Found this article on Personal Liberty,
Original article on Personal Liberty
The only thing I'd add would be that police corruption, and brutality has been going on as long as there've been police. But lately American police have started moving in the direction of the Russian Cossacks who at the orders of the Czar or his minions made a habit of riding down and killing crowds of innocent citizens for instance during Bloody Sunday on January 22, 1905. Witness what happened to the demonstrators in the Michael Brown demonstrations after he was murdered by a local Ferguson cop. True he, according to subsequent, after the fact, and under police protest, investigation may have attacked the cop, but at the time of his murder was far away and UNARMED, thereby NO threat to the cop, who of course used the most time tested, excuse of all cops, "I was in fear for my life."
Lee Murray
Article on Bloody Sunday
Time Article On the Michael Brown murder in Ferguson Missouri
Either praise the police or shut up
This article originally appeared on Pro Libertate.
Following
Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, members of the Persian elite
were required to prostrate themselves before their new ruler.
Polyperchon, one of Alexander’s generals, sternly rebuked one of the
Persians whose self-abasement was seen as inadequate.
“Come on, don’t just touch the floor with your chin,”
demanded Alexander’s arrogant underling. “Bang it, man!
Bang it!”
Police
union commissar Patrick J. Lynch displays more than a hint of that
attitude in dealing with a public that at long last has become disgusted
with routine and impenitent criminal corruption on the part of the
state’s consecrated dispensers of violence.
For Lynch (whose views
are very commonplace in law enforcement), any attitude toward police
other than abject, servile gratitude is unacceptable and perhaps even
criminal. This is true even of those who preface modulated discussion of
unambiguous criminal misconduct with the familiar disclaimer: “Not all
cops are bad.”
“Proclaiming that `not all cops are bad’ implies that rational people might somehow believe the opposite,”
Lynch whined in a recent column for the New York Post.
“It lends cop-haters a credibility they don’t deserve. And it minimizes
the dedication and professionalism that police officers display, day in
and day out, by implying that it’s the exception rather than the rule.”
From
Lynch’s perspective, sycophancy toward the licensed purveyors of
violence is a civic obligation, and the public has a duty to sustain the
pretense that every single police officer is a divinely commissioned
instrument of justice and the distillate of valor.
Lynch demands
that the public accept the proposition that “all cops put their lives on
the line to protect all New Yorkers.” The New York Police Department
formally repudiated that claim
in its official reply to a lawsuit filed by the heroic Joseph Lozito,
who was cut to ribbons while taking down crazed serial killer Maksim
Gelman in a subway car as officer Terrance Howell cowered behind a glass
partition.
Howell was hailed as a “hero,” and the NYPD deflected
Lozito’s lawsuit by insisting that “under well-established law, the
police … have no special duty” to protect an individual citizen.
For
cops, “officer safety” is always the prime directive. Lynch would
contend that the public must embrace Howell as a hero because of his
occupation — or, failing that, stifle any criticism of his behavior.
Extolling him as a heroic exemplar is acceptable; describing him as an anomalous “bad apple” is not.
According
to Lynch, police are victimized by an invidious double standard. After
all, “when a patient dies on the operating table under dubious
circumstances, elected officials don’t rush to reassure the public that
not all surgeons are incompetent. If an airline pilot is caught drinking
before take-off, TV talking heads don’t remind us that the majority of
pilots are sober.”
Leaving aside the fact that the mechanisms of
professional accountability for surgeons and pilots are much more
demanding than those that exist in law enforcement, the most obvious
problem with Lynch’s desperate analogy is that people in those
professions are actually rendering a service to the public.
Police have no enforceable duty to do likewise.
Doctors
help their patients; pilots safely convey passengers to their chosen
destinations. Private security personnel defend persons and property.
For people in those professions, success is measured in terms of
positive outcomes for paying customers, and failure is recognized as
either unavoidable misfortune or culpable incompetence.
For police
officers, by way of contrast, “success” results when those targeted in
displays of government-sanctioned violence either submit or are subdued,
often with lethal consequences — even when the recipient of that
violence did nothing to warrant such treatment.
