasonable suspicion” has proved remarkably flexible. A cop who wants to search your car can simply say “I smell marijuana,” and suddenly the most invasive imaginable search is “reasonable,” no matter what his original reason was for detaining you. Regardless of any and all circumstances, you are not allowed to refuse his “lawful order” – yet another serious departure from American norms.

The “must not” part has effectively vanished. State and local police forces have become quasi-military bodies. They’ve been equipped with large amounts of military-grade hardware that no private citizen would be permitted to own. They frequently stage violent intrusions and “no-knock” raids on private institutions and private homes. Most of the time, they have court authorizations for those activities...but often on suppositions that later prove to have been wrong, or based on testimony or “evidence” that was convenient but fictitious. Despite all that, courts have ruled that persons subjected to such treatment do not have a right to resist it – that any violence committed in the process of resistance will be held against the citizen, not the police.

To these eyes, it would appear that the incentives pertaining to police and policing have headed in the wrong direction, and are rather far down the road at that.

The incentives of power dictate that over time, power-positions will be filled by an increasing percentage of persons who love power more than all other things. The test of power resides in its use; if you’re not using it, you can’t be certain you possess it. That would suggest that, in the two centuries since the formation of municipal police forces, the percentage of persons in police forces who are there because they love power rather than justice or public service has risen steadily.

Still, even though incentives are important, justice demands that we address the actual behavior of American police. We cannot assume that because the incentives are perverse, therefore the typical cop is merely a thug with a badge. The problem here is that without the cooperation of governmental sources, including police departments, that have a natural interest in keeping us outside their walls, determining the justice and appropriateness of police behavior is next to impossible.

For example, we are told, though not by official sources, that 1089 civilians died at police hands during 2014. Semi-official sources tell us that from 2004 through 2013, an average of 55 policemen were killed each year in the performance of their duties. The ratio might be meaningful, but stripped of context we can’t be sure. Who was doing what to whom (and why) at the time of the death in question? Such details aren’t always available...and when they are, they’re seldom complete or ironclad.

The judicial system is also involved. Consider a “no-knock” raid in which one of the occupants of the house is killed by the police...but it later emerges that the police raided the wrong house. Exactly such things have happened in recent years. Were the intruders not police, that would constitute felony murder by the plain words of the law. However, cops are almost never held to account for such events. Judicial deference to the police is seldom punctured.

All that having been said, there are surely some cops who aren’t merely thugs with badges, just as there are surely some who are that and nothing else. Our problems include both detoxifying the incentives toward thuggish behavior under color of police authority and protecting good cops from being lumped in with their not-good colleagues in blue.

Much police misbehavior stems from bad law: the unConstitutional firearms laws, the anti-drug laws, and the many “laws” that prohibit or restrict various kinds of peaceful commerce. In such cases, it’s easy to dismiss the matter by saying the cops are “only doing their jobs.” In point of fact, police discretion is usually involved to a considerable extent. It’s almost always exercised in a fashion that favors authority...and those persons favored by the police and officialdom.

An example: Where I live, a permit is required to operate a roadside coffee truck. Also, sanitary codes apply to such trucks. Most operators stake out specific spots on particular thoroughfares. Over time, they become known to the police. Relationships develop. Some such operators are conceded something akin to property rights over the spots they habitually occupy. The police then harass others who might stake out positions they deem “too close” to their favored operators, repeatedly (sometimes several times a day) demanding to see permits, conducting “inspections,” and generally making it plainly visible to potential customers that this operator is “on the outs” with the police.

There is nothing even remotely legal about this. Yet it has become commonplace on Long Island. That a number of coffee-truck operators have family ties to the police is surely not a coincidence.

Bad laws create and intensify the incentives to bad behavior. That includes bad police behavior.

The problem is stiff. Americans are generally disposed to believe that much of the above is unavoidable, perhaps even desirable. The rise in allegations of police misbehavior has caused rancor and tumult, but is unlikely to bring about substantial legal, judicial, or procedural changes. No outcome is certain, but the probabilities incline in the direction of an intensification of the “us versus them” attitude about the police that’s become prevalent on both sides of the “blue wall.”

There is no Last Graf. Be watchful, and wary about developments in your locale. Record any suspicious incidents in as much detail as possible. Get to know the cops who regularly appear in your neighborhood personally; personal relationships are one of the few deterrents to abuse available to the private citizen. And stay tuned.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Law, Lethality, And The Watchmen: A Problem Of Processes And Principles

“It is capricious to treat similar things differently.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
“It is capricious to treat different things the same.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

Now and then, it seems that only a complete outsider can bring order and rationality out of the chaos and emotion rampant in a set of publicly inflammatory incidents...or a pair of them.

These past few months we’ve watched the unfolding of two partly similar, partly dissimilar cases of civilians dying at police hands: that of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and that of Eric Garner of New York City. The foofaurauw over those two cases has risen to deafening levels, such that quite a lot of persons are turning off their televisions rather than be bombarded by any more of it.

