To the police I’m sayin f— you punk,
Readin my rights and s—, it’s all junk.
Pullin out a silly club, so you stand
With a fake-ass badge and a gun in your hand.
But take off the gun so you can see what’s up,
And we’ll go at it punk, and I’ma f— you up
This has been the great success of the drug war. To undermine respect for the law and create general hatred of the police. Most of my law-abiding upper middle-class friends and I now have more regard for lower-class criminals than we do for the police – at least they don’t operate under color of law. The local sheriff happily cooperates with revenue agency thefts built on blatant fraud, the local police commit highway robbery* and then affect to be surprised when the citizenry begins to regard them as nothing but a gang of thugs, more part of the problem than the solution.
It’s not just a few bad apples. It is endemic corruption designed into an extra-legal system. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about the police, they are merely a tool. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that the particular order they are being used to uphold is not a form compatible with individual freedom, the common law or the American Constitution.
*Local police in these small towns made millions of dollars in profits by trolling the interstate highways and stopping travelers with out of state tags. The police typically claimed some traffic infraction, asked permission to search the car and got it, found no drugs but some cash, then brought in a drug sniffing dog, and after getting it to “alert,” seized all the travelers’ money.