The Plague of Punitive Populism

"Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."

-- Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath


In Virginia, police officers raid a baptismal party for two small boys. Without cause or provocation they assault the grandfather who owns the home, tasering him three times while children and other guests look on in horror.



When the pregnant daughter-in-law of the victim intervenes, she, too, is forced to perform the "electron dance." The grandfather is charged with disorderly conduct and public intoxication, despite the fact that Virginia state statutes specify that such offenses cannot be committed on one's own property.


The woman who came to the aid of the first victim was charged with "assaulting an officer," since her brave effort to protect the grandfather from a criminal assault involved placing her unhallowed hands on the sanctified personage of a "law enforcement officer." Such presumption simply cannot be tolerated.



A few weeks earlier in Webster, Texas, a pastor is tasered after a member of his congregation was pulled over by police in the church parking lot. Once "backup" arrives -- the boldness of police, like that of feral wolves and droopy-drawered gang-bangers, is a function of operating in packs -- the officers charge the church sanctuary, assaulting Pastor Jose Moran and pepper-spraying the worshipers who objected to the treatment of their pastor. Once again, the victim, rather than the assailants, finds himself charged with assault.


Pastor Jose Elias Moran recovers in a Texas hospital after being attacked by a Taser-wielding state bureaucrat.




In Alabama, police pepper-spray and then taser a deaf, mentally handicapped adult man who couldn't hear their orders to leave the bathroom of a discount store.


Once the confusion was cleared up, they arrested him anyway on various charges, including -- no extra points for guessing correctly -- "assaulting" the officers who attacked him. The police department issues a statement claiming that the attack with chemical and electro-shock weapons was justified because the confused man-child (a term I use with sympathy, not in derision) was "armed" with an umbrella.

Victim of police abuse Antonio Love (left, with his mother).



In Boise, Idaho, police swarm, gang-tackle, and handcuff a man involved in a domestic dispute.


When he complains about impending suffocation -- a very acute threat, since many victims of lethal police violence die from positional asphyxiation -- he is subjected to a Taser strike in his rectum by a still-unidentified officer who threatens to strike the victim's genitals next. Subsequently one of the assailant's superiors attempts to destroy the evidence by erasing an audio taped record of the event.



In Wisconsin Dells, two callow patrolmen -- Officer Beavis and Officer Butt-Head -- stumble upon a couple of off-duty National Guardsmen and decide to have some fun. The police accuse the victims of urinating in public and then demand that they lick from the ground a substance they are told is human urine. When a third police officer materializes, the victims speak of filing a complaint.


This prompts the threat of a bogus burglary charge and the promise that "nobody will believe you" if they actually file a protest. As it happens, the complaint is believed -- most likely because it was made by two Iraq war veterans, rather than common citizens.



These are mere snapshots of the commonplace sadism that increasingly typifies contemporary American law enforcement. But this really isn't so surprising for a country in which a bare majority, according to a recent global survey, opposes state torture.


That survey found that Americans are much likelier to support government-inflicted torture than citizens of Communist China, and marginally more indulgent of the practice than the residents of Muslim Indonesia and Muslim/socialist Egypt. Support for torture is also more widespread among Americans than among Iranians.



One might think that support for torture would be restrained by the influence of America's church-going population. One would think that those Americans who worship the Man of Sorrows who was tortured to death by the occupation forces of a pagan imperial state would be among the most insistent opponents of the vile and indefensible practice.


Again, one would think this would be the case.


One would be entirely wrong, since exactly the opposite is true: A survey taken earlier this year documented that a majority (54 percent) of people who attend church at least once a week support torture.



Perhaps the most arresting discovery was that more than sixty percent of white, evangelical Protestants condone the practice. Torture advocates of this theological persuasion profess a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ. That relationship must be, at best, a distant and superficial one.


As the United States sinks into what will be a long and dreadful depression, and partisan politics takes on the character of a literal bloodsport, speculation is rampant about a possible civil war (which would not be the same thing as peaceful secession, which may prove to be the only sensible way to address our economic and political afflictions). If such a conflict were to come, it might actually start within the church-going segment of the population, pitting nominally Christian statists against those who believe in what the Epistle of James called the "perfect law of liberty."