According to Lynch,
the death of Eric Garner — who was suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes — at the hands of an NYPD thugscrum
was a “success.” Once the officers had decided to abduct Garner,
“failure” — meaning successful resistance by their victim — was no
longer an option.
What should police do, Lynch complained in a
recent press conference, “when we’re faced with a situation where the
person being placed under arrest says, `I’m not going. I’m not being
placed under arrest.’ What is it we should do? Walk away?”
If the
arrestee wasn’t involved in an actual crime — and there’s no evidence
that Garner had done anything other than embarrass plainclothes officers
by breaking up a fight — then the inescapable answer is: Yes, the
police should walk away.
“We don’t have that option,” Lynch
asserts, which means that officers are entitled to “use necessary force
to make that arrest.” In the case of Garner, this included the use of an
illegal chokehold by officer Daniel Pantaleo, which resulted in a
criminal homicide.
“There is an attitude on our streets today that
it is acceptable to resist arrest,” grouses Lynch. “That attitude is a
direct result of a lack of respect for law enforcement.”
Actually,
that attitude is in large measure a reflection of the ever-escalating
lawlessness of the government employees represented by Lynch and his
comrades. It may also reflect a growing appreciation for the fact that
resisting unlawful arrest — while considered a crime and prosecuted as
if it were —
is an ancient, venerable, and indispensable right of free people. Under the still-valid Supreme Court precedent
John Black Elk v. U.S.
(1900), a citizen has a legally recognized right to use lethal force to
prevent the consummation of an unlawful arrest, and bystanders likewise
have a right (and perhaps a moral duty) to intervene on behalf of the
victim.
Like other agencies of its kind, the NYPD is well-stocked
with the kind of privileged bullies who have mastered the art of
simultaneously swaggering and simpering. Thus, anonymous NYPD sources
described anti-police graffiti to the New York Post as “a disturbing hate crime.”
Through video surveillance, the NYPD identified
36-year-old Rosella Best
as the culprit. Best tagged police vehicles and a public school with
graffiti expressing such eminently defensible (if grammatically awkward)
sentiments as “NYPD pick on the harmless,” “NYPD pick on the innocent,”
and — in a display of familiar but increasingly justified hyperbole —
“NAZIS=NYPD.” (Assuming that Best used only “public” property as her
canvas, it’s difficult to identify an actual victim in this case.)
Best was charged with “criminal mischief as a hate crime.”
Under Article 485 of New York Penal Law,
a “hate crime” must involve “violence, intimidation [or] destruction of
property” inspired by animus toward people on the basis of “race,
color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice,
age, disability, or sexual orientation.”
Absent from that
inventory is any mention of occupation as a “protected category,” which
means that the NYPD must consider itself to be either a tribe, a cult or
perhaps even a sexual orientation, most likely one that fetishizes
sadistic mistreatment of the helpless.
The statute also specifies
that the offending act must be intended to “inflict on victims
incalculable physical and emotional damage” and be intended to
“intimidate and disrupt entire communities.” By filing a hate crimes
charge against Best, the NYPD is certifying that its rank and file
consists of people who are wounded and intimidated by public criticism.
If the bold and valiant badasses of the NYPD must be protected from
hurtful words, they’re obviously not the kind of people who “put their
lives on the line to protect all New Yorkers,” as Lynch would have us
pretend.
All police officers embody “selflessness and courage,”
Lynch maintains. But there is one “nightmare” that burdens their waking
thoughts and holds sleep in abeyance: accountability.
“We have
watched in disbelief as the worst nightmare a police officer can have
comes true,” wailed retired Jersey City Police Officer Robert Cubby
in a post at LawEnforcementToday.com,
referring to the prospect of criminal charges against Pantaleo for
killing Garner. “An NYPD officer applied what was falsely called a choke
hold. Moments later, the perpetrator gasped for air and died in the
hospital.”
These two developments, Cubby would have us pretend,
were not necessarily related. It’s not that Garner’s government-employed
assailants killed him; he just chose that particular moment to die.
