Child-Stealers and Prison Profiteers: A Case Study

A young inmate at the Juvenile Detention Center in Nampa, Idaho. 

“The Court, in its infinite wisdom, has committed your child, based on risk and needs.” 

From  the introductory video “Your Child Has Been Committed to The Juvenile Corrections System”

 

 

For reasons beyond his control, it had taken Donny* three attempts to complete his senior year in high school. On his twentieth birthday, Donny was three days from finishing the classwork necessary to graduate from the Rebound School of Opportunity in Meridian, Idaho. All he had left was to make an oral presentation of his senior report. He had already been offered a post-graduation job at Valley Truss, a local construction service and supply store.

At home, Donny’s father and mother, David and Norma, had prepared a party in honor of their oldest son’s birthday and his anticipated graduation.  When they got home from school, Donny’s siblings, Larry and Sally*, were eager to celebrate with their older brother. But Donny didn’t come home from school that day. Just before classes ended, he was dragged away in handcuffs by his probation officer, John Youngkin and taken to the Ada County Jail, where he will remain until April 28.

Over the past six years, Donny has been incarcerated in a variety of institutions, from “treatment centers” in both Idaho and Utah to the Idaho Department Juvenile Corrections Center in Nampa. The juvenile facility in Nampa has become notorious for corruption and sexual exploitation of inmates by guards and other staff members.

In 2008, Donny pleaded guilty to charges of indecent exposure and battery as a result of an incident with his younger brother and sister that did not involve physical contact.

“Norma and I went to Papa Murphy's to pick up some pizzas for dinner,” David recounted to Pro Libertate. “We were gone just a few minutes – not even a half hour – and we left Donny here in charge of the younger kids. He was 14 at the time, and he seemed able to handle things. Besides, it was just down the block.”

At the time, Sally was six years of age, and Larry was ten. When Dave and Norma returned, Sally told them that Donny had “asked us to take our clothes off.”

“We were upset and worried, of course, and we tried to find out immediately what had happened,” Dave related. “As far as we could tell, it wasn't as if he had abused the kids, or even touched them. It was a `You show me yours, and I'll show you mine' kind of thing, which is bad, and wrong, but it was not anywhere near as bad as we were afraid it might be.”

Still, out of an abundance of caution, and acting as conscientious parents, Dave and Norma decided to have their daughter examined.

“We took Sally to the hospital right away, and she was fine,” Dave reports. However, the hospital visit resulted in a mandatory report to social workers and police, and Donny was in custody before his parents returned.

An examination of Donny conducted on behalf of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare concluded that the teenager displayed “Mild Mental Retardation to Borderline Intellectual Functioning.” He was on a variety of prescription medications and severely depressed by the prospect of being separated from his family. His parents, who were hardly people of means, were predictably desperate to find an alternative to juvenile prison. They didn’t understand that the juvenile “justice” system is designed to prolong needless and unproductive suffering.

“The original evaluation called for outpatient therapy through SANE Solutions,” David points out. “However, at the hearing [counselor] Larry Overholser discouraged us from seeking outpatient treatment, insisting that what he called an`in-patient' approach would be better.”

Dave and Norma took that advice, without being told explicitly what it would entail. They soon regretted their decision.

“We asked the judge for Donny to receive in-patient treatment. He agreed – and the bailiffs took him into custody immediately. That happened six years ago. He has been a prisoner ever since.”

From the orientation video for parents of juvenile inmates.

 Donny’s six-year ordeal has included two month-long stints in the Juvenile Corrections Center (JCC) in Nampa. During those visits, Dave recalls, “We saw staff members who were covered in prison tattoos, and a few who were wearing [GPS] ankle bracelets” because of criminal convictions.

Seeing their son confined in a facility where he was surrounded by violent offenders – both among fellow inmates and the staff – led his parents to wonder “if we should sue the County for child endangerment,” David observes. They wouldn’t be the first to file a lawsuit of that kind against the JCC.

