Tag: NWA was right

It appears there has been at least one positive consequence of the Baltimore riots:

Six city police officers were charged Friday in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man who suffered fatal spinal injuries last month while in custody, a swift development in a case that has heightened the national focus on policing in black communities.

The announcement by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, the city’s chief prosecutor, surprised many in a city where officials had cautioned for days that the investigation might not come to a quick resolution. Spontaneous celebrations broke out in some neighborhoods that were roiled by looting and violence after Mr. Gray’s funeral on Monday, while police union officials said they were disappointed in what they called a rush to judgment.

The most serious charges were brought against Officer Caesar Goodson, who was driving a police transport van that brought Mr. Gray to a police station after his April 12 arrest. Mr. Goodson, 45 years old, was charged with second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and other charges.

Officers William Porter, 25, Lt. Brian Rice, 41, and Sgt. Alicia White, 30, were each charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office. Officers Edward Nero, 29, and Garrett Miller,
26, were charged with second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
Lt. Rice and Messrs. Nero and Miller were also charged with false
imprisonment for making what Ms. Mosby termed an illegal arrest of Mr.
Gray.

The officers surrendered to police and bail was set in
amounts ranging from $250,000 to $350,000, according to court records
and state officials. By Friday night, all six officers had posted bail
and been released, according to public records. Like Mr. Gray, three of
the officers, including Mr. Goodson, are African-American.

I have no doubt that the six officers will get off without a penalty, but at least the case will draw further attention to the problem of US police believing they are able to freely murder US citizens without being held accountable. Even though they will probably be “exonerated” by the legal system, the arrest and trial itself serves as a moderate deterrent for future officers tempted to impose rough justice on the public.

It’s time to take away the police excuse of “feeling threatened” for shooting someone or cutting them any slack when they kill someone. It should take a genius to know that basing law upon feelings is not the best idea, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the so-called “good cops” are perfectly willing to cover for the supposedly few “bad apples”:

Patrolman Michael Slager, 33, opened fire on father-of-four Walter Scott, 50, in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday morning after reportedly stopping him over a broken tail light.

Slager was arrested, jailed and charged with murder yesterday afternoon after the incendiary footage emerged. An outraged representative of Scott’s family said: ‘This was a cop who felt like he could get away with just shooting anybody that many times in the back.’

The killing comes at a time of mounting unrest over police use of force – particularly against black men – after violent protests erupted over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson last summer.  Slager had previously defended his actions as being in line with procedure, saying he ‘felt threatened’ by the Coast Guard veteran.

The officer claimed Scott ran away after being pulled over at which point he tried to Taser him. But he claimed Scott managed to wrest the stun gun away, prompting him to draw his pistol. At no point in the video, which does not show the initial contact between the men, does Scott appear to be armed.

In the footage, Scott gets a few yards away before Slager opens fire – seven shots in quick succession followed by an eighth, with three of them missing. Scott collapses face-down on a patch of grass. Slager then walks over, shouts at him to put his hands behind his back, then handcuffs him.

Footage then appears to show Slager jogging back to the point where the Taser fell to the ground, bringing it over to Scott’s body around 30 feet away and dropping it next to him.

According to police reports, officers performed CPR on the victim. But video shows that Scott remained face down on the floor for several minutes without being given any medical attention. It is only after two-and-a-half minutes that Slager is seen placing his hand on Scott’s neck in an apparent attempt to check his pulse.

The police are not, contra their all-too-common assumptions, above the law. And if they are not held accountable by the justice system, it is entirely predictable that they will be brought to rough justice by vigilantes and family members seeking revenge. It is stupid and short-sighted for police officers to think they can continue to get away with dirty business as usual; the ever-present eyes of the Panopticon are watching them just like everyone else.

Remember the idea that with great power comes great responsibility? That means that those given badges and guns by the state or local government must be held MORE accountable than the average untrained citizen. Not less.

The police are under no legal obligation to protect and serve you. And apparently, if they do not feel sufficiently lionized by the public, they will not even do their jobs.

Arrests plummet 66% with NYPD in virtual work stoppage. It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage. NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.

The dramatic drop comes as Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio plan to hold an emergency summit on Tuesday with the heads of the five police unions to try to close the widening rift between cops and the administration.

It has helped contribute to a nose dive in low-level policing, with
overall arrests down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared
with the same period in 2013, stats show. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame. Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.

Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241. Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control
Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent,
from 382 to 63.

If you still weren’t convinced that the corrupt and militarized modern police of America are little more than a badge gang, I should think this obnoxious, irresponsible reaction by the police should suffice to convince you, at least concerning the feckless nature of the NYPD.

Recall that police work is not even among the ten most dangerous jobs in America; if it were, women would not pursue it. Remember that most officers never draw their gun nor fire it in the course of their career. And keep in mind that police departments intentionally screen to keep out the excessively intelligent and the insufficiently aggressive.

The petulance of the NYPD made me recall the Tom Simon essay in Sci Phi Journal #2, which concerned, among other things, Tolkien’s definition of heroism.

In his essay “Ofermod,” Tolkien writes:

For this ‘northern heroic spirit’ is never quite pure; it is of gold and an alloy. Unalloyed it would direct a man to endure even death unflinching, when necessary: that is when death may help the achievement of some object of will, or when life can only be purchased by denial of what one stands for. But since such conduct is held admirable, the alloy of personal good name was never wholly absent.

These words describe Boromir exactly. To him, as to his father, the idea of the Good is limited to “the good of Gondor”; ultimately, to the good reputation of the Stewards and their house. Because Gondor, too, has much in it that is intrinsically good – there, too, folk spend much of their time growing food and eating it, and doing various kinds of service to one another – this remains a noble pursuit; but it is fatally flawed, for it mistakes the secondary good (the reputation of the guardians) for the primary.