Now
that the death of Garner — who was not a “perpetrator” of any sort,
once again, but rather a man who had just broken up a fight — has been
ruled a homicide, the “career of those involved from the NYPD dangles
from a thread,” moans Cubby. “The officers face the worst possible
nightmare; loss of their career and being thrown in jail for a good
portion of the rest of their lives.”
The same would be true of
anybody else who fatally assaulted another human being without cause.
Cubby and people of his ilk assume that police officers must be beyond
accountability for such actions and that the loss of their exalted
station as dispensers of lethal force is a fate worse than death.
“While
these officers now become defendants and have to, somehow, gather
enough emotional strength to get through this horrible accusation [and]
gather all their financial resources to defend themselves, stay out of
jail and retain their jobs, it is time for the LEO family to support our
NYPD brothers and sisters,” insists Cubby. He suggested that members of
the state’s armed enforcement class display their solidarity with
Garner’s killers through a “United We Stand with NYPD” social media
campaign: Law enforcement officers and their friends were urged to
change their Facebook profile picture to an upside-down NYPD flag. That
green, white, and blue banner, which was adopted by the department in
1919, is draped over the coffins of officers who are killed in the line
of duty.
After all, if a costumed tax-feeder can’t kill without consequence, what’s the point of living?
Cubby’s
suggestion, it should be pointed out, was made before the Michael Brown
shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, in August — which led to protests,
riots and a Fallujah-grade crackdown by fully militarized “local”
police. The well-publicized conduct of the police in Ferguson finally
forced the public to confront what the police have become. This, in
turn, helped propagate an epidemic of institutional self-pity within law
enforcement, and
Lt. Daniel Furseth of Wisconsin’s DeForest PD came down with a particularly severe case.
“Today, I stopped caring about my fellow man,” begins
Furseth’s Oct. 14 essay in American Police Beat Magazine.
“I stopped caring about my community, my neighbors, and those I serve. I
stopped caring today because a once noble profession has become
despised, hated, distrusted, and mostly unwanted.”
Furseth, like
Lynch, is disillusioned not because of what their profession has become,
but because of how it is perceived by an ungrateful public that is
proving itself unworthy of their sanctified overseers. Furseth also
seems deaf to the implications of his own overwrought, self-fixated
rhetoric: If he stopped “caring” about the people he “serves,” shouldn’t
he resign? Or is he admitting to being a state-licensed sociopath with
permission to inflict violence on a public he now views with unfiltered
scorn and unalloyed resentment?
“I stopped caring today because
parents tell their little kids to be good or `the police will take you
away,’ embedding a fear from year one,” complains Furseth, offering a
variation on Lynch’s complaint that even people who respect the police
understand that they are agents of violence. He likewise condemns those
who quite correctly describe the police as “just another tool used by
government to generate `revenue.’”
In offering that particular
complaint, Furseth reveals himself to be either incurably disingenuous
or a stranger to the concept of irony.
DeForest, Wisconsin, is
a town of about 9,000 people located not far from Madison, the state capital. It is roughly 91 percent white and
has a crime rate less than one-third the national average
— and a violent crime rate so low it doesn’t make the needle twitch.
Revenue collection through traffic enforcement and OWI (Operating While
Intoxicated) “saturation patrols” are the chief functions of that police
department.
Furseth proudly describes himself as
the creator of the Capital Area OWI Task Force, which regularly conducts patrols for the purpose of “pulling over drivers as often as possible in a friendly show of force,”
in the oxymoron-infused language of a local news account.
The DeForest PD’s 2013 Annual Report
smugly observes: “One individual stated the following on a social media
site: `Dude, I refuse to drive into DeFo with anything remotely illegal
in my car, it seems like there’s a cop on every street.’”
That’s a
sensible precaution, given that the “friendly” people responsible for
that state of affairs are not only doing everything possible to wring
revenue from visitors, but are also obsessively monitoring social media.
“We
represent a `Police State’ where `Jackbooted badge-wearing thugs’
randomly attack innocent people without cause or concern for
constitutional rights,” laments Furseth. “We are Waco, Ruby Ridge, and
Rodney King all rolled into one….”
