The Lethal Illusion Called "Authority"

Killer on the loose: Ian Birk, seconds before he gunned down John T. Williams.

"Why did you shoot that man? He didn't do anything!"

The question was wrenched from a woman who had watched in horror as Police Officer Ian Birk pumped four shots into the body of John T. Williams on a Seattle street corner last August 30.

Birk claimed that he had been "threatened" by Williams, a 50-year-old alcoholic woodcarver who was carrying two closed knives at the time of the incident. The autopsy, however, documented that Williams wasn't facing Birk when he was shot: The officer approached him from behind and to the right, and Williams was shot in the right side of his body from an estimated distance of about ten feet. A fifth shot that missed the target was never accounted for.

No reasonable person would have considered Williams a threat to Birk; in fact, since the victim was partially deaf, it's likely he never clearly heard Birk's demand that he drop his carving knife, and died before understanding what was going on. The entire lethal encounter lasted less than eight seconds.

There were several eyewitnesses to the homicide. None of them saw Williams display threatening behavior of any kind. Then again, none of them was a member of the State's punitive caste, which means that they hadn't been indoctrinated to perceive even a momentary lack of cooperation by a Mundane as a "pre-attack indicator." During the January inquest into the shooting, Birk explained that he gunned down John T. Williams on a Seattle street corner because he didn't like the way the 50-year-old chronic alcoholic looked at him.

Seconds to live: Williams, just before Birk shot him.

While prowling Seattle’s streets last August 30, Birk saw Williams in a crosswalk carrying a knife and a block of wood.  Birk reported that he was going to perform a "shake" -- an informal contact with a potentially suspicious person. He exited his police cruiser and, with his firearm in the "Sul" position, commanded Williams to drop his knife. No more than four seconds passed between Birk’s demand and the first of five gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly seven seconds.

Significantly, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Birk specified that he had killed Williams for refusing to drop the knife, not because of threatening behavior of any kind. He also told another police officer that Williams "was carving up that board" -- which, if true, meant that Birk had seen the knife used as a tool, rather than a weapon.

In the dashcam video, Williams appears to be a small, middle-aged man with a shambling, tentative stride. While crossing the street the artisan does appear to be working with the wood in some fashion. Birk can be seen exiting the car and speaking casually into his portable radio before bellowing "Hey! Hey! Hey! Drop the knife!" Nothing in Birk's posture or tone of voice suggests that he was confronting a potential assailant, or in fear for his life.

Perhaps the most important fact, given Birk's claim that he was "threatened" by the confused, partially deaf woodcarver, is the fact that the officer was the one who was closing the distance in the seconds leading up to the shooting.

Williams had a troubled past characterized by alcoholism and occasional fits of improper public behavior. He was well known to the police as a “chronic inebriate.” In a video recording of an earlier encounter one officer is heard telling another that “I write him a ticket every time I can.”

In the days just prior to the August 30 shooting, Williams was stopped by police on several occasions. In one confrontation, Williams -- who at the time was so deep into his cups that he could barely stand upright -- can be heard making what was described as a “threat” to kill “all you police force.” This “threat” wasn’t taken seriously by the officers, who simply shrugged their shoulders and let Williams shuffle away.

John T. Williams with his handiwork.

 The Seattle police were familiar with Williams, his alcohol abuse, and the occasionally unsavory public behavior that resulted from it. Officers had also seen him carrying a carving knife and a block of wood on previous occasions. 

While he wasn’t always pleasant to be around, Williams wasn’t known to be disposed toward violence, and in any case wasn’t physically capable of any.  At the time Birk killed him, Williams was carrying two knives, both of which were legal under Seattle municipal ordinances (their blades were under 3.5 inches in length) and  were closed when photographed by crime scene investigators.

Officer William Collins, who arrived in response to Birk’s “shots fired” report, told him, seconds after the killing,  that he had done a "good job." All that Collins knew at the time was that a fellow member of his coercive brotherhood had just killed a Mundane -- and that's all he needed to know.

During the January shooting inquest, Seattle police brutality lawyer Tim Ford asked Collins if a closed knife constitutes a threat to "officer safety." A closed knife is "a major threat," Collins maintained, "just as big as an open knife.... It's extremely dangerous, and you have to treat the person with utmost caution.... [I]f you don't drop it, you may be shot" -- even if it is closed at the time. After all, Collins insisted -- regurgitating a familiar self-pitying police cliche --"We don't get paid enough to be hurt."

