The Police State's "Cardinal Rule": The Mundane Must Submit

British officer: You call yourself a patriot, and a loyal subject to King George?

Hawkeye: I don't call myself "subject" to much of anything.

Hawkeye explains the foundational tenet of the American worldview to a self-important armed government functionary offended by the frontiersman's principled defiance; from the 1992 version of Last of the Mohicans.


Marilyn Levias, a 19-year-old Seattle girl involved in a jaywalking incident during which a police officer assaulted another 17-year-old girl,  displayed "a dangerous refusal to observe a cardinal rule that civilians simply must comply with instructions from police officers," insists Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes. 

For this, Miss Levias faces a gross misdemeanor charge of "Obstructing a Police Officer." During the confrontation, Levias's 17-year-old friend, Angel L. Rosenthal, intervened on her behalf and was punched in the face by officer Ian P. Walsh. As is typically the case when a Mundane's face obstructs the trajectory of a police officer's fist, the victim is the one facing criminal charges. 


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In announcing the criminal charge against Levias, City Attorney Holmes offered the mildest possible limpwristed swipe at the Seattle Police Department by saying that the incident illustrates the need "for de-escalation training for officers." Holmes also cited an observation by Judge Michael Spearman, auditor for the police department's Office of Professional Responsibility, that "The use of force in a [jaywalking] situation as a best practice is questionable."


Even this timid and tentative criticism was an unbearable affront to the delicate sensibilities of Rich O'Neill, president of Seattle's Armed Tax-Feeders Guild. 


"Force was not used in a jay-walking incident! Force was used because the individuals involved assaulted a uniformed police officer," protested O'Neill.

The "assault" in question occurred when the teenage girls tried to free themselves from Walsh's clutches after he had needlessly laid hands on them. They were uncooperative, not threatening. 

Yet to O'Neill, who is apparently so Emo that his last name should be Philips, jaywalking occupies the same continuum as violent crime. 

Accordingly, the use of overwhelming force is entirely appropriate: "Officers are trained to enforce the law and not to `de-escalate' (walk away) simply because a violator objects to being stopped. That would simply lead to lawlessness."


Indeed: If we don't permit police officers to slug jaywalking teenage girls in the face, the terrorists will win.


There are evil axioms embedded in the statements of both Holmes and O'Neill. First of all, both assume that there is a dichotomy between police and "civilians" -- which of necessity means that the former should be regarded as military, or at least para-military, in nature. Holmes reinforced that assumption by referring to the Mayor of Seattle as "commander in chief" of the city's police. 

As I've noted elsewhere, the idea that "civilians" are to render instant, unqualified obedience to any armed individual in a government-issued costume is the chief characteristic of the martial law mind-set. 

O'Neill exhibits that mind-set when he complains that "de-escalation" is tantamount to surrender -- or, as he put it, walking away from a confrontation. 

In fact, if the police are to be peace officers, rather than paramilitary enforcers, there are many circumstances in which they should simply walk away. The alternative is ... well, what we're dealing with now: The promiscuous use of physical coercion, including lethal force, as summary punishment for failure to "cooperate" with the police. 


Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister who created the first modern police force in 1829 while serving as British Home Secretary, insisted that "police are the public and the public are the police." The only difference between a police officer and any other "civilian," from Peel's perspective, was that he is "paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen" where protection of life, liberty, and property are concerned. 

Thus if it was proper for Ian Walsh the tax-engorged state functionary to punch a teenage girl in the mouth, it would be just as proper for a hypothetical productive private citizen named Ian Walsh to do exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. 

As any honest person will acknowledge, our alternate-universe Ian Walsh would be facing assault charges, rather than being commended as a stalwart defender of public order.

It was the assumption of police impunity, not the requirement to "de-escalate," that led to Walsh's lawless assault on 17-year-old Angel Rosenthal -- unless we are to assume, as do O'Neill and his ilk, that the individual police officer is the law. 

Once again, according to Peel's "Nine Principles of Policing" those paid to perform the police function must display "absolute impartial service to the law"; in this case, "subordination" is a suitable synonym for "service." 


Likewise, Peel recognized that public support for government-employed "professional" police is inversely proportionate to the tendency of police to employ coercive force, particularly under dubious circumstances. 

Peel was a conservative politician steeped in the assumptions of an imperial monarchy. Yet his "cardinal rule" regarding the relationship between the public and the police would be that the latter must defer to the former, rather than the reverse. 

This is why, in seeking the "voluntary cooperation" of the public, the police were to emphasize "persuasion, advice, and warning," Peel maintained, employing compulsion only when absolutely necessary. Under Peel's standards, that threshold obviously isn't met when a teenage girl jaywalks and then mouths off to a police officer. For those hostage to the martial-law mindset, that threshold is reached whenever a Mundane displays so much as a moment's hesitation in complying with a police officer's directives, whether or not they are rooted in actual legal authority. 