In dealing with the prospect of an internecine conflict among believers, it's instructive to recall the events described in the 12th chapter of the Old Testament Book of Judges, in which the Gileadites and Ephramites were at war.


After the Gileadites routed their opponents in one battle, they devised a clever method of winnowing out concealed Ephramites from their midst. As it turns out, the Ephraimites for some reason couldn't pronounce the word "shibboleth" correctly, rendering that term "sibbolet." Accordingly, each man who approached a critical checkpoint was required to say "shibboleth," with instant death being the penalty for tens of thousands who uttered malapropisms.


While I have no desire to put anyone to the sword, I suggest that liberty-minded Americans, whether or not they subscribe to the Christian faith, can learn much about themselves and those around them through what we could call the "Tom Joad Test."


I'm not a fan of Steinbeck's incurably wrong-headed economic views or his idiosyncratic collectivist politics in general, although I must admit a sneaking respect for anybody who attracts the hostile interest of the FBI solely on the strength of his published writings.



His creation Tom Joad isn't among my favorite fictional characters. But there is substantial merit in Joad's pledge to sympathize with those who are victims of Power.



Early in The Grapes of Wrath, Joad -- recently paroled after serving four years in prison for killing a man who stabbed him in a fight -- becomes re-acquainted with Jim Casy, a fallen Oklahoma Pentecostal preacher who has embraced a populist version of Emerson's "oversoul" concept: "Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."



Thus was planted the seed that would sprout into Joad's famous soliloquy, which included the pledge that "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."



So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the "Tom Joad Test":


When you see a cop -- or, more likely, several of them -- beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?


If it's the former, you're an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.


If it's the latter, you're an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.


It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn't invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject's default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.


Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual -- any individual -- is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?


This could be considered a reverse application of Lenin's famous political formula, kto kogo? -- broadly translated as "Who does what to whom?" Lenin and his followers sought and acquired the power to be the "Who" in that formula, which meant that millions of those consigned to the "whom" category were imprisoned and slaughtered.


Ironically, many law-and-order conservatives come uncomfortably close to Lenin's view of the state when they reflexively take the side of agents of state coercion -- the "who" in the typical encounter between police officer and citizen. The American view of rights, however, is overwhelmingly weighted on behalf of the latter, even when the "who" is a winsome and well-dressed policeman, and the "whom" is a scruffy and unappealing individual.


One of the easiest and least intrusive ways to conduct the Tom Joad Test is to observe an individual's reaction to the typical installment of the TV series COPS, which -- in any of its iterations -- is a kind of authoritarian pornography for the badge-licker population.


Several months ago, I took my family to a large and very nice Chinese buffet in Boise. Since the Grigg family is almost at brigade strength, we were ushered into the conference room, where we could have a long table all to ourselves. Unfortunately, the room was equipped with a television set, most likely because some secret Reversal of Freedom law dictates the presence of an infernal device of that kind in every room of a certain size. Even worse, a COPS marathon was underway.


As I grazed on sauteed bok choy and exquisitely seasoned bean sprouts (delicious vegetarian items being a specialty of this particular restaurant), my appetite began to depart as the screen conveyed an endless repetition of the familiar storyline: Police spy pathetic, socially marginalized individual; police harass said pathetic individual, who had done nothing to harm anyone else; police find some excuse to arrest said individual, often throwing him to the ground and humiliating him in the process.


Despite the delicious fare in front of me, my mood turned sour and ominous mutterings began emanating from me like premonitory tremors anticipating an eruption. Similar outrage radiated from the faces of other nearby patrons.


Near the beginning of the third consecutive installment of COPS, we were treated to the unedifying sight of a police officer approaching a woman on a sidewalk and demanding that she show identification. She had done nothing to provoke the interest of the officer, and wasn't inclined to comply with that unwarranted demand.