Detective Jeff Mudd, who also testified at the inquest, also asserted that Birk's decision was appropriate: "We're trained to shoot people who pose a threat to us."

In what sense was this puzzled, decrepit old alcoholic, "armed" with a small, closed knife, a "threat" to the young, vigorous, highly trained paladin of public order who confronted him with a drawn gun? The answer offered by Birk was that he was justified in shooting Williams because the woodcarver had given him a dirty look.

 "He had a very stern, very serious, very confrontational look on his face," Birk testified during the inquest. "He was still holding the knife up in front of himself ... in a confrontational posture." Birk's use of the word "still" means that Williams's "posture" hadn't changed from the time the officer supposedly saw him "carving up that board" -- which may have been unwise, but couldn't be construed as "confrontational."

A detailed account of the inquest published by The Stranger points out: "No witnesses reported seeing Williams act aggressively toward Birk or anyone else. No witnesses reported seeing a knife in Williams' hand."

Birk mentioned that he and other police are taught the "21-foot rule," which dictates that a knife-wielding subject should be considered a lethal threat within the prescribed distance. But it should be remembered that it was Birk who insisted on closing the distance. Birk also testified that "I motioned for him to come over and talk to me. He walked away."

If Birk, pursuant to the "21 foot rule," considered Williams to be a "threat," why did the officer instruct the woodcarver to come closer? When asked to elucidate that point, Birk stated that "if he would've complied with that command, it would've been a sign that he was compliant with what was going on."

Of course, if Williams had "complied" with that demand, it's entirely possible that he would have been gunned down anyway -- and that Birk would have claimed that the victim had "threatened him" by closing the distance between them.

Birk's testimony, which was clearly scripted for him, is a splendid example of what police call "creative writing" -- or what more honest people call perjury. He claimed that somehow, during the course of their very brief encounter, he saw Williams become "increasingly aggressive.... His brow was furrowed, eyes were fixed in a thousand-yard stare. His jaw was set."

Somehow, in a matter of nano-seconds, the forlorn and inoffensive American Indian woodcarver had -- at least in Birk's eyes -- assumed the fearsome demeanor of the ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain, whose "eyes were dark, his expression sullen."


In a fascinating piece of performance art, Birk recreated for the courtroom the sullen expression and "attack stance" that caused the valiant defender of the public weal to soil his skivvies.

The officer supposedly recognized and acted on these "pre-attack indicators" within the space of about four seconds. The situation "escalated more quickly than I had predicted," Birk insisted on the witness stand. So this was a "split-second decision," correct? Well -- perhaps for the police officer, but not for the victim, who according to Birk had all the time in the world to comply. "Mr. Williams had ample opportunity to do a number of things preventing this situation from becoming what it ultimately became," Birk declared on the stand.


Birk's lavishly detailed description of Williams' threatening behavior is difficult to reconcile with his own behavior in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Nowhere in the video recording of the incident can Birk be heard telling other officers or onlookers that Williams had threatened him with a knife. In his on-scene interview with the above-mentioned Detective Mudd, Birk said nothing about "pre-attack indicators." In his testimony at the inquest -- a pseudo-judicial procedure that is neither a criminal nor a civil trial -- Birk recited his lines like a well-rehearsed soap opera actor, displaying the composure of a sociopath in assigning all of the blame to the victim.


The jury at the inquest was not convinced that Birk had told the truth about the supposed threat posed by Williams. On February 15, Seattle PD's Firearms Review Board ruled that the fatal shooting was "unjustified," and recommended that "Officer Birk must remain stripped of all Seattle Police powers and authority, as he was on October 5th, 2010 when he surrendered his gun and badge."

Birk had clearly committed an act of criminal homicide, and his only "punishment" was to be "stripped" of something nobody really possesses -- the supposed power and authority to engage in discretionary killing.

As we’ve seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is “overkill.” (Birk, like so many other police officers, is a military veteran, having served as a paralegal in the National Guard.) It likewise means that they are functionally immune from prosecution when they commit acts of criminal homicide.

Shortly after the decision of the Firearms Review Board was made public, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg announced that although the murder of Williams was “troubling,” no criminal charges would be filed against the murderer. This is  because it Satterberg believes it would be impossible to demonstrate that the unjustified killing was the product of malice.