Notably absent from his
jeremiad is any acknowledgement, however qualified or tentative, that
the perception he laments could possibly be justified. If he possesses
so much as a particle of principled concern for the rights of innocent
people, Furseth will reach beyond his privileged peer group and offer
support to a local family who suffered horribly “without cause or
concern for constitutional rights” in a 3 a.m. no-knock SWAT assault.
DeForest is about a half-hour from Madison,
which is where the family of Bounkham Phonesavanh — more commonly known as “Baby Bou-Bou” –resides.
The 20-month-old child was nearly murdered by police in Georgia on May
28 during a 3 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid. Acting on the basis of purchased
intelligence from a petty criminal, the raiders attacked the home
without warning, hurling a flash-bang grenade into the living room. The
infernal device exploded in Bou-Bou’s crib, blowing off his nose and
ripping open his chest.
The Phonesavanh family was residing
temporarily with an aunt in Georgia. The parents weren’t suspected of
any criminal conduct; but that didn’t prevent the invaders from
assaulting the father, leaving him with a permanent shoulder injury. No
drugs or other evidence was found at the home, nor was the relative
suspected of drug dealing.
The tiny victim was still in a
medically induced coma when Habersham County Sheriff Jerry Terrell
officially exonerated the officers who had nearly murdered him: “I stand
behind what our team did. There’s nothing to investigate, there’s
nothing to look at.” Public outrage eventually led to a grand jury
inquest, which did little more than ratify the sheriff’s claims.
Following a six-day investigation,
the grand jury declined to indict the law enforcement officers who participated in that atrocity.
The prologue to the grand jury’s “Presentment”
is five pages of frothy self-justification and pious persiflage
emphasizing the public-spiritedness of the panel and extending sympathy
to both the victims and perpetrators of this atrocity.
“Nothing can be more difficult and heart-wrenching than injuries to one’s child,” the document asserts, before suggesting that
inflicting
such injuries can be just as traumatic to the exalted instruments of
state coercion who nearly killed Bou-Bou. “[W]e wish to extend our
sympathy also to the law enforcement officers involved… [W]hat has not
been seen before by others and talked or written about, is that these
individuals are suffering as well.”
That “suffering,” like the
nearly fatal injuries to Bou-Bou, came after an investigation that was
“hurried, sloppy, and unfortunately not in accordance with the best
practices and procedures.” This wasn’t “criminal negligence,” mind you,
but simply the regrettable result of “well-intentioned people getting in
too big a hurry, and not slowing down and taking enough time to
consider the possible consequences of their actions.”
This
assessment might be appropriate in describing the distracted and
inattentive cook who sets fire to a stove. Applying it to people who
carried out an unjustified 3 a.m. military-style assault that left an
infant fighting for his life is an obscenity.
The most abhorrent
passage in this document comes on page 13, where “the parents and
extended family” of the victim are cut in for a share of the blame,
because they supposedly “had some degree of knowledge concerning family
members involved in criminal activity that came in and out of the
residence.” Bou-Bou’s parents had taken refuge with relatives in Georgia
after their home in Wisconsin was burned down. They weren’t implicated
in the alleged wrongdoing of their relative; they were simply desperate
for a place to live.
Bou-Bou’s parents, who moved back to
Wisconsin in July, have been saddled with more than $1 million in
medical bills. After initially promising to help defray those expenses,
Habersham County officials — displaying the selective, self-serving
fastidiousness for “law” that is so typical of tyrants and bureaucrats —
now insist that it would be “illegal” to do so.
Daniel Furseth is a neighbor to the Phonesevanh family. He ends his essay
with a self-dramatizing flourish: “Yes, I stopped caring today. But tomorrow, I will put my uniform back on and I will care again.”
If the compass of his caring extends beyond his comrades in the coercive caste —
and there is videotaped evidence that he has a soft spot for small children
— Furseth really should extend his sympathies to the Phonesevanhs,
perhaps by organizing a fundraising effort to help those innocent people
pay the costs of restoring their mangled baby to health.
By doing
so, however, Furseth would acknowledge that decent people have abundant
reason to look upon the police with fear and suspicion. And that is a
concession he probably cannot bring himself to make.
–William N. Grigg