The officer replied in predictable fashion, beginning the familiar procedure of jacking her arm behind her to slap the cuffs on her wrists. To her considerable credit, the woman shrugged off that assault and put up a more than respectable fight, despite being roughly 50-75 lbs. smaller than her assailant.


Eventually, the cop -- who had created this altercation ex nihilo -- ended it by grabbing the small-boned woman in a headlock and slamming her face-first into the sidewalk.


That sight wrenched gasps from several people sitting at other tables. My reaction was characteristically measured and sedate.


"You malignant BASTARD!" I exclaimed in a voice that was probably heard in Winnemucca.


Shooting a quick glance around, I noticed several food-laden forks suspended in mid-transit from well-stocked plate to gaping mouth, and numerous sets of eyes distended in shocked disbelief. I suggested to my wife, the lovely and brilliant Korrin, that we should leave. She didn't resist the suggestion.


The success of COPS and its imitators, like the survey results dealing with torture, illustrates that there is a wide, deep, and resilient strain of punitive populism in American culture. I suspect that there is a smaller, but growing, sub-population of people who instinctively take the side of the person on the receiving end of the nightstick.


In light of the fact that nightsticks and various other implements of coercion will play an increasingly prominent role as the economic implosion accelerates, we'd better find each other, and radically increase our ranks -- and do this as quickly as humanly possible.

On a related note...

In the comments section of a recent essay, mention was made of the little-appreciated role played by the Marquis de Sade as a founder of the modern collectivist movement. Over at another blog I've recently posted an essay dealing with that subject; for those who are interested, please take a look and leave a comment or two.

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Child-Snatchers and Life-Stealers, Pt. II: Protecting the Guilty and Powerful

Under the rule of District Attorney Ed Jagels, Kern County, California became ground zero for the child abuse hysteria that raged across America for most of the 1980s. Utterly ruthless in pursuing convictions and entirely indifferent to the truth, Jagels recruited and developed a disciplined cadre of persecutors -- assistant DAs, police investigators, social workers, and "expert" witnesses -- who refined the art of railroading defendants into an exact science.


Kern County was the laboratory that developed the methods employed by opportunistic prosecutors who would eventually imprison thousands of innocent people on the basis of palpably fraudulent abuse accusations.


The process would begin with one or a handful of children believed to have been abused by someone. Those children would be designated "victims" and taken into "protective" isolation. Investigators and social workers would barrage the children with leading and suggestive questions, and then dispense with questions outright and demand that the children simply ratify accusations made by the adults themselves.


Some of the methods of manipulation favored by Jagels's agents were sleep deprivation, prolonged interrogation, positive reinforcement when the child would "admit" to being abused, coupled with contemptuous, hostile treatment of any child suffering from "denial" of abuse. Toys and other gifts were used as inducements, as were consciously dishonest promises that children who cooperated would be re-united with parents they accused of abusing them.


Once a handful of "victim"/accusers had been assembled, the investigation would take on the characteristics of a pyramid scheme: Each "victim" was urged to name other "victims," who in turn were pressured into naming "abusers." In this fashion, within a little more than a year Jagels -- with the help of a scandalously incurious local press -- was able to convince the public that Bakersfield and its suburbs were infested with at least eight child abuse "rings." And before long, other prosecutors began to copy the Jagels Formula.



As Edward Humes points out in his Pulitzer-winning expose Mean Justice: A True Account of a Town's Terror, a Prosecutor's Power -- and a Betrayal of Innocence, Jagels's minions "helped ignite similar cases throughout the country, as Kern County investigators and social workers fanned out to spread the word of their winning techniques."


For the rest of the decade and into the early 1990s, the public would be barraged with tales of massive child abuse "rings" found in communities from coast to coast --from the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California to the Wee Care daycare center in Maplewood, New Jersey.


It was as if a chain-reaction were underway, causing public officials and local populations to suffer a complete melt-down where critical thinking and rational application of the law were concerned -- and Kern County had served as the breeder reactor.


