Pity the Poor, Persecuted Police

The Man Who Terrorizes Sunriver, Oregon's "Finest"? Robert Foster, with his daughter Rebecca.

Michael Kennedy is Chief of Police in tiny Sunriver, Oregon, an unincorporated resort village in the Beaver State's Deschutes County. Kennedy insists that his police force has been terrorized for years by a marauder named Robert Foster. 

“He breaks the law all the time,” Kennedy insisted in a June 15, 2010 sworn deposition. 

“Well, have you ever arrested him?” asked Portland attorney Frank Wesson, who was representing Foster at the time.

“I have not,” admitted Kennedy.

“Has anyone in your department ever arrested him?” Wesson pressed.

Kennedy sought refuge in evasion: “Not to my knowledge, sir.” 

Bear in mind that Kennedy isn’t supervising the LAPD; he heads an eight-member police force (supplemented on occasion by a 30-member volunteer citizens patrol) in a town of fewer than 1,500 permanent residents in which actual crime is all but nonexistent. 

An honest answer would have been: No, Foster had never been arrested, because no evidence exists that he ever committed a crime. Honesty was not Kennedy’s first choice, however, nor does it appear to be his strong suit. He went on to list among Foster’s alleged crimes “disorderly conduct, interfering with a police officer, menacing, harassment, and stalking.” 

“Was he ever arrested for any of those?” Wesson persisted.

“No; fortunately for him, no,” Kennedy replied. The Chief made that statement in apparent ignorance of the fact that he had just admitted, under oath, to incompetence in the administration of the law – assuming that Foster was the serial offender depicted in Kennedy’s testimony and internal department memoranda. 

Chief Kennedy (r.) with State Rep. Whisnat (c.)

One official report from Sunriver Officer Dree Warren to Chief Kennedy describes Foster as glaring at Sunriver police officers and emitting a sinister laugh like that of “the villain the Joker from the Batman cartoons." Surely an archfiend of that magnitude can’t be allowed to prey upon the innocent people of Sunriver, and their gallant protectors!

 “I’m curious, do you know why your officers wouldn’t arrest Mr. Foster if they thought he was breaking the law?” asked the defense attorney.

After a brief bout of dissimulation, Kennedy tried to dismiss the question by insisting that he “can’t account for what every officer is thinking.”

This is true, of course. It is also entirely irrelevant. If Foster were a one-man crime wave, leaving him at large would be a grave dereliction of duty, both for Sunriver’s “Finest” and their bold and intrepid leader.  

Rather than instructing his officers to arrest Foster if there was evidence that he had committed a crime, Chief Kennedy, by his own account, told them “to document every time they had a problem with Mr. Foster.” He did this because “Mr. Foster was harassing and stalking our officers.” 

After tabulating a number of “unwanted contacts” with Foster, three of Sunriver’s “Finest” induced a judge to issue a Stalking Protection Order forbidding him to come within eyeshot of his cringing, terrorized “victims.” Under the terms of that order, the “victims” – Officers Kasey and Tiffany Hughes (a married couple) and Sgt. Joseph Patnode – can literally arrange for the arrest of Foster any time he comes within their field of vision. 

Thanks to the efforts of Robert Foster’s daughter, Rebecca Kossler, I’ve been able to review several hundred pages of detailed information on every aspect of this controversy. This includes numerous official police reports, several sworn depositions, legal filings, photographs taken of Foster by the police during several “unwanted contacts” with Foster, and a transcribed audio recording of a July 6, 2010 traffic stop involving Rebecca Kossler’s husband, Ian. 

The police accounts describe Mr. Foster engaged in such suspicious activities as sitting in his pickup truck, shopping, buying gasoline, and otherwise conducting routine business that brings him within visual distance of Sun River police officers. These incidents were breathlessly described as "evidence" of some unspecified criminal activity. 

Nowhere in any of the accounts provided by the supposed victims in this matter --the people with guns and badges and the purported authority to use lethal force in the name of "officer safety" -- is there any evidence of an actual crime or a threat to commit the same on the part of Mr. Foster. (Chief Kennedy refused to respond to repeated requests for an interview.) However, those reports are valuable evidence of unlawful activity – the unwarranted harassment and unlawful surveillance of Robert Foster by the Sunriver Police Department. 