Jesse Wright, a newlywed 22-year-old EMT from Chattanooga, faces a cluster of spurious criminal charges because he refused to submit to the supposed authority of Officer Jim Daves. At the time, Daves was physically obstructing Wright's efforts to get medical attention for his wife Aline, a cancer survivor who was experiencing a stroke. 


Jesse and Aline are both employed by Chattanooga's Erlanger Medical Center. Aline, who lost her leg to cancer a few years ago, is undergoing chemotherapy, and the possible side effects of her treatment include stroke. Last Wednesday, when Aline's face began to droop and her speech became slurred, Jesse called the Medical Center and informed them of her condition. En route, Jesse treated stop lights as if they were stop signs -- pausing at each and then proceeding through them before they turned green.

Aline Wright in the hospital.

Daves, who was lurking near one stop light, hit his siren and followed Jesse and Aline to the hospital. When they arrived, Jesse grabbed Aline and, carrying her in his arms, tried to get her into the emergency room. His path was suddenly obstructed by Daves, who ignored the obvious fact that Jesse was dealing with a life-and-death emergency. 

For Daves, the really important thing was not to render aid, but rather securing compliance from a Mundane -- even if this meant prolonging the encounter while his stroke-afflicted wife suffered permanent brain damage. Aline's symptoms were visible and unmistakable -- yet Daves was fixated entirely on enforcing the "cardinal rule" of contemporary law enforcement: Make The Mundane Submit.


To his credit, Jesse ignored Daves' self-preoccupied demands and got his wife the treatment she needed. Daves continued to harass Jesse as the newlywed husband and his professional colleagues sought treatment for Aline. In addition to barging in to Aline's hospital room, Daves called Jesse a "sh*thead" and promised that he would "think of something" to justify arresting him. A couple of days later, hospital security -- acting on a spurious, vindictive warrant filed by Daves -- arrested Jesse on several counts, including a felony charge of "evading an officer." 

If Jesse hadn't "evaded" Officer Daves, Aline (whom he had married just days before) might either be dead or so mentally incapacitated that her career options would be limited to employment in a sheltered workshop or a position as a patrol officer for the Chattanooga Police Department.

Because he's been charged with a felony, Jesse has been placed on unpaid leave. By way of contrast, Daves has been put on paid vacation while the police department sorts out the PR mess the officer has made. 


A very similar incident occurred last year when paramedic Maurice White, Jr. was assaulted by State Trooper Daniel Martin in Paden, Oklahoma, a small town 40 miles east of Oklahoma City. 

According to  an AP account, Martin was speeding in his cruiser in a frantic rush to get nowhere in particular, and had his feelings hurt when the ambulance — which was actually providing a useful service by ferrying Stella Davis to the hospital — didn’t pull over for him. He then compounded his useless rage by imagining that the driver flipped him off.

The ambulance driver, intent on getting the elderly patient the care she needed, hadn’t noticed that the trooper had been behind him with lights flashing. When Trooper Martin zoomed by, he made radio contact and snarled that the driver “should consider checking [his] rear view mirrors.”

A little while later, Martin cut off a car driven by a family member of the patient and signaled for the ambulance to pull over. Seeing a woman sitting next to the Trooper, and thinking she might need medical care, White -- who was supervising the driver -- complied — only to find himself under assault and the subject of a spurious arrest on the way to the hospital. 

When Martin tried to arrest the ambulance driver, Mr. White — a man of amazing patience and dignity — intervened to explain that the ambulance was carrying a patient. This prompted a tantrum from Martin, who assaulted White twice and threatened to arrest both him and the driver. That attempt failed, but not before Martin actually placed a hand on White’s throat to choke him as the patient’s family looked on in stunned, disgusted disbelief.

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Later, at the hospital, Martin actually said in the presence of witnesses that he was prepared to pull his gun and use lethal force against White. After all, de-escalating an unnecessary confrontation would be tantamount to surrender, and countenancing defiance by a Mundane would fatally undermine respect for The Law.  

Episodes like this are hardly uncommon. Indeed, it's reasonable to believe that treatment of this kind -- if not necessarily this severity -- is becoming the rule, rather than the exception, during encounters between police and citizens. 

Where police constitute a threat to life, liberty, and property, ignoring them -- or actively resisting their demands -- is not only legally permissible, but morally imperative. Now that the Brotherhood in Blue is becoming little more than an armed plunderbund (noble and worthy exceptions to that characterization notwithstanding), it's difficult to see how things would be noticeably worse if we simply did away with it outright. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"Mysteries of Policy": Officially Sanctioned Murder

To prove that these sort of policed societies are a violation offered to nature ... it needs only to look upon the sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence, which are every where used to support them.