The cases are similar in that:

A large black civilian died at a white policeman’s hands in each of them.
In both cases, the police involved have been accused of an illegal use of deadly force.
In both cases, black racialist mouthpieces have incited “protests” – i.e., riots – over the incidents.
In both cases, a grand jury has returned a verdict of “no true bill:” i.e., it has declined to indict the cop(s).

The cases differ in that:

Officer Darren Wilson had attempted to question Michael Brown in connection with an extremely recent petty theft involving the violent intimidation of a store clerk; Eric Garner’s arrest was over the sale of untaxed cigarettes on a Staten Island thoroughfare.
In the Brown shooting, the evidence strongly demonstrates that decedent Brown physically attacked Officer Wilson, at one point trying to wrest Wilson’s gun from his hand; in the Garner case, four New York City policemen brought about Garner’s death with a chokehold in the course of arresting him.
There is no video evidence of the Brown / Wilson confrontation; there is video evidence of the Garner arrest.
Ferguson, Missouri is a predominantly black city; Staten Island is overwhelmingly white working-class, with a large population of New York City police and firemen.

It’s been said that a white cop will never be tried for killing a black man, particularly a black “youth.” It’s also been said that a Staten Island jury would never dare to indict or convict a New York City cop, regardless of the facts of the matter. Yet the matter goes beyond sentiment, including racially oriented sentiments and biases, into a realm only one commentator has even brushed against to this point:

[Garner’s] initial crime: Selling “looseys” — individual cigarettes — in violation of NYC tax law. When you pass a law, however trivial, you are providing an opportunity for police to use lethal force.

Ace’s brief analysis follows from that:

Did Eric Garner deserve to die? No. The crime that began all this was selling "Loosies," single cigarettes out of the pack, in defiance of the state tobacco tax laws and all the other nonsense laws they throw on people about only selling things in their original packaging. Minor shit. Nonsense.
And yet, he defied police orders when they attempted to arrest them. When they tried to cuff him, he defied them again, pulling his arms away. He decided, as a Jury of One, that the law was silly and he would not be being arrested today.
I can't entirely blame him for feeling that way, but I know that if the police attempt to arrest you for a law which you are in fact breaking, even if you think it's a minor harassing sort of law, you do not have the right to resist arrest.
What followed is what follows in all resisting-arrest cases: some escalating violence as the police attempt to physically impose their will on the noncompliant suspect.
Some number of such situations will result in the death of the suspect.

The initial problem – i.e., that the law in question defines an offense that many of us, perhaps even all of us, believe to be absurd, even fundamentally unjust – is beyond our reach except by recourse to a process that has proved capricious, intractable, and maddeningly frustrating. Once it’s in place, its very existence opens the door to violent police / civilian confrontations in the process of investigation and / or arrest. As Ace has noted, some percent of those confrontations will result in serious, perhaps fatal harm to someone.

The next problem is that of principle: the principle of proportionality.

It’s the case, de facto if not de jure, that a near to indefeasible presumption of “lawful action in the performance of public duty” is conferred upon a policeman accused of an unreasonable or disproportionate use of force. It takes irrefutable evidence, multiply confirmed, to get that presumption set aside. Granted that the “blue wall of silence” is often a factor in such cases, an accused cop can always claim that in the situation he faced as it unfolded, the only way he could see to discharge his duty was the approach he took, and that any other cop placed in that situation would have reacted in the same fashion. Yet when the offense in question appears trivial and non-violent, onlookers will want to know why deadly force is permitted in the enforcement of such a law.

However, the law makes no distinctions among varieties of penal offenses. All arrests occur under the presumption that the arrestee is legally required to submit to the justice system without resistance. Moreover, if the law were to attempt a categorical distinction – say, between misdemeanors and felonies, or between non-violent and violent crimes, such that potentially lethal force may only be employed in an arrest for the latter sort of crime – it would result in the perpetrators of the former sort being legally permitted (and often effectively able) to resist arrest, perhaps by killing the arresting officer. Think about it.

Glenn Reynolds’s take on this problem:

That’s why I favor fewer laws, not more.

...is my own...yet as long as there is government, there will be laws that criminalize non-violent offenses such as tax evasion and entering the U.S. illegally. Absent the total privatization of all judicial and penal processes – i.e., anarchism – there isn’t much that can be done about it.

What we are left with is an inherently imperfect and imperfectible arrangement in which Juvenal’s question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is ultimately unanswerable. Trust the police unquestioningly? Unacceptable. Hold them accountable for never injuring a civilian who hasn’t yet been convicted of a violent crime? Unworkable. No position between those poles can be defined to a degree of specificity that would eliminate all possibility that someone, uniformed or otherwise, will get away with murder.

Life as fallible men trapped under the veil of time is like that.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)