Ironically, given his role in abetting this national disaster, Ed Jagels (to alter our metaphor) didn't ignite the firestorm in Kern County, even though he did cynically feed the flames.


During his 1982 campaign for the District Attorney post -- the last campaign he's ever had to run, now that he's effectively the Kern County DA-for-life -- Jagels capitalized on the issue during a May debate with his opponent, Judge Marvin Ferguson.


During a question-and-answer period, a woman named Jill Haddad strode to a microphone and, brandishing a large sheaf of photocopied papers, accused Ferguson of being lenient in his treatment of child abusers. The documents she held, according to Haddad, proved that in 1975 Ferguson had sent an abused four-year-old girl named Mary Ann Azevedo back to the stepfather who had beaten her, and then compounded this act by giving the abuser a ridiculously light sentence.


A few months later, after the stepfather was released, he took Mary Ann and her mother to Mississippi, where -- just a short while later -- he beat the poor child to death. Ferguson, blindsided by the accusation, dissolved into a gibbering, stammering mess while Jagels sat next to him on the rostrum smirking.


This confrontation -- memorably captured in a photograph run on page A-4 of the Sunday, May 16 Bakersfield Californian -- proved to be the decisive moment in the campaign. It undoubtedly impressed on Jagels the political potency of the child abuse issue.


The procurement of the case file wielded by Jill Haddad, and the cover-up of the circumstances under which it was made available, may have been the first of the many instances of official corruption that would characterize Jagels's career as Kern County prosecutor. The case file was obtained from the county clerk by a woman named Colleen Ryan, who -- like Jagels -- was an assistant county DA. At the time, Ryan was on maternity leave and had no official need for the confidential document; that fact was not explained to the clerk who handed it over.


Ryan gave the file to Jagels's campaign manager, who in turn provided it to Jill Haddad, a local child abuse activist and Jagels supporter.


As it happens, Jagels and his allies not only stole the file, they lied about its contents in order to cover up their own role in the death of Mary Ann Azevedo.


It is true that Judge Ferguson sent Mary Ann back to a seriously troubled home. He didn't have a choice: The District Attorney didn't bother to send anybody to attend the critical hearing. In the absence of someone there to make the case for the prosecution, Judge Ferguson quite properly dismissed the charges.


Furthermore, the leniency granted to Mary Ann's stepfather (who was in jail for a different offense) was not Judge Ferguson's idea. He was the beneficiary of a plea-bargain arrangement that dramatically reduced his sentence. So if anyone in an official capacity was responsible for the death of Mary Ann Azevedo, that blame resided with the District Attorney's office.


This was not the first or last time the Kern County law enforcement community had covered up embarrassing details regarding the death of a child.


In 1979, four years following the death of Mary Ann Azevedo, a 14-year-old honors student named Dana Butler disappeared on her way home from church. Three days later, her mutilated mortal remains were found at the side of the highway just outside the Bakersfield city limits. Her body had been perforated by scores of stab wounds, and there was evidence that she had been tortured before being permitted to die.


Of particular interest was the fact that the murderer had carefully bathed and dressed the body before depositing it on the side of the road; it was still damp when the police discovered it. The obvious intent was to wash away critical physical evidence -- hairs, fibers, fluids -- that could be used by investigators seeking to identify the perpetrator.



Within a short time investigators learned that Dana had been a frequent house guest of 56-year-old Glenn Fitts, who routinely invited teens to his home for parties in which he'd ply the underage youth with alcohol and drugs and often receive sex in return. According to her friends, Dana had visited Fitts the day before she disappeared, and planned to return on the following day. Although Fitts was an obvious suspect, the DA's office and the Sheriff's Office were reluctant to pursue the investigation.



Prior to his retirement just a few years earlier, Fitts had been a pillar of the local law enforcement community: In addition to being chairman of the law-enforcement program at Bakersfield Community College, Fitts had been director of the Kern County Police Academy and a high-ranking member of the Bakersfield Police Commission. He had personally instructed many of the local police officers and sheriff's deputies, and as commissioner he had served as their supervisor.