The record of the July 6, 2010 traffic stop provides compelling evidence of a criminal conspiracy to deprive Ian Kossler of his constitutionally protected rights, and an oblique admission that the department had done the same to Robert Foster.

Hughes (c.) and Patnode (l.)

 The officer conducting the traffic stop was Kasey Hughes, one of the “victims” who filed a stalking order against Foster. When Ian Kossler asked why he was being pulled over, Hughes replied: “You weren’t wearing you seat belt when you passed me. In fact, when you were actually following me.” 

“I wasn’t following you,” Kossler objected. 

That detail is important, since Hughes, his wife Tiffany, and their supervisor, Sgt. Patnode, insisted that Foster had “followed” them on various occasions, thereby subjecting them to “coercive” or “threatening” behavior. 

During his encounter with Ian Kossler, Hughes told Sgt. Patnode via radio that Kossler had been “following” him, and that he had been parked next to Robert Foster at a local restaurant called Blondie’s.

“I’m gonna ask him in a minute and then … the fact that he is stalking me too -- he can have his concealed weapons permit revoked very quickly,” Hughes informed Patnode. 

After returning to Kossler’s vehicle, Hughes issued a citation for not wearing a seat belt – and then brazenly attempted to provoke a confrontation.

“Keep following us around and that’s what’s gonna happen, OK!” sneered Hughes.

“Dude, I wasn’t following you,” replied a composed but puzzled Kossler.

“You were following me around,” reiterated the petulant tax-feeder.

“I was not following you… Why are you so paranoid?” responded Kossler, whose patience was understandably beginning to evaporate.

“You stalk us and you’ll lose your concealed weapons permit, too,” gloated Hughes.

“I am not stalking anybody,” replied the only adult who was a party to that conversation. 

The order that targeted Foster amounts to a bill of attainder. Chief Kennedy and three of his subordinates have disposed of the necessity of providing evidence that Foster has ever committed a crime. Instead, they have criminalized the person of Robert Foster – and they won’t be satisfied until they’ve contrived some way to put him in prison. 

The traffic stop involving Foster’s son-in-law establishes a pattern on the part of the Sunriver Police: Identify a troublesome person, accuse him of “stalking” them, and use that accusation to deprive him of his rights. Just a few weeks after that encounter, Foster filed his civil rights complaint – which may be the only reason why Ian Kossler hasn’t been the subject of a spurious stalking order.

Foster’s civil case has been submitted to third-party arbitration. Under the terms of the police department’s settlement offer, Foster would be subject to a 10-year permanent stalking protection order that could not be modified, or he could choose a 5-year permanent stalking order and pay $10,000 in legal costs. 

Whichever option he selected, Foster would also be required to withdraw his tort claim against the police, and the existing legal record of the case – including the damaging admissions made by Chief Kennedy – would be expunged. This would mean that the police would be able to arrest Foster for violating the stalking order at their leisure.

Incredible as it will seem to people burdened with a capacity for rational thought, the arbitrator, Bend Attorney William Flinn, is insisting that Foster accept that deal. (Like Chief Kennedy, Mr. Flinn also refused to respond to repeated interview requests.)

"I know Bob feels that, had he accepted the [settlement] offer, the police still would have found some way to construe episodes of his future conduct as stalking,” Flinn wrote to Foster’s current defense counsel on July 11. “But, I don't think that was a good reason to reject the offer."  Four days later, Flinn reiterated his demand that Foster submit to a settlement that was manifestly not in his best interest, telling his attorney that  “there is virtually no chance that Bob will prevail in court, despite your excellent trial skills and some evidence of paranoia/lack of candor on the part of the police."  (Emphasis added) 

A more appropriate term to describe the “lack of candor” Flinn refers to is “perjury.” 

Not only are the Sunriver police paranoid, according to Flinn, but in his opinion they also pose a threat of potentially lethal violence. That’s an eminently defensible assessment – one that Flinn fashioned into an argument that Foster should submit to their demands.