In June 2012, seven Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections employees filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that their supervisors had permitted female staffers to engage in sexual misconduct with male detainees. According to the lawsuit, the facility’s “cronyist, incompetent, corrupt, and unresponsive administration” had abetted widespread “fraud and waste of public resources”; bestowed promotions on unqualified personnel, who were insulated from accountability; and retaliated against employees who expressed concerns to supervisors. 

One former employee described how some staffers would sexually exploit prisoners and were “grooming” others to replace them as resident predators.

“One staff member was [sexually] involved with a juvenile,” Shane Penrod told the Boise Weekly. “That juvenile became a staff member and now they are involved with another juvenile.”

The allegations didn’t reflect the isolated views of a few embittered dissidents: A total of 47 current and former employees eventually lodged complaints against the agency. The lawsuit claimed that the Nampa Police Department was made aware of the widespread problems – including sexual misconduct – at the jail, but did nothing about it.

The IDJC filed an official response denying all of the allegations. Sharon Harrigfeld, director of the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections, issued a statement reassuring the public “that our facilities are safe” and thanking “all staff for the public service provided each day to community safety.”

That statement was issued on July 31, 2012. At that time, the facility’s staff, whose indivisible probity had earned Harrigfeld’s unqualified endorsement, included 31-year-old employee Julie McCormick, who was arrested several months later and charged with sexual assault on a 15-year-old boy.

McCormick, who has entered a guilty plea, faces a sentencing hearing on March 17. The sexual offenses she committed are outlined, in infuriating detail, in a $1.2 million tort claim filed on behalf of her 15-year-old victim in November 2012.

While confined in the Juvenile Corrections Center's mental health unit, the young boy "was a victim of statutory rape" by McCormick, who had been designated as "Safety and Security Supervisor" despite having "little or no qualifications for security, management, or care and treatment of juveniles or mental health patients...." That position gave McCormick the opportunity to groom the teenager, who was on psychiatric medications, "in a manner commonly used by child molesters" -- lavishing attention on him, laundering his clothes and bedding at home, giving the boy "love notes" and taking his "letters and photos of his girlfriend out of his cell, isolating him from other persons." 

The sexual exploitation began on July 4, 2012 and continued for several months. Staff and management were aware of what was happening, but no action was taken.

 

JCC Whistleblowers with their attorney (Boise Weekly photo).

IDJC staffer Rhonda Ledford, one of the original plaintiffs in the whistleblower suit, has confirmed that employees had seen evidence of McCormick's criminal conduct and expressed concerns to supervisors the previous April, but were “required to sign confidentiality statements about the situation.” 

On February 5 of this year, notice of an impending lawsuit was filed against the Department Juvenile Corrections on behalf of a former inmate who claims he was “threatened with bodily harm” by the staff if he were to “talk about crimes committed in the facility.” The plaintiff was committed to the JCC in June 2008 and released in February 2010 –a time frame that includes the two months Donny  served there. He claims that the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections has allowed “sexual predators to have continued access to inmates” at the JCC.

According to the plaintiff, he was the victim of repeated sexual assaults, including one that took place “while [he] was shackled and recovering from being anesthetized from surgical dental procedures in October 2008.” One staffer “locked him in a room … and had sexual intercourse” with the boy, who had been sexually abused before arriving at the JCC. The predator would seek to “pay” the victim for sexual favors – and then threaten “to turn him in for having cash in the facility.” The guard also “threatened she would tell Plaintiff’s friends and family of his sex acts if he spoke to anyone” about what had been done to him.

Some of the female staffers “watched Plaintiff and other male inmates shower for their own prurient interests,” according to the tort claim. Others “arranged for physical fights involving juvenile and young adult inmates at the facility, off camera, in a large closet room.” After he filed a complaint about his mistreatment, the staff “retaliated against him with extended incarceration and false accusations of behavior.”

The victim’s criminal record, and the possibility of being sent incarcerated again after his parole, left him vulnerable to blackmail following his release: His chief tormentor “continued to threaten and intimidate [him] through 2013.”

Rather than carrying out a thorough lustration of the facility in Nampa, the IDOJC filed a motion to seal the documents connected to the whistleblower lawsuit. This was to be expected, given that covering up sexual misconduct by “corrections” personnel is standard operating procedure.