A powerless victim, an unpunished crime: Investigators retrieve the body of 14-year-old Dana Butler, who was almost certainly raped and murdered by former Kern County Police Academy director Glenn Fitts.


After a lengthy and unnecessary delay, a search was conducted of Fitts' home, which had been thoroughly -- but not adequately -- scoured of evidence.


Carpet fibers and human hairs found in the house matched some found on Dana's body. Among them were (please forgive the specificity of this description) pubic hairs from Fitts that matched a sample found clinging to the head of the deceased 14-year-old girl.



Despite the accumulating evidence, the Kern County DA's office refused to prosecute. This decision was made by District Attorney Al Leddy in collaboration with his three top assistants. The Sheriff's office retaliated against the cover-up by leaking news of the investigation to the press; this resulted in the creation of an ad hoc pressure group called Mothers of Bakersfield, which pressured the state Attorney General to investigate the Kern County DA.


With pressure mounting on him, Leddy eventually submitted a case against Fitts to a grand jury. The ridiculously inadequate charge against him was contributing to the delinquency of a minor. And even then, notes Humes in Mean Justice, "senior prosecutors withheld key evidence from the panel and ultimately closed the investigation without asking for an indictment."


The only purpose served by that exercise was to provide political cover for Leddy and the local law enforcement hierachy. Their problems appeared to solve themselves shortly thereafter when Fitts died of what was officially described as a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. And even then, a neighbor reported hearing two gunshots rather than one -- a fact that suggests either really poor aim by Fitts, or very careful work by an assassin.


The Dana Butler murder and cover-up ended Leddy's career, and helped propel his subordinate Ed Jagels into Leddy's old office. It also offered a telling glimpse into the workings of the local ruling oligarchy, the so-called "Lords of Bakersfield," whose corrupt and criminal behavior was carefully protected by Jagels for more than a decade.


As an investigative report by Rolling Stone observes, many Bakersfield residents -- including people with access to the corridors of power -- concluded that Jagels' child abuse jihad was intended "to divert attention from the illicit sexual behavior of the city's ruling elite."


Kyle Beckman, who served as an investigator for the DA's office under Jagels, now says that "the 1980s molestation trials were overcompensation," that Jagels and his allies among the "Lords of Bakersfield" were "covering up their tracks by going after other people."


"Between 1981 and 1984," reports Rolling Stone, "three prominent men in Bakresfield were murdered by their teenage lovers. At his trial, one boy testified that he had sex with 150 closeted gay men in Kery County, a group of judges, prosecutors and other pillars of the community who became known in local lore as the Lords of Bakersfield. For years, rumors about the dark cabal filtered through town: the wild parties at the house of Ted Fritts, publisher of the Bakersfield Californian, where teenage boys mingled with graying power brokers; the park at the edge of town where homeless kids would swap sex for money or drugs."


The Californian newspaper, interestingly enough, was little more than a megaphone for Ed Jagels' office during the child abuse frenzy, and displayed no interest at all in pursuing the truth about these tantalizing rumors -- until after Fritts, the paper's publisher, died of AIDS in 1997, and another of the local "Lords" was murdered five years later.


On September 13, 2002, the body of assistant Kern County DA Stephen Tauzer was found in his garage. Tauzer was the victim of a particularly vicious attack: His head was riddled with multiple stab wounds.


With Tauzer's death the curtain was pulled back far enough to reveal one unsavory aspect of his private life: For years he had been involved with a teenage boy named Lance Hills, a meth addict and hustler. Many speculated that Tauzer, by that time in his late 50s, was supplying Hills with drugs in exchange for sex.


Public records documented that the assistant DA was using his influence to protect Hills when he was arrested on drug charges. Rather than being sent to jail or prison, Hills was sent to a rehab facility, where he stole a car that he wrecked in a head-on collision that also ended his life. One month after Lance Hills died, his father Chris murdered Tauzer.