"The skirmishing between the Sunriver police and Bob Foster has been going on for over five years, wrote Flinn to Foster's lawyer. "So far, no one has resorted to the use of weapons, but it appears the risk increases with every new encounter. If I were the judge hearing this case, my priority would be to defuse the situation before it gets violent. No judge wants to be blamed, in retrospect, for passing up an opportunity to prevent armed conflict and the loss of life."

In his sworn deposition, Chief Kennedy admitted that Foster has never been seen carrying a firearm. The only threat of violence in any of those encounters is that posed by the armed children under Kennedy’s supervision. That threat can, and should, be defused by ordering Kennedy and his kiddie patrol to withdraw their complaint and leave Foster alone, unless there is evidence that he’s actually committing a crime. Instead, the “mediator” is making common cause with people he describes as dishonest and potentially violent -- and who are engaged in something that can properly be described as extortion. 

The fearsome figure who causes Sunriver’s “Finest” to lose bladder control is a wiry, soft-spoken 51-year-old entrepreneur who runs a hot tub installation and maintenance company. A lifetime resident of rural Oregon, Bob Foster is the kind of blessed troublemaker who carries copies of the U.S. Constitution in his pickup truck, but – unlike nearly everybody else in Deschutes County –rarely carries a rifle in his gun rack, a fact Chief Kennedy artlessly tried to obfuscate in his sworn testimony. 

Foster is blunt but not abrasive. He is a devoted grandfather. He is also an accomplished guitarist whose irreproachable taste in classic rock is demonstrated by the fact that his favorite band is ThinLizzy. Most importantly for the purposes of the present discussion, Foster is an outspoken critic of what he describes as Sunriver’s ruling political clique.

Before 2008, Sunriver was one of the few places in the known universe where police were required by law to act as peace officers, rather than law enforcers. Although they were permitted to arrest people for crimes against person and property, they were forbidden to act as armed tax farmers by detaining and mulcting motorists who violated Oregon’s invasive seat belt law, or who committed other infractions that would result in traffic fines elsewhere.

“No seatbelt? No citation. No tail light? No ticket. In too much of a hurry? Not to worry,” reported a March 3, 2007 AP story from Sunriver. “Sgt. P.J. Beaty watches people in this upscale development breaking traffic laws, and sees plenty of them. But he can't pull them over. A man swerved head-on into Beaty's lane, and then back out again and Beaty couldn't law a glove on him.” 

Owing to the fact that Sunriver was actually governed by a private homeowners association, its streets were exempt from most of the obnoxious enactments used as pretexts for roadside shakedowns by police. As local reporter Susan Lawson of the Sunriver Scene told Pro Libertate in a May 2007 interview, “if someone were robbing the mini-mart up the road the police would obviously have the power to arrest the suspect. The police are simply not permitted to enforce a very small number – it's either six or eight – of laws dealing with minor traffic infractions, because our roads are the equivalent of private property.”

 This was an unconscionable state of affairs, according to the SROA, which prevailed on Oregon State Rep. Gene Whisnat to sponsor H.B. 3445, which extended police “authority” to include roads and streets on “premises open to the public that are owned by a homeowners association....” That measure was passed, and another freedom-promoting “loophole” was closed. But that wasn’t the end of the matter.

In 2003, the Sunriver Owner’s Association (SROA), which functions as a municipal government, had created a special service district within Deschutes County. In 2008, following passage of H.B 3445 – which put the police in the business of collecting revenue at gunpoint – the SROA enacted a special multi-million-dollar tax assessment for the special service district. 

Bob Foster, who has lived in the area nearly all his life and is a well-respected local businessman, became a conspicuous presence at public meetings, where he would politely but forcefully express his opposition to the service district and the tax assessment.

Like any small town dependent on tourism, Sunriver is acutely sensitive to economic trends. During one public meeting in which the town’s economic challenges were discussed, Foster suggested that the SROA could save several millions of dollars each year by seceding from Deschutes County, thereby canceling the expensive service district agreement. He also recommended that the duties of the police be scaled back to their pre-2007 role, and that Sunriver contract with a nearby town called La Pine for emergency services.