“A jury would be compelled to find Officer Birk not guilty,” Satterberg claimed. This should be taken as an oblique admission by Satterberg that he would have thrown the case if it had gone to trial. The state’s homicide statute recognizes that it is not necessary to demonstrate malice in cases where death results from criminal neglect.

Furthermore, the relevant section Washington’s criminal code describes an offense called “homicide by abuse” in which one person, in “circumstances manifesting an extreme indifference to human life,” causes the death of ” a developmentally disabled person”; although this statute was written to apply to cases in which mentally handicapped or otherwise dependent people die from prolonged mistreatment, a properly motivated prosecutor could find a way to convince a jury that the statute should cover an incident in which a police officer summarily executes a deaf, mentally challenged woodcarver.

As is generally the case when a member of the Krypteia slaughters a helot, the only ones punished are the local tax victims: The City of Seattle has announced a $1.5 million settlement with the victim’s family.

Birk himself will probably join the ever-growing ranks of "Gypsy Cops" and turn up somewhere else swaddled in a government-provided costume and invested with the spurious authority to kill.

Police authority" is a strange, mystical property that leaves a heavy residue of privilege even in those, like Ian Birk, from whom it is withdrawn.

Consider what would happen if the situation had been reversed on that Seattle street corner last August 30: What if Birk had been ordered to divest himself of his weapon by a member of the productive class? What if Birk had been the one gunned down four seconds after that demand had been made by someone who later claimed that he felt "threatened" by Birk's facial expression?

Were a sanctified personage in a police uniform to be killed in that fashion by a Mundane who displayed no malice, D.A. Satterberg would probably find the motivation, and summon the necessary creativity, to build a criminal case.

In a recent case of that kind in Eugene, Oregon, a woman reportedly suffering from schizophrenia allegedly gunned down Officer Chris Kulcullin, who -- his chosen profession aside-- appears to have been a genuinely decent man, with a wife and two children. While the specifics of that horrible episode differ from the killing of John T. Williams, both of those incidents were random acts of unjustified lethal violence. Ian Birk faces no criminal charges. Cheryl Kidd, who allegedly murdered Kulcullin, has been charged with aggravated murder, and could face the death penalty.

The only thing separating those two acts of criminal homicide is "authority" -- that quantity, at once elusive and illusive, that supposedly elevates the State's hired enforcers above the hoi polloi, permitting them to inflict summary punishment on any Mundane who displays so much as a flicker of defiance. It is this ineffable gift that allows Ian Birk and his ilk to gun down, without serious consequence, any Mundane who dares give them a dirty look. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Blood On Their Hands

The federal "hate crimes" measure recently signed into "law" by Barack Obama will do nothing to protect innocent people from criminal violence. But thanks to the cynical pressure group politics that led to passage of that measure, thousands of innocent people will certainly die.

Working with its congressional allies, the White House attached the hate crimes measure as an amendment to the most recent military spending measure, a $680 billion appropriation that contains at least $120 billion to fund the ongoing slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The brutally honest Chris Hedges describes how this arrangement managed to unite advocates of tyrannical "tolerance" on the home front with those who promote the mass murder of harmless foreigners abroad:

"It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game."

The price of "tolerance": An Afghan child displays the burns inflicted by a NATO bombing (left); other "liberated" Afghans and Iraqis are seen below. Hundreds or thousands of additional victims will die thanks to the political deal that brought about the new hate crimes law.


Granted, it isn't likely that the Pentagon appropriation, including the war funding, would have been defeated.


The difference between this measure and its predecessors is this: The leading elements of the "hate industry" -- those sanctimonious scolds who make a handsome living tutoring the rest of us in the ways of "tolerance" -- are now directly implicated in the avoidable mass murder of innocent people in the Near East.

For the squalid collection of pressure groups that promoted passage of the hate crimes measure, -- the so-called Anti-Defamation League, the self-styled Human Rights Campaign, the fraudulently named Southern Poverty Law Center, et. al. -- this is an entirely acceptable arrangement. Their fund-raising will prosper; their stature in Washington will continue to grow; their influence over law enforcement will expand; most importantly, the power of the state to persecute their political enemies will be significantly enhanced.

Oh, sure -- the political trade-off behind this "victory" means that poor brown people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq will suffer violent death in their homes, streets, and houses of worship, cultivating understandable anti-American hatred that will yield a bloody harvest of terrorism and unending war.

But, hey, aren't we talking about religion-obsessed, hetero-patriarchal homophobes, anyway? Wouldn't the world be better off if we were to be rid of such intolerant people?