During the child abuse frenzy of the 1980s, Tauzer had been Jagels' right-hand man, supervising the persecution of scores of innocent people. He was fully complicit in the crimes and abuses committed by the DA's office. That relationship, and revelations about Tauzer's relationship with Hills, support the accusation that Jagels' child abuse campaign was intended, at least in part, as a diversion undertaken to protect the depraved "Lords of Bakersfield."


Additional support for that assessment came a few months after Tauzer's death, when the Bakersfield Californian ran a revealing series about the "Legend of the Lords of Bakersfield."


Abounding in detail and carefully reported, the series substantiated at least some of the speculation regarding the influence and activities of that powerful clique.


Jagels remains ensconced in the Kern County DA's office to this day. In terms of the security of his position, the longevity of his rule, and the cruel lawlessness of his reign, Jagels invites comparisons to Fidel Castro. Despite the fact that all of the child sex charges were dismissed, neither Jagels nor any of his subordinates or allies has ever admitted error, or been held accountable in any way.


Although large-scale child abuse scandals no longer dominate the headlines, families are ripped apart, children are abducted, and innocent people are terrorized by predatory state officials using techniques pioneered by Jagels and his comrades. This happens somewhere in this country every day. But Jagels and his associates did more than just create a template for spurious child abuse investigations; they were the vanguard of a movement to create a corporatist police state.


Notes Edward Humes in Mean Justice: "Even as schools and parks and clinics suffered, Kern County bolstered the budgets of the sheriff, police, and prosecutors. It built a new, bigger jail far out in the desert, doing everything it could to crack down on crime, hard and sure...."



And where criminals could not be found, Jagels and his allies were prepared to manufacture them, thereby guaranteeing a return on this civic "investment." "You don' thave to do anything at all in this town to be convicted of a crime," explained a former employee of Jagels to Rolling Stone. "I tell my kids, `Get out of this county after high school or you'll end up in prison.'"


A similar admonition applies to visitors: According to a popular local folk saying, Bakersfield's Chamber of Commerce invites tourists to "Come on vacation, and leave on probation."


At the time Jagels came to power, Bakersfield's civic elite described their community as an "All-American City." What it became was a foreshadowing of America as our descent into abject police state tyranny accelerates.

Not-entirely-gratuitous video extra

Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens perform the country classic, "Streets of Bakersfield":

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Praetorian Presumptions

Behold the face of fear and insecurity: Riot police in Oakland, seen here protecting and serving their community.


Salt Lake City's Deseret News, as part of its continuing campaign against rationality, recently published a house editorial condemning civilian ownership of firearms.


Bobbing in the puddle of pathos created by the editorial staff's lachrymosity can be found this lump of congealed hypocrisy: "[T]ough guys don't pack firearms. Fearful guys do -- people who see everyone around them as a threat and think the worst of faces they don't recognize. Guns don't showcase strength, they showcase weakness."


There is the beginning of an important point here, but it's one the people responsible for that editorial, in their ideologically induced foolishness, are too thick to recognize: If they are serious in their assessment that carrying firearms (particularly handguns) is symptomatic of socially dangerous insecurity on the part of those who carry them, then disarmament should begin with those most frequently found in public possession of those weapons -- that is, the police.


Since police are trained "to see everyone around them as a threat and think the worst" of those they encounter, they are a uniquely suitable target for disarmament, at least by the standard suggested by the Deseret News.


In what could be (depending on one's worldview) either a divinely ordained symmetry, an example of Karmic synchronicity, or a convenient coincidence, an active-duty police officer validated the point above in a brief blog item for National Review.


Writing about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Jack Dunphy" -- the name is a pseudonym for an active-duty LAPD officer -- took umbrage with the suggestion that slapping a set of handcuffs on a small, middle-aged man and hauling him off to jail might not be the wisest way for a police officer to react when offended by something that man had said.


After all, insisted the cyber-Centurion, being a policeman is dangerous, and those mundanes who refuse to display proper docility might well end up dead.


By way of illustration, "Dunphy" writes, "here is what I would advise [anyone] ... who finds himself unexpectedly confronted with a police officer: You may be pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over."


"At that moment," Dunphy continues, "I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own."