In 2007, Timothy Ray Gilligan, who was employed as a prison guard at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in 2007, admitted that he had repeatedly had sexual relations with a female inmate. In September 2009, Gilligan was arraigned on a charge of felonious sexual misconduct. Thanks to an all but inexplicable act of leniency by the Ada County prosecutor, and the uncharacteristic generosity of the Idaho Sex Offender Classification Board, Gilligan did not have to register as a sex offender. He wasn’t even prosecuted on the sex charge. As a result, he served only a few months of a three-year sentence.

The Ada County Prosecutor's office, in collaboration with 4th District Judge Ronald Wilper, arranged an agreement in which Gilligan was permitted to plead guilty to a charge of burglary -- despite the fact that the only thing the offender may have taken by force was a captive woman's self-respect.

The Sex Offender Classification Board helped out by relieving Gilligan of the prospect of being a registered sex offender, or even a violent sexual predator (VSP). This decision was supposedly made on account of the results of a "psycho-sexual evaluation" carried out by SANE Solutions, a quasi-private psychological counseling service that provides such evaluations and supervises treatment of convicted sex offenders.

A quick reminder: If Donny and his parents had agreed to an “out-patient” treatment program, it would have been conducted through SANE Solutions.

Gilligan, who worked as a "psychiatric technician" in the prison system subsequent to his admitted offenses, may have known how to game that system. Then again, it's obvious that Gilligan's erstwhile colleagues in the criminal "justice" system extended every conceivable professional courtesy in the effort to avoid ruining his life by forcing him to register as a sex offender.

As Donny  and his parents can testify, in sexual misconduct cases not involving employees of the state criminal "justice" system, the Ada County prosecutor's office is not inclined toward such generosity.

The stated reason for Donny’s final arrest was an alleged probation violation. Specifically, he had not subjected himself to a required polygraph examination. Donny’s parents insist that they had received approval for an alternative treatment program as a substitute for a polygraph examination.

The polygraph ranks just below the witching rod as a reliable scientific instrument. It was invented by the same man who created the comic book character “Wonder Woman,” an Amazonian princess who wielded a magic lasso that could compel truthful disclosures from those whom it encompassed. Polygraph findings are generally not admissible as evidence in court, but the device is routinely used during interrogations as a way to intimidate suspects into confessing. It is also widely used to “re-offend” people on probation.

Several years ago, Donny “failed” a polygraph question about being alone with his siblings in violation of the terms of his probation. His father David insists that this was not only untrue, but impossible.

“We were appalled by that result,” he declares. “Donny was never left alone. He was under 24/7 supervision.”

Donny requested a second polygraph examination, which meant another $150 fee had to be paid by the family.  An appointment was made with an approved polygraph technician, and Donny, along with his father and his attorney, went to the appointed location – only to be told that the technician had selected a different location several miles away.

“Somehow we made it there on time, probably breaking several traffic laws doing so,” David recalls. This sudden change of plans resulted in the creation of an unnecessary high-stress situation, just as the harried young man was going to undergo a scientifically dubious examination that measures, among other things, his stress levels.

The second polygraph examination resulted in Donny being sent back to confinement to be treated for what were described as “thinking errors.”

“What on earth is a `thinking error'?” David asked, his voice burdened with incredulity. One of the doctors who examined Donny asked the same question: “He told us that he had no idea what was meant by the expression `thinking error,' or how it could be treated.”

This meant another prolonged separation from the family as Donny made the circuit of treatment facilities in Idaho and Utah. Despite the anxiety, depression, and other difficulties he faced, Donny excelled in his independent study program, earning top grades in academic subjects and finding a place on the Honor Roll. Yet with metronomic regularity, some new problem would arise to extend his period of confinement and prevent him from graduating.

After Donny enrolled in the Rebound School, David recalls, “We went to a counselor ... to try arranging an alternative to a polygraph. The proposal was that he would undergo six additional counseling sessions, and do some special assignments, in place of the polygraph examination.” David says that this alternative course was approved, leaving the family hopeful that the ordeal was, at last, winding down. He was once again living at home, flourishing in his studies, and doing volunteer work, along with his mother, every Thursday night at a food pantry run by a church in Kuna.