Through its involvement in the political deal that led to passage of the hate crimes bill, the Hate Industry (aka the Tolerance Lobby) took an ownership interest in the regime's wars of aggression abroad.

Those running that Lobby are certainly smart enough to have realized this. The moral calculus behind that trade-off must be similar to the self-serving calculations of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: Since there is a certain sacrificial "percentage" of people who are fated to die each year to serve society's "greater" interests, why scruple over the death of a single unpleasant, greedy old woman -- or several thousand innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, or Iraqis? And wouldn't there be something redemptive in using that horrible war to do something to advance the cause of "tolerance" here?

The hate crimes legislation signed by Obama on October 28 bore the names of James Byrd and Matthew Shephard, murder victims whose assailants were found, prosecuted, and punished very efficiently without the dubious benefit of a federal "hate crimes" statute. There is no shortage of laws dealing with criminal violence against innocent people. But purposes served by "hate crimes" laws have nothing to do with protecting the innocent.

"Hate crimes" statutes invert the priorities described by Justice Felix Frankfurter (in a moment of atypical wisdom): "Law is concerned with external behavior and not the inner life of man." By enhancing the penalty for criminal acts either provably or putatively rooted in certain proscribed attitudes, "hate crimes" statutes impermissibly assert the government's jurisdiction over the inner life of individuals. This is, in principle, an assertion of totalitarian power.

The newly enacted hate crimes measure also expands the assault on what remains of federalism. During that brief and fondly remembered period during which the U.S. Constitution was recognized as the "law of the land," it was understood that whatever police powers could properly be exercised were (with very few specific exceptions) entirely within the purview of the individual states.

Briefly indulging the winsome fantasy that the Constitution is in some way relevant to the actions of the government ruling us, we dust off Federalist #45 in which Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, explained that the "few and defined" powers of the federal government do not include a general police power (as the Lopez ruling reminded us a few years ago).

"Did you take offense over an opinion, an unfriendly look, a politically incorrect bumper sticker or t-shirt inscription? Give us a call!"

By way of contrast, the "numerous and indefinite" powers reserved to the states "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people" as well as matters of "internal order" -- that is, police power dealing with the protection of life, limb, and property.

There are myriad sound reasons why states shouldn't enact hate crimes laws, but they're constitutionally free to do so. The newly enacted federal measure, on the other hand, is facially incompatible with the assignment of powers described by Madison and required by the 10th Amendment precisely because it would permit federal intervention in criminal matters that fall entirely within the innate jurisdiction of the states.

That jurisdictional arrangement can be changed, of course -- through a constitutional amendment. That not being the case here, there are ample legitimate grounds for state governments to nullify the new federal hate crimes measure. Ironically, one of the arguments used by the measure's supporters actually amounts to what could be called "nullification in reverse."

The new hate crimes "law" provides for an end-run around the Constitution's prohibition of double jeopardy, thereby encouraging federal prosecution of people either acquitted by local courts, or charged with offenses other than "hate crimes."

Defenders of this approach insist that this is "necessary" because some local jurisdictions are fetid pools of bigotry, thereby creating the prospect of jury nullification on the basis of racial or other prejudice. They say that this approach is constitutionally appropriate because of the "dual sovereignty" relationship between states and the federal government.

Bear in mind that this argument comes from the lips and keyboards of left-collectivists who ordinarily regard any reference, however oblique, to state "sovereignty" as covert code for segregation or other offenses against "tolerance."


Tearing away the gauze of sophistry in which they've been swaddled, "dual sovereignty" prosecutions are substantively indistinguishable from double jeopardy. They also tend to be dictated by considerations extraneous to individual justice -- such as race-based interest group politics.


To understand how the "dual sovereignty" doctrine operates in practice, consider this contrast: After being acquitted of criminal charges by a local jury, the four police officers who beat Rodney King were subjected to a federal "civil rights" trial for the same offense, based on the same facts; two of them were convicted. However, when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in what many regarded as a race-based act of jury nullification, he was not subjected to a "dual sovereignty" civil rights or hate crime prosecution.


But this sort of thing is to be expected of a system in which "justice" is a function of belonging to a government-protected collective. That's the vision being inflicted on our society through the new "hate crimes" law, a progressive victory purchased for the paltry cost of $120 billion to kill helpless foreigners.


Such a deal!

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Dum spiro, pugno!