Are you paying attention, oh wise and compassionate editorial board of the Deseret News? Here is an active-duty police officer who treats as a virtue precisely the cluster of borderline-paranoid traits you ascribe to every civilian gun owner: A tendency to see everyone else as a threat, an inclination to suspect the worst of every stranger, and a willingness to resort to lethal force at the slightest provocation.


At some point, it will get to be that obvious: Peruvian riot police wearing their Imperial Stormtrooper-by-way-of-Strange Brew armor to celebrate that country's Independence Day.



From the point of view of that police officer -- a very common opinion in that profession -- killing an innocent civilian as the result of a mistaken threat assessment, however tragic, is justifiable.


In fact, summary execution just might be condign punishment for a mundane who "disses" a police officer by being a bit too persistent in asserting his rights, according to "Dunphy." He and the others of his caste enjoy the privilege to kill, which means that the rest of us have a duty to submit, or die.


So when an innocent person finds himself on the receiving end of unjustified attention from a police officer, his only safe course of action -- from this point of view -- is that of the proverbial rape victim: Just lie down and endure it, and enjoy it, if possible.



"One of the common-sense rules of life can be summed up this way: Don't mess with cops," opined Washington Post writer Neely Tucker by way of reinforcing that point in the aftermath of the Gates arrest. "It doesn't matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever," Neely asserts. "When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.... The police, when they show up at a residence or a liquor store, don't know what's what or who's who. The good cops are there to have people (a) cease and (b) desist. The bad cops still have a badge, a gun and the legal authority to haul your butt downtown."


"So you want to make friends, join the glee club," concludes Neely. "You want to yell at people who are lousy at their jobs, go to a Redskins game. But, all things considered, don't mess with cops. It usually works out better that way."



Here's how it breaks down from the statist perspective: When civilians carry firearms because they don't know who the bad guys are, we're being pathologically insecure; when police not only carry them but routinely use them to make others submit to their will without reasonable cause, they're merely exercising a professional prerogative.



As things presently stand, any reaction to police other than immediate, unconditional submission is treated as a threat to "officer safety" and grounds for arrest or the exercise of lethal force. "The rule is, if a police officer stops you in a car or on the street, he's the captain of the ship, and whatever he says goes," insists Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. "If you've got something to address, do it later. Do what he says, or else only bad things can happen."


Do what he says, or else only bad things can happen.


Isn't that the essence of any illicit demand made by a criminal or terrorist?


Pasco and others of his ilk display a mindset that is innately, and definitively, anti-American. Not only do they assume that were living in a state akin to martial law -- that is, a condition in which civilians are required, on pain of death, to render immediate obedience to people in state-issued costumes; they also assume that authority flows downward from government officials upon the heads of less exalted personages in the private realm.


Norm Stamper, former police chief of Seattle, Washington, is a retired peace officer whose influence is sorely needed today. He points out that contemporary law enforcement officers are not trained to deal respectfully and deferentially to "real Americans" -- that is, people who understand that in our constitutional system police are supposed to be their servants, not their masters.


"Any cop can deal with a robbery suspect, but show me the cop who can handle a real American," commented Stamper in a recent interview with the (Boston-based) Christian Science Monitor, quoting policing expert George Thompson. A "real American" is "someone, when you say, `Roll down the window,' says `No,' or who meets you at the threshold at home and says `No, you can't come in. Show me your warrant.'"



For all of the horrors associated with the militarization of law enforcement, there is one ironic benefit: It's becoming easier all the time to recognize the "real Americans" among us. They're the ones writhing at the end of Taser wires, or being dragged away in handcuffs, or bleeding to death on the floor of their homes because they required -- either verbally or through so much as a moment's puzzled non-cooperation -- a modicum of respect for their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Talk about gratuitous: Henry Gates, seen here under arrest for the purported crime of hurting a police officer's feelings.


Most jurisdictions have what some call "cover laws" -- such as those dealing with "disturbing the peace," "disorderly conduct," or other dubious infractions -- that are applied with malicious creativity by police officers who don't care to be reminded of their servile status.