Every evaluation attested that Donny was not a danger to “re-offend.” If the object had been rehabilitation, that goal had clearly been achieved. But the probation and parole system is run by people who have the power to prolong the suffering of harmless people, and the whimsical cruelty necessary to do so on the thinnest pretext.

“We were half-way through the supplemental therapy sessions when the probation officer showed up and arrested him at school” last November 18, David recalls. “He had called the Principal at the Rebound Academy and found out that Donny had two weeks left to finish his work for graduation.” In what could reasonably be construed as an act of deliberate sadism, the probation officer waited until Donny's birthday to drag him away from school in handcuffs.

“Our family had prepared a birthday party for Donny,” Dave points out. “The kids came home from school eager to see their brother, expecting to have a party. Instead we find out that he was arrested.”

According to the State of Idaho, the “kids” who were so eager to see Donny were his victims, and they needed to be protected from him. The terms dictated to the family made it impossible for David, who is on disability, to find a job: While Donny was at home, one of his parents had to be present to supervise him, especially when the younger children were at home.

“It’s been six years, and our family simply cannot take it anymore,” David told the judge during the January 14 hearing in which it was decided that the state Corrections system would steal another 168 days of Donny’s life.

“Idaho has to be number one in something – and it’s number one in dropout rate,” Norma pointed out in her statement to the judge. “I don’t want my kid to be a statistic.”

Donny wasn’t merely a statistic:  He was in many ways typical of thousands of troubled but essentially harmless people who are devoured by the tax-fueled engine of misery called the Idaho Criminal Justice System.

Despite its reputation for being commendably hostile toward government, the state ranks second in the country in terms of the prison population’s growth rate. 

Those convicted of non-violent offenses in Idaho compose 62 percent of the inmate population, and they typically serve sentences twice as long as the national average. 

Over the next five years, barring dramatic changes in the system, Idaho tax victims will pay roughly $300 million in prison construction and operating costs. The "corrections" system is an immensely lucrative racket, sustaining not only those directly employed to operate prisons and jails but also the profiteers  who populate an ever-expanding network of "private" organizations affiliated with the probation and parole system.

Among the changes being considered by the Idaho legislature is a proposal to hire more probation and parole officers and authorize them “to impose immediate sanctions for violators.” As the ordeal of Donny and his family illustrates, such “reforms” would not be an improvement. Non-violent “offenders” sentenced to probation are handed a Sisyphean stone and assigned an overseer who can extend their suffering at his discretion. 

__
*The names of the children have been changed for the purposes of this story.

Thanks to everyone who has donated so generously to keep Pro Libertate up and running. We still need your help -- and we greatly appreciate it. God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Art Acevedo Defense: At Least My Minions Didn't Rape Her

Chief Art Acedevo of the Austin Police Department is like a figure from Roman history – in one of the worst ways imaginable. To be specific, his view of the privileges of the coercive elite, and the deferential gratitude they’re supposedly owed by the plebian class, summon memories of Cicero’s description of the aspiring ruler Marcus Antonius. In fact, Acevedo’s dismissive comments about the unjustified arrest and abuse of a female jogger displayed a tyrannical insouciance that Antonius might have considered a bit excessive.

After Cicero delivered the first of fourteen philippics against Antonius in the Senate, the general invited public applause for the forbearance he displayed by allowing the orator to live. Cicero devoted a lengthy section of his second philippic to demolishing the would-be dictator’s pretense of magnanimity:

“That, senators, is what a favor from gangsters amounts to – they refrain from murdering someone, and then they boast of their kindness.... What sort of kindness is it, to have abstained from committing a horrible evil? To me, it doesn’t appear so much a favor as a burden, to know that it was within your power to do such a thing with impunity. But I grant that it was a favor, such no greater kindness can be expected from a robber.”