 “That’s the kind of talk that made me Public Enemy Number One,” Foster told Pro Libertate during a lengthy interview. He is a legitimate threat to the Sunriver Police – not to the physical safety of any of its officers, but to the agency's continued access to a steady stream of plundered revenue. This is why every gesture or public utterance by Foster is treated by the Sunriver Police as evidence of his criminal intent.

In an October 8 2010 petition seeking the extension of the stalking protection order, Officer Kasey Hughes accused Foster of making “violent and aggressive” statements that displayed a “distorted perception” of the police department. Among those supposedly criminal utterances was “You’re a public servant, I’m your boss.” On another occasion Foster “referred to the Sunriver Police as `the local Gestapo’” – an assessment which, given the department’s behavior, barely qualifies as hyperbole.

Foster “appears to be a highly volatile person,” simpered Hughes, accusing him of “obsessive behavior that could turn to aggression at any point.” Besides, Foster “has access to guns,” pouted Hughes, who – unlike his supposed persecutor – carries one with him at all times. 

A report filed by Officer Hughes a few weeks before submitting that petition suggests that he, not Foster, is hostage to bizarre obsessions. Hughes described how he and two other officers were responding to a citizen complaint at the Crossroads Gas Station in Sunriver when he saw Foster “sitting at a table directly in front of his truck,” writing in a notepad. A few minutes later, while interviewing a local resident, “I saw Foster standing outside his vehicle, staring at me,” Hughes continued. “I also noticed him washing his windshield very slowly.” 

Foster’s "threatening" behavior was supposedly noticed by the individual Hughes was interviewing. “Man, he’s eye-f**king you,” the resident told Hughes, according to the officer’s unsupported account. According to the report, this incident was enough to frighten Hughes away – although, oddly enough, his supposed stalker “was still at the gas pumps when I left.”

If Robert Foster is compelled to accept the Sunriver Police Department’s settlement offer, Hughes would be able to transmute a peculiar sexual fantasy of that kind into a criminal complaint. He or either of the other two “victims” would also be granted a license to stalk Foster and have him prosecuted for violating the permanent stalking order.  

Robert Foster’s experience can appropriately be described as “Kafkaesque” – but it is not unique. There are uncanny similarities between his story and recent developments in Quartzsite, Arizona, another small rural town (population circa 3,600) that is largely dependent on tourism. In recent months, something perilously close to open warfare has erupted between the Quartzsite TownCouncil and its reform-minded Mayor, Ed Foster (the shared surname is another striking coincidence).  

Foster is convinced that the Council has engaged in corrupt and dubious bookkeeping. His suspicions were sharpened by the Council’s refusal – in defiance of municipal ordinances and state law, and with the support of Police Chief Jeff Gilbert – to allow him access to the appropriate records. On several occasions, the Mayor and several other prominent critics of the Council have been arrested or harassed by the police in transparent acts of retaliation. This led ten members of the Quartzsite Police Department to file a public protest denouncing Gilbert’s abuse of “authority.” The Council has responded by declaring a state of emergency, suspending all but three members of the police force, and placing the dissenting officers under a gag order. 

One member of Quartzsite’s Town Council, Joe Winslow, persuaded Justice of the Peace Karen Slaughter (a retired sheriff’s deputy with no legal education) to issue an injunction against a local businessman named Michael Roth, who was accused of “harassing” and “threatening” Winslow by shooting him dirty looks and speaking to him disrespectfully. The court order requires that Roth surrender his firearms to Chief Gilbert and his praetorian guard – not because of anything the citizen has done, but because the offended Council member, who admits to purchasing a shotgun, describes himself as “more concerned about my reaction to his aggression than anything else.” 

In other words: This Mundane has frightened me and made me angry, so he must be disarmed before I either kill him or have one of my armed minions kill him on my behalf. There is little, if any, material difference between that demand and the terms being forced upon Robert Foster.

A third case of a similar kind is unfolding in Renton, Washington, where police and the City Attorney seek to arrest and prosecute an anonymous parodist who created several animated cartoons mocking the scandal-plagued police department. 