It's not unusual for police officers possessed of a particularly strong bullying tendency to bait citizens into conduct that can be described as "disorderly" in order to create a pretext for arrest. That's pretty clearly what happened in the Gates arrest.


David Rudovsky, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, describes the phenomenon of "persons being arrested who challenge the authority of police" as a form of extra-judicial "street punishment." That is to say, it's exactly the kind of government-inflicted criminal violence that provokes official disapproval in State Department-issued human rights surveys of other countries. By now it's become pretty clear that issuing reports of that kind is a motes-and-beams exercise.


Perhaps there's nothing new about the common "wisdom" urged on us by our rulers, who expect us to behave like cringing serfs in every encounter with our supposed protectors -- and then to hymn the praises of the "freedom" we enjoy as subjects of the world's largest, most powerful, and most malignant empire.



What is new, and ominous, as illustrated by the Gates Incident, is this: Taken as a body (there are more than a few heroic and valuable exceptions), the federalized, militarized police "community" is a Praetorian Guard afflicted with a prickly pettiness about criticism, whether public or private.



Granted, America's professional police forces were not originally created as a special bodyguard to the chief executive. But over the past four decades, since Richard Nixon announced a "war on crime" as a cynical ploy to capture the loyalty of the uniform-worshiping "Silent Majority," all serious presidential contenders have courted the endorsement of police unions and associations. Each administration since Nixon's has cultivated a bond between the "front-line soldiers in the war on crime" and their "Commander-in-Chief."



Accordingly, police unions now have sufficient political influence -- due in no small measure to the tendency of conservatives to fetishize armed bureaucrats in uniform -- to stare down the President. Witness the success of Sgt. James Crowley, the officious dweeb who needlessly arrested Henry Gates, in extracting -- with the help of his comrades in the police union -- what amounts to an apology from Barack Obama.



Observed the Christian Science Monitor: "[T]he union's hard line -- successfully staring down a president -- is a window into the so-called Thin Blue Line -- the `Band of Brothers' mentality that draws police departments closer in time of crisis." Or, in this case, fuses them together in bonds of adolescent petulance in confronting their critics when one of their number abuses a citizen.



We've reached the stage in our imperial decline in which the bearer of the Imperial Purple has to take care to keep the Praetorians on his side. Obama is particularly vulnerable in this respect, not only because police unions see him as a cultural outsider but especially because his agenda for forcible reconstruction of American society will depend heavily on the organs of official coercion.



As someone who lives inside an all but impregnable security bubble, Mr. Obama doesn't face the prospect of sudden, undeserved violence that increasingly haunts typical citizens in their encounters with police. Yet in his recent stand-off with Officer Crowley and his comrades in blue, Obama flinched because he obviously fears the political consequences of alienating the Praetorians.


A piece of American folk wisdom unwisely attributed to Thomas Jefferson informs us that when government fears the people, there is liberty. As our present and deepening predicament indicates, this isn't entirely true.



Those supposedly intrepid fellows who are kitted out in high-powered weaponry and body armor, and prowl our cities in over-powered cars, have a bladder-loosening fear of the common citizenry. The worst among them are bold as Achilles when it comes to slapping the cuffs on diminutive Harvard professors, or forcing grandmothers to do the "electron dance," but suddenly acquire a taste for caution when dealing with actual criminals who can put up an effective resistance.



At some point, common Americans -- both inside and outside the jury box -- are going to have to rediscover the ancient and indispensable right to resist unlawful impositions by police. We need to bring about an end to the culture of impunity that has taken root and begun to flourish in law enforcement.



The best way to do this is not by trusting police to police themselves, or expecting the political class to do likewise, but to recognize, in law and practice, a principle articulated centuries ago by John Locke: A criminal who acts under the color of government "authority" is simply a criminal, and should be dealt with, by the citizen, in appropriate fashion.


(The second part of the series on "Child-Snatchers and Life-Stealers" will be posted later.)

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Dum spiro, pugno!