Like every other notable municipal police chief, Acevedo presides over a department that is notorious for committing acts of capricious violence against innocent people – and almost without exception he defends such crimes as suitable exercises of discretion by the punitive caste.

Women tend to be preferred targets in the ongoing APD crime wave. One suitable example was the case of Vanessa Price, who was unlawfully “detained” outside her home by Officer Jermaine Hopkins, and then brutally assaulted by him after she used her cell phone to call her husband for help. Hopkins then charged the victim – who had been observing a police encounter with an unruly house guest from a distance of roughly thirty feet -- with “interference” and “resisting arrest.” The charges were dropped, and Hopkins – rather than being prosecuted for aggravated armed assault – was given a trivial suspension. Mrs. Price had to endure two months of expensive physical therapy to recover from the unprovoked attack.

Insisting that his conduct was exemplary, Hopkins appealed his suspension. He had the support of the local police union, the Austin Police Association. Sgt. Wayne Vincent, the APA’s spokesliar, insisted that Mrs. Price’s refusal to put down the phone constituted an impermissible threat to the “safety of the officer,” before which all considerations must yield.

Viewed in the context of the Austin PD’s established standards, the actions of the officers who assaulted and abducted jogger Amanda Jo Stephen as summary punishment for “contempt of cop” were comparatively mild. This is an indictment of the state-licensed gang over which Acedevo presides, not an endorsement of the behavior of this specific group of costumed kidnappers.

Blogger Chris Quintero, who captured the abduction on video, reports that the female victim had been jogging when members of the local slave patrol detained her and demanded that she present a "pass" from her master. The officers were carrying out a tax-farming operation at a busy intersection to mulct students for the supposed offense of "jaywalking," and were feasting heartily on their victims when Stephen – who was listening to music while exercising -- happened by.

When one of the officers laid hands on Stephen, the young woman -- not knowing that corpulent stranger was a cop -- jerked her arm away. After Stephen, who wasn’t operating a motor vehicle and wasn’t under arrest, refused to give her name, her captors illegally arrested her for the supposed offense of “failure to identify.” She was then shackled and hauled off screaming by a phalanx of well-nourished tax-feeders.

 

The public reaction to this crime was sufficiently vehement to provoke an effort at damage control by Acevedo, who used that opportunity to put on a display of contemptuous hostility toward the offended public. Indulging in the kind of stilted sarcasm we would expect from a spoiled adolescent, Acevedo suggested that Stephen should be abjectly grateful that she was spared being raped or killed by her uniformed betters:

“Thank you, Lord, that it’s a controversy in Austin Texas that we had the audacity to touch somebody by the arm and tell them, `Oh, my goodness, Austin Police – we’re trying to get your attention.’ In other cities, cops are actually committing sexual assaults on duty.”

Of course, if a Mundane “had the audacity to touch” a cop on the arm, this act of desecration would be described as “aggravated assault on an officer,” and the offender would most likely be tasered and beaten bloody. In this case, from Acedevo’s perspective, the female Mundane committed a crime when she shrugged off a physical advance from a member of the exalted brotherhood of official coercion:  “Quite frankly, she wasn’t charged with resisting and she’s lucky I wasn’t the arresting officer because I wouldn’t have been as generous.”

A very similar view was expressed by Officer Adam Skweres of the Pittsburgh Police Department, a serial predator who was arrested and prosecuted for sexually assaulting a woman in her home. Skweres, who had attempted to violate at least three other victims, told one of them that if she put up a struggle, he could arrest her for “resisting.” That point of view isn’t limited to obvious sociopaths like Skweres. During oral arguments before the Michigan supreme court in October 2011, Gregory J. Babbitt, an assistant DA for Michigan’s Ottawa County, acknowledged that a woman who fought off a sexual assault committed by a state-privileged attacker could be prosecuted under the state’s “resisting and obstructing” statute.

Magdalena Mol, a young wife and mother, was detained without cause in the incongruously named village of Justice, Illinois on the night of May 5, 2012 by Officer Carmen Scardine. 

At the time, Mol was waiting for a taxi to take her home after visiting a friend. 

