Tag: NWA was right

The dissolution of order

The cracks in US society are widening:

Police officers showed their contempt for New York’s mayor on Saturday, turning their backs as he addressed a funeral for a fallen colleague.

Rafael Ramos was shot dead alongside his partner Wenjian Liu last weekend amid nationwide protests accusing police of racism and using excessive force against black people. Mr Liu’s funeral will be held in the coming days.

Officers have accused Bill de Blasio, the city mayor, of having blood on his hands for failing to give his full backing to officers while demonstrators raged at the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died in a police choke hold.

While he received polite applause inside the church, hundreds of officers outside turned their backs to screens showing the service.

Notice the names. Ramos. Liu. De Blasio. Ironically, only Garner, the black man, had an traditional American name. They are names that would cause a progressive’s heart to leap for joy, were it not for the context of the story in which the names appear. And I would be remiss to fail to mention Ismaaiyl Brinsley.

This is what multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic society looks like. Violence, lack of respect for authority, rival power centers, and ongoing societal fragmentation. Expect more of it.

Sometimes there are no good guys

ESR points out that it’s not always possible to take a side:

After Brinsley’s mini-murder-spree, the temptation for any reasonable person to weigh in on the side of conservatives and the cops is great. And yet…and yet…important distinctions are in danger of being lost. On the evidence we have, Michael Brown was a violent thug who deserved the death he got, but the live-on-video strangulation of Eric Garner was a genuine atrocity. The New York medical examiner deemed it a homicide.

But because humans are excessively tribal, it’s difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner’s murderers without being lumped in with the “wrong side”. Nor will Garner’s partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren’t interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death.

I don’t have a fix for this problem. But someone needs to be pointing out that both of the pseudo-tribes that have sorted themselves around this dispute are behaving badly. “Death to cops” is totally out of line, but the New York police had innocent blood on their hands before Ismaayil Brinsley did on his. There should be an accounting for that, not by assassin’s bullets but by a trial in which justice can be seen to be done.

I’m not on the side of the Africans or the Badge Gang. One is a barbarian force, the other has devolved into a destabilizing one. Both are dyscivic. I’m on the side of civilization, but watching what is taking place in the USA is somewhat akin to watching Tutsis butcher Hutus and vice-versa. It doesn’t make any sense to cheer for either side, nor will it accomplish anything positive.

The Badge Gang must be held considerably more accountable than it presently is, for its own sake, if nothing else. Once it loses its perceived moral authority, as is increasingly the case today, it doesn’t actually have much else to fall back upon.

The temptation to choose sides is understandable, but in cases such as these it should be resisted. We live in a fallen world, a sinful world, an evil world, where often there are no good guys on either side. That’s the central point of the holiday we are celebrating tonight and tomorrow.

4GW in Brooklyn

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.

The banality of US evil

ESR rightly identifies a problem much worse than racism:

Eric Garner was black. The policeman who choked him to death was white.

Some people want to make this horror about race. I find myself wishing they were right – that just once, the racial grievance peddlers weren’t basically making up inflammatory crap that canonizes thug trash like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Because as bad as violent racism is, I’m afraid that what actually killed Eric Garner was something far worse.

The truly terrifying thing about Eric Garner’s death is that I don’t think the cops in that video hated anybody. They were just doing their job. And their job included strangling a man to death for having sold “loosies” – untaxed cigarettes. Something he wasn’t doing when he was killed; he had just broken up a fight that the police came to investigate.

Garner had just broken up a fight. The police hassled him, based on his record as a (gasp!) vendor of untaxed cigarettes, and when he protested the force of law came down on him and snuffed him.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book called Democracy In America that has been justly celebrated for its perception about the young American republic ever since. In it, he warned of the dangers of what he called “soft despotism” – that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules”, all justified in soothing ways to achieve worthy objectives. Such as discouraging people from smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes.

Eric Garner died in a New York minute because “soft despotism” turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood. There was no anger there, no hate; the police simply failed to grasp the moral disproportion between the “crimes” he wasn’t even committing at the time and their use of force. And an investigating grand jury did no better.

Violent racists, as evil as they are, generally understand on some level that they’re doing wrong. That understanding is written all over the excuses they make. These cops didn’t need an excuse. They were doing their job. They were enforcing the law. The casual, dispassionate, machinelike brutality with which Garner was strangled reveals a moral vacuum more frightening than mere racism could ever be.

Americans find themselves living in a country where people can be freely killed, without hesitation or consequences, by the police for the “crime” of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To call it “the Land of the Free” is darkly morbid sarcasm indeed.

The anger expressed in the Ferguson riots was misplaced, but not entirely illegitimate. There is a serious cancer in the United States and it has fully metastasized in the police forces across the country. It is yet another sign that all is not right on Main Street USA these days.