Tolkien’s most direct criticism of this defective idea of virtue is put in the mouth of Faramir. He does not denigrate Boromir’s character directly, but he implicitly recognizes his flaws by making the distinction that Boromir missed, preferring the primary to the secondary good:

‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.’

The NYPD have made it clear that they love only themselves. They do not love that which they claim to protect and serve. Their idea of virtue is defective. They want to be regarded as heroes, but it is their very hunger for heroic status that renders genuine heroism forever beyond their reach.

As William S. Lind predicted it would in his book ON WAR, 4GW has arrived in America and is targeting the police. Because the police have militarized and lost their moral authority, they are now deemed legitimate enemy targets by a growing number of armed individuals.

In an apparent targeted killing, two police officers were shot in their patrol car in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon by a man who later fatally shot himself in head, police officials said. The shootings come at a moment when the city is roiled by demonstrations after a grand jury decided not to indict an officer in the chokehold death of a Staten Island man. The shootings on Saturday took place near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“It looks like they were shot in the upper body,” Deputy Chief Kim Royster said.

She said that a man fled into a subway station after shooting the officers from the patrol car’s passenger side, and that the police had recovered a gun from the scene. Chief Royster said the man opened fire on the police officers, ran up Myrtle and went into a subway station. The man died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Chief Royster said.

Fire Department officials said that a 911 call came in around 2:50 p.m. reporting that two people had been shot. Charlie Hu, the manager of a liquor store at the same corner, said he saw two police officers slouched over in the front seat of their patrol car. At least one of the officers, Mr. Hu said, appeared to have been shot in the head.

A high ranking police official called the shooting an assassination.

The problem faced by the police is that their instincts are now in direct contradiction to their best long-term interests. They are increasingly corrupt, increasingly frightened, increasingly gunned-up, increasingly feeling at war with the general population, and increasingly of a different ethnicity than the people with whom they are interacting on a regular basis.

What they should do is disarm completely, stop playing soldier, abandon the concept of “law enforcement”, and stop their confrontational tactics. This is highly unlikely, however, because most police officers recruited after the Drug War began are psychologically well-suited for confrontation and quasi-militarization. They’re neither trained nor psychologically equipped to lower the temperature these days.

The police problem is the same one faced by occupation forces everywhere. While they have the ability to project overwhelming Mass at specific targets at will, the complete lack of Shape means that their opponents can deliver superior Mass at any time, in almost any place. The police have forgotten that their very survival depends upon the good will of the people; the people could re-enact the Sicilian Vespers and wipe out every single police officer in the country in a single night if they were so inclined. One hopes that they will come to their senses and remember this before things get any uglier.

And this isn’t uglier. We’ll be fortunate if the 4GW forces developing in the USA remain content with only targeting armed officers.

A reader asks: “In 2007 or so Bill Lind wrote that cops understood that you can’t fight
an insurgency by cracking down.Think they still know that?” 

I don’t know. I am concerned that they do not, as the manhunt in Los Angeles that very nearly killed some innocent women indicated a propensity to panic and overreact once they discover that they are the prey and no longer the untouchable predators.

Whether he wears a badge or not:

What Lanier portrays as crippling criminal enterprises appears to be equally targeted towards separating users from their next fix — or simply separating random “suspects” from whatever they happen to have in their wallets.

Since 2009, D.C. officers have made more than 12,000 seizures under city and federal laws, according to records and data obtained from the city by The Washington Post through the District’s open records law. Half of the more than $5.5 million in cash seizures were for $141 or less, with more than a thousand for less than $20.

Because the system is primed for abuse, legislation has been introduced that would overhaul the city’s asset forfeiture program, raising the threshold of proof needed to justify a seizure as well as forcing a majority of funds to be routed into the city’s general fund. Unsurprisingly, cops aren’t fans of the proposed legislation.

[T]he bill has been opposed by law enforcement officials, partly for the same reason other reform efforts across the country have been stymied: money. The officials also said it would create an administrative burden. In addition to tightening oversight and the rules for civil seizures, the District proposal would cut back on revenue.

No policeman who has ever participated in a civil asset forfeiture can be declared innocent of thievery. Nor is it correct to point the finger and blame politicians when the police themselves are actively lobbying against legislation that would place the burden of proof concerning the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the ownership of the individual’s property on the accuser rather than on the owner.

In their commendable respect for authority, conservatives often tend to forget that authority can be legitimate or illegitimate, as well as honest or corrupt. They also tend to ignore the fact that every single totalitarian and authoritarian state in history has had a police force which the people quickly learned to fear and hate. After all, one can hardly have a police state without police.

Like it or not, “law enforcement officials” are actively attempting to undermine the remnants of the Constitutional limits on policing the public in their own pecuniary interest. An extrapolation from the DC data indicates that around 2.9 million Americans who are accused of committing no crime other than carrying $150 dollars or less have been robbed by these police thieves; will the defenders of asset forfeiture attempt to evade the point by demanding to know why these individuals are in possession of such outrageous sums of money?

The decent, law-abiding police of yesteryear are simply not germane to the subject. They are retired or dead. The police of today do not wear the same uniforms, carry the same weapons, or operate under the same rules of engagement. One can no more exonerate the police of today by appealing to the behavior of the police of yesteryear than one can argue for the scientific precision of biology by appealing to the accuracy of physics.

It is not police critics like me who are traducing the reputations of the good policemen of the past. It is their corrupt and lawless successors who are doing so through their actions.