Scardine invited her into his car and demanded identification. When the cab arrived, the officer ordered the driver to leave. Scardine then drove Mol to a secluded spot and raped her. The assailant didn’t charge Mol with an offense – a gesture Chief Acevedo would probably treat as an act of regal generosity.

Acevedo was eventually compelled to issue an apology for his remarks, which he described as a “poor analogy.” In fact, Acevedo committed a “gaffe,” as that term was defined by Michael Kinsley – that is, the unwitting disclosure of an uncomfortable truth by a public official. Acevedo’s apology most likely reflected his regret for offending his comrades, rather than any remorse for mocking Amanda Jo Stephen and the outraged public.

Writing of the era in which Rome succumbed to undisguised tyranny, historian Edward Gibbon observed: “A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression.” 

Strangely enough, that was the same message Chief Acevedo sent, even if it wasn’t the one he had intended. If it were received and properly understood, Acevedo not only would lose his job, he would be run out of town – unless the population he addressed is worthy of the contempt he expressed. 

Notes and asides 

These are terrible and terrifying times for everybody who is not a member of the Plunderbund, including people who are actively fighting it.

About a week ago I had the opportunity to share the stage in Phoenix with the estimable Larken Rose, who -- like myself -- is an evangelist of liberty who proselytes without purse or scrip. On the way home, he suffered an automobile breakdown and needs some help. 

The heroic Regina Tasca, whose case I have described in this space, is burdened with legal fees amounting to roughly three-quarters of a million dollars. She was fired from her job as a police officer in Bogota, New Jersey because she intervened to protect an innocent young man from being assaulted by a fellow cop. An Indiegogo page has been set up for those who would like to give her a hand.

Like many of you, I have been both infuriated and edified by the writings of Arthur Silber, who is enduring both severe health crises and is under assault by the IRS. He is likewise eminently worthy of support.

I've dilated on my personal and family circumstances too often, and we've been blessed by the generosity of many people (including some -- too many -- whom I have neglected to thank). I greatly appreciate the kindness of those who replied to my most recent appeal. We are still facing some immediate and very acute challenges -- not the least of which is the fact that a month from today, the home in which we're living is scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction. In the meantime, we are struggling to keep the lights on and the telephone connected.

Our landlords -- a married couple employed as prison guards who make at least $100,000 a year between them -- stopped paying on the mortgage more than two years ago, and didn't bother to tell us about their delinquency. 

While acknowledging that there are many others who deserve your support, I earnestly hope that you can send us some help, as well. Thank you, and God bless. 

Dun spiro, pugno!

Support Your Local Slave Patrol

Phyllis Bear, a convenience store clerk from Arizona, called the police after a customer threatened her. The disgruntled patron, seeking to purchase a money order, handed Bear several bills that were rejected by the store’s automated safe. Suspecting that the cash was counterfeit, Bear told him to come back later to speak with a manager.

The man had left by the time the cops arrived, and Bear was swamped at the register. Offended that she was serving paying customers rather than rendering proper deference to an emissary of the State, one of the officers arrested Bear for “obstructing government operations,” handcuffed her, and stuffed her in the back of his cruiser.

A few minutes later, while the officer was on the radio reporting the abduction, his small-boned captive took the opportunity to extract one of her hands from the cuffs, reach through the window, and start opening the back door from the outside. The infuriated captor yanked the door open and demanded that the victim extend her hands to be re-shackled. When Bear refused to comply, the officer reached into the back seat and ripped her from the vehicle, causing her to lose her balance and stumble into the second officer.

Bear, who had called the police in the tragically mistaken belief that they would help her, was charged with three felonies: “obstruction” – refusal to stiff-arm customers in order to attend to an impatient cop; “escape” – daring to pull her hand out of the shackles that had been placed upon her without lawful cause; and “aggravated assault” – impermissible contact with the sanctified personage of a police officer as a result of being violently dragged out of the car by the “victim’s” comrade.