A thief is a thief

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.

Thieves with badges

The U.S. police are not longer entitled to absolutely any respect or presumption of innocence anymore. They are, quite literally, trained highwaymen:

The stop of the gamblers in Iowa on April 15, 2013, illustrates some of the highway interdiction methods in use nationwide. Earlier
that morning, an officer in Illinois alerted an Iowa trooper to a
suspicious red car with Nevada license plates driving west, court
records show. When the Altima appeared in Iowa, Trooper Simmons followed
it for several miles before pulling it over. He told the motorists that
they had been stopped for failing to signal when they passed a black
SUV.

Simmons said he was issuing a warning for the failure to
signal. After handing over the paperwork, he said the stop was over.
Then he asked the driver, Newmerzhycky, if he had “time for just a
couple quick questions.”

Police who specialize in highway
interdiction use casual conversations to avoid triggering legal
questions about the length of stops. If the conversations are
consensual, courts consider the added delay to be legal.

Highway
police are trained to use the chats as an opportunity to take stock of
alleged “indicators” of criminal activity, including nervous speech
patterns, a pulsing carotid artery and inconsistencies in stories. They
are also trained to seek permission for warrantless searches.

Notice that the video proved that Trooper Simmons was lying when he told them why he pulled the two gamblers over. They were correct to doubt his veracity and lie to him in return. Never answer a policeman’s questions. Always ask him if you are arrested, and if not, if you are free to go. If you can, video every interaction with them. They are not the good guys. They are, at best, thieves who prey upon the public.

The least surprising leak ever

It is being reported that a leak in the prosecutor’s office indicates there will be no indictment of the police officer responsible for shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

From a source inside the Prosecutor’s Office – NO INDICTMENT in the Michael Brown case.

Frankly, I’m a little puzzled that anyone ever thought there might be one. I’m about as dubious of the American police as anyone, and I never thought it appeared to be an even questionable shooting.

Anyhow, if the announcement does come tonight, this is an open thread to discuss it and any related events.

Ferguson

I tend to doubt things are going to get too out of control given the heavy police and federal presence, but this is a post for folks to post news and thoughts over night assuming it is announced that Officer Wilson will not be charged for the lethal shooting of Michael Brown.

4GW in Middle America

This looks rather like a prelude of one of the signs I predicted would be among the harbingers of the civil war that will bring about the end of the USA:

Police families in Ferguson fear for their safety and many have gone into hiding or left town after receiving assault and death threats.

Spouses and children of cops in Ferguson, Missouri, have received assault and death threats after the shooting of Michael Brown. Tensions continue to rise in Ferguson as a grand jury nears its decision on whether to indict Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s shooting

‘It’s very frightening,’ said the police wife, who asked to not be identified. ‘Most people who have a family member who’s a police officer are very proud of what they do.This is real and people actually do know how to find us and they do want to harm us.’

I doubt it is anything more than threats at this point, though. If people were planning to act, they wouldn’t be warning police families ahead of time. We will know that 4GW has come to America in earnest when police and federal agents are leaving their jobs for fear of harm coming to their families.

Which, you may recall, is one reason I theorized that the notorious FEMA camps are not actually intended for enemies of the state, but rather, for the families of its servants.

Women in combat

One aspect of the Eric Frein manhunt that has mostly escaped readers is the way that this episode, featuring a strong, independent female police officer under fire, doesn’t bode well for the champions of women in combat:

Late on the night of Sept. 12, Cpl. Bryon Dickson, 38 years old and the father of two young sons, was ending his shift. As he walked out of the Blooming Grove barracks, a neat, tan-brick building nearly surrounded by woods, he suddenly dropped to the ground.

A colleague who was just beginning her shift heard a sound like a firecracker, saw Corporal Dickson on the ground — a few yards from flagpoles flying the American and Pennsylvania flags — and went out to help, only to hear another shot that kicked up a cloud on the lobby floor.

She retreated into the building and tried, unsuccessfully, to call 911. Her wounded colleague asked her to bring him inside, but she could not reach him. She called out for assistance.

Trooper Alex Douglass, also just beginning his shift, walked up from the parking lot toward Corporal Dickson. He, too, fell to the ground, shot, but crawled to safety into the lobby. Using bravery and the shield of a marked S.U.V., other troopers managed to carry their brother into the barracks.

In other words, she heard a shot, ran away, didn’t shoot back, couldn’t manage to call for help, and wouldn’t take the risk of going back out to drag the wounded into shelter. Then, when other male officers arrived, she didn’t help them go out to get him.

Also, since when are police officers “assassinated” rather than “shot” or even “murdered”? They are armed civilians and petty agents of the state, not heads of state. Are they really to be considered “politically prominent” now?