Let us take a review of the dungeons, whips, chains, racks, gibbets with which every society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in pride and madness, and millions in abject servitude, and dependence.


There was a time, when I looked with a reverential awe on these mysteries of policy, but age, experience and philosophy have rent the veil; and I view this sanctum sanctorum ... without any enthusiastic admiration.


-- Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)


Troy Meade killed Niles Meservey in the parking lot of Everett, Washington's Chuckwagon Inn last June 10. Meade shot the unarmed, intoxicated man seven times in the back. These facts are not in dispute.


In his recently concluded trial, Meade justified his lethal assault by describing it as self-defense: At the time of the shooting, the drunken Meservey was behind the wheel of his Corvette, and Meade was standing behind and to the left of the vehicle.


The jury rejected the claim of self-defense, because Meade was never in significant physical jeopardy. Meservey had plowed his car into a chain-link fence; if he had put the car in reverse, he wouldn't have hit Meade.


Trial testimony established that Meservey was not backing up when Meade pulled his gun. The wrecked Corvette was still embedded in the fence when the crime scene investigators arrived.


Meade was charged with first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. The same jury that rejected Meade's self-defense claim acquitted him of both counts.


Guilty on the facts, acquitted by the jury: Officer Troy Meade and his wife react to the verdict.


If the killing of Niles Meservey wasn't self-defense, how could it be something other than an act of criminal homicide?



Since Troy Meade is a police officer and his victim was a mere Mundane, this question typifies what Edmund Burke described as the "mysteries of policy" -- those special exemptions from the moral law claimed by the exalted beings controlling the state's apparatus of coercion.


Any other individual who killed a man under the circumstances recounted above would almost certainly be found guilty of criminal homicide. Because Meade was dressed in the sacerdotal vestments of the state's punitive priesthood, his lawless act of lethal violence was transmuted into an act of policy.


To borrow the expression used by the government ruling us when it audits the shortcomings of other officially established criminal syndicates, this was an "extra-judicial killing" -- a term found in descriptions of murder rampages carried out by police in such places as Nigeria, Pakistan, and Latin American dictatorships of yore. Meade's extra-judicial killing of Meservey was a form of "street justice" by way of summary execution.


"Time to end this -- enough is enough!" According to Officer Stephen Klocker, who was on the scene at the Chuckwagon on June 10 and on the stand as a prosecution witness at Meade's trial, this was what his fellow officer exclaimed as he drew his gun and killed Meservey.


Klocker, a 21-year police veteran, offered his testimony against his own professional interest -- and, as police whistleblowers elsewhere would attest, at some risk to his physical safety.


During the trial Everett's municipal government -- which faces a lawsuit by Meservey's family, and thus had an interest in seeing Meade acquitted -- took the remarkable step of providing the defense with documents intended to undermine Klocker's reliability as a witness. It is ironic, but hardly inexplicable, that the city government didn't make an issue of Klocker's credibility until he testified that another cop had killed a citizen without legal cause or justification.


According to the jury, this purely discretionary killing was not a criminal act. Apparently the lethal fusillade was just an unusually assertive way to bring "closure" to an encounter between an obstreperous drunk and a stressed-out police officer.


That encounter lasted less than a half hour. There were no exigent circumstances involved. By exercising minimal force and exposing himself to an all-but-undetectably small amount of personal peril, Meade could have deprived Meservey of his car keys, immobilizing him until he was either unconscious or cooperative.


Nah. Too risky. The only safe option here, obviously, was open gunplay.


The reasoning behind the verdict seems to be roughly this: "Sure, the circumstances didn't legally justify the use of lethal force, but we have no right to second-guess a decision reflecting the inscrutable wisdom of an agent of state authority."


Somewhere (eternal judgment not being my prerogative, I don't claim to know where) Joseph de Maistre, the 18th Century apostle of absolutism, is smiling with approval over the verdict in the Meade trial. In Meade's acquittal, Maistre would find vindication of his foundational authoritarian maxim:


"[A]ll greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears."


In Maistre's vision of the world, terror is the foundation of "society." His contemporary, Edmund Burke, drew a crucial distinction between "artificial" or "policed" societies, on the one hand, and "natural" societies, on the other.


The latter are rooted in tradition and cooperation; the former are controlled through "sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence" -- institutionalized terror and officially sanctioned homicide.


Cheerfully oblivious to besetting reality, many still believe that our society is governed by laws, rather than the arbitrary will of individuals.


The morally contorted verdict in Troy Meade's trial offers a useful corrective by starkly illustrating that sanctified official violence is the foundation of the "policed society" in which we live.




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Dum spiro, pugno!