The first two charges were quickly dropped. During a bench trial, the prosecution admitted that the arrest was illegal. Yet the judge ruled that Bear – who had no prior criminal history -- was guilty of “escape” and imposed one year of unsupervised probation. That conviction was upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals, which ruled that although the arrest was unwarranted and illegal, Bear had engaged in an illegal act of “self-help” by refusing to submit to abduction with appropriate meekness.

Decades ago, when Arizona was a more civilized place, the state “followed the common-law rule that a person may resist an illegal arrest,” the court acknowledged.  But that morally sound and intellectually unassailable policy was a casualty of what the court called “a trend … away from the common-law rule and toward the judicial settlement of such disputes.” Referring to the act of unlawfully seizing another human being and holding that person by force as a “dispute” is a bit like calling assault rape a “lover's quarrel.”

“Permitting an individual to resort to self-help to escape from an illegal arrest, rather than seeking a remedy through the legal system, would invite violence and endanger public safety,” pontificated the court -- carefully ignoring the fact that arrest is a violent injury, and illegal arrest is nothing more than an abduction. “The same public policy that permits a conviction for resisting arrest even if the arrest is unlawful should authorize conviction for escape despite the unlawfulness of the underlying arrest.”

Furthermore, it’s not necessary for a police officer to explain why the arrest was made; according to the court, “only the fact of [an] arrest is a necessary element” for the victim to be charged with “escape.” In an earlier case, the same court ruled that a woman who jerked her arms away from a police officer committed the supposed crime of resisting arrest. Anything other than immediate, unconditional submission to the demands of a costumed enforcer is treated as a criminal offense – even when those demands are not valid as a matter of law.

From that perspective, all citizens are incipient slaves, subject to detention, abduction, and other abuse at the whim of uniformed slave-keepers.

A slave is somebody who cannot say “no” – as in, “No, I can’t talk to you right now because I’m on the clock and there are paying customers ahead of you.” This is because the slave doesn’t exercise self-ownership in any sense in the presence of a slave-keeper.

A slave-keeper is somebody who claims the legal right to take ownership of another person at his discretion, and use physical violence to compel submission.

This is the specific definition of the peculiar institution called “law enforcement,” as demonstrated by the following statement from theannual report of an entirely typical sheriff’s office: “A law enforcement officer’s authority and power to take away a citizen’s constitutional rights is unmatched anywhere in our society.”

The conceit that defines law enforcement is that all claims to self-ownership evaporate in the presence of a police officer. Some people have internalized that message to such an extent that they immediately assume the position of a submissive slave whenever a police officer approaches. Among them is actor and literacy activist LeVar Burton, whose breakthrough role – either ironically or appropriately, I can’t decide which -- was the fictional escaped slave Kunta Kinte.

“This is a practice I engage in every time I’m stopped by law enforcement,” explained Burton during a panel discussion on CNN. “And I taught this to my son who is now 33 as part of my duty as a father…. When I get stopped by the police, I take my hat off and my sunglasses off, I put them on a the passenger’s side, I roll down my window, I take my hands, I stick them outside the window and on the door of the driver’s side because I want that officer to be as relaxed as possible when he approaches that vehicle. And I do that because I live in America.”

Burton describes his ritual of self-abasement as his strategy for physically surviving an encounter with police. In order to avoid arrest it may be necessary to plumb further depths of personal degradation.

Dale Carson, a defense attorney, former cop, and former FBI agent, has written a revealing manual entitled Arrest-Proof Yourself. That book is replete with significant insights into the institutionalized sociopathy called police “work” – and it abounds in even more revealing advice about the kind of self-inflicted humiliation expected of Mundanes once their self-anointed slave masters appear. 

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine, Carson described law enforcement as a “revenue gathering system” in which predatory officers compete to see “who can put the most people in jail.” His most emphatic advice is to avoid attracting the attention of police officers – something that is becoming nearly impossible in our Panopticon society.

In the event that avoiding the police proves to be impossible, Carson offers etiquette tips for Mundanes seeking to avoid an arrest: Make eye contact, but don't smile; don't react when (not if) the privileged thug deliberately provokes you through foul, confrontational language and calculated acts of battery; be accommodating and extravagantly respectful.

If all of these tactics prove unavailing, then Carson recommends that the Mundane surrender what residue of personal dignity remains by crying or, if possible, deploying other bodily emissions. He suggests that you could foul yourself “so that police will consider setting you free in order not to get their cruiser nasty,” urinating in your pants, or, if possible, vomiting.

Remarkably, Carson's tactics for avoiding arrest track very closely with the notorious rape prevention advice provided by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The college faculty, piously discouraging “violent self-help” (such as carrying and using a firearm), urged women confronting a potential rapist to “Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating” and that “Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacked to leave you alone.”

In similar fashion, Carson’s advice on avoiding arrest assumes a limitless capacity for self-denigration on the part of the Mundane. But it only applies to public encounters with police. It provides no direction for people victimized by lawless police violence in their own homes, something that is becoming commonplace.

Last May 28, 72-year old Fort Worth resident Jerry Waller was shot and killed in his garage by Officer R.A. Hoeppner. 

Displaying the competence for which government law enforcement is legendary, Hoeppner and his partner, Ben Hanlon, had responded to a burglary alarm by going to the wrong address. 

Hearing prowlers on his property, Waller grabbed his gun and went out to investigate. A few minutes later he was dead, shot multiple times by Hoeppner when he refused to disarm himself. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.

In describing the events of that evening, Hoeppner, a neophyte police officer from a multi-generational family of law enforcers, displayed the reflexive perplexity of a freshly-minted slave catcher confronting someone who didn't see himself as another person's property.

“His attitude toward us was very malicious – It, it was not pro-police at all,” recalledHoeppner. Although Waller was on his own property, and the police officers were the intruders, Hoeppner described the victim’s posture as “very aggressive toward us – and I mean like almost … attitudish.” That assessment makes perfect sense once it’s understood that Hoeppner had been indoctrinated to view any non-cooperation as “aggression” because police, in some sense, own the rest of us.

After Hoeppner made the unlawful demand that the alarmed homeowner disarm himself, Waller quite sensibly asked, “Why?” This struck the cop as an act of irrational defiance:

“What person in their right man – mind would ask a peace officer – a, a law enforcement officer `why' when he tells you and gives you verbal commands.... Your law-abiding citizen is not going to tell – going to ask you, why.”

From the cop’s perspective, the expression “law-abiding citizen” is a functional synonym for “Properly obedient slave.” Not only did the uppity Mundane refuse to submit, he actually behaved as if he was the rightful owner of his person and property: “It was almost like he had the attitude of you – you cannot tell me what to do with my gun in my, you know, in my castle.”

Slave-keepers don’t have to ask permission to invade the servants’ quarters, and slaves have no right to protect the sanctity of their person or effects. In his study of 18^th Century slave patrols – the largely unacknowledged ancestors of today’s “professional” police agencies -- historian Philip L. Reichel points out that “patrols had full power and authority to enter any plantation and break open Negro houses or other places where slaves were suspected of keeping arms; to punish runaways or slaves found outside of their masters’ plantations without a pass; [and] to whip any slave who should affront or abuse them in the execution of their duties….”

No-knock midnight raids; gun confiscation; “stop-and-frisk”-style demands for identification that quickly escalate to violence and arrest; summary punishment for “contempt of cop” – all of these practices would be immediately recognizable to 18^th century slaves. They would probably find it incomprehensible that people who consider themselves to be free would allow such practices to continue. 

Video Extra: Austin Slave Patrol In Action

 Blogger Chris Quintero captured the spectacle of Austin police officers detaining, abusing, and abducting a female jogger who had failed to produce ID when the slave-keepers demanded it of her.

 

Obiter Dicta

My sincere thanks to everyone who has donated to Pro Libertate. We could still use some help -- and we are very grateful for your generosity!

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 2014 Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, where I met some remarkably talented and thoughtful people. I was invited to participate in a discussion with the estimable Larken Rose (it was billed as a "debate," but we disagreed about very little) during the Friday evening session. That discussion was video-recorded, and I will let you know when it becomes available. My thanks to Ernest and Donna Hancock and to everyone else who organized that event.

Dum spiro, pugno!