The videos “target specific members of the City of Renton and Renton Police Department with the intent to embarrass and emotionally torment the victims,” asserts police investigator Ryan Rutledge in a July 11affidavit filed in the Superior Court for King County. Rutledge contends that the videos – which by any rational definition constitute politically protected speech – are covered by the Washington State “cyberstalking” statute. In an example of what would be irony were it not related to the institutionalized corruption called "government," the Renton Deputy Police Chief Tim Troxel was given a trivial reprimand for ordering an off-duty police officer to stalk his wayward girlfriend.

Although no institutional or personal names were mentioned in the cartoons, Rutledge reports that “three individuals have come forward and identified themselves as being the persons targeted by embarrassing and emotionally tormenting comments about past sexual relationships or dating relationships that were discussed within some of these videos.” Once again, the "offense" in question consisted of making public comments that hurt the feelings of corrupt public officials.

One case of this type can be regarded as an anomaly; two can be described as coincidence; however, three or more examples constitute a pattern. 

Wherever they can get away with it, police are using wiretapping statutes to prosecute Mundanes who record their public behavior. Now local police, and the entrenched political elites they serve, are using anti-stalking and anti-harassment laws to disarm and criminalize their critics. We can expect depraved ingenuity of this kind on the part of the tax-devouring class as the retreating economic tide lays bare layer after layer of official corruption -- from Washington to Wall Street to City Hall. 

Thanks again for your help, and your patience...

... as I get the promised copies of Global Gun Grab to those of you who have been so generous.

Pro Libertate Radio has ended its run on the Liberty News Radio Network, which has changed formats. I have been approached about resuming the program with another network, and will provide details as they become available.

 Dum spiro, pugno!

In Praise of "Rogue" Cops

“His death was gang-involved, the way I see it,” lamented former Orange County Sheriff’s Detective Ron Thomas after viewing the mangled body of his 37-year-old son, Kelly. “A gang of rogue officers … brutally beat my son to death.” 

The description of the crime is appropriate: Kelly Thomas was murdered by a thugscrum of at least six police officers on a sidewalk in Fullerton. Kelly, who had a criminal record, was a homeless adult who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. On the evening of July 5, police were called to a street near the Fullerton bus depot by a report that someone was burglarizing parked cars. 

Kelly was identified as a suspect, and was uncooperative with the police. He was tasered at least five times and beaten until brain-dead while pleading with the officers and crying out for his father. Multiple eyewitness accounts have disclosed that the beating continued – punctuated by the familiar demand that the victim “stop resisting!” -- long after Kelly was on his back, motionless and defenseless.

That this was a gang-involved murder is indisputable. With all proper respect to Ron Thomas, however, the grieving father is desperately wrong about one detail: The murderers were not “rogue officers.” Once the gang assault on Kelly began, practically the only thing that could have saved his life would have been the timely intervention of a rogue officer.

As an institution, the police do not exist to defend life, liberty, and property. That would be the role played by peace officers -- a population that is, for all intents and purposes, extinct. Police are given the task of “enforcement” – the imposition of rules devised by, and on behalf of, the wealth-devouring class. That role includes dispensing summary punishment against people who display anything other than instant, unqualified submission to them and to the political order they embody. Any material good that is done by a police officer is a renegade act, given the nature and purposes of the institution that employs him.

In any situation blighted by the presence of a police officer, that armed functionary’s first priority is not to “serve” or to “protect” anybody. Sociologist James Q. Wilson, whose writings became somethingakin to canonical texts for Rudolph Giuliani and other politicians and policy makers of an authoritarian bent, explains that a police officer’s first priority is to “impose authority on people who are unpredictable, apprehensive, and often hostile.” 

That apprehension is an understandable reaction to the presence of an armed stranger of dubious character who demands unqualified submission. The hostility is predictable, entirely defensible, and generally commendable. Members of the Costumed Enforcer Class refer to it as “Contempt of Cop,” and regard it as an offense subject to summary punishment through the application of state-licensed violence, frequently of a lethal nature. 

Ron Thomas – who, once again, is a retired law enforcement officer himself who teaches “arrest and control” techniques – explains that the officers who murdered his son weren’t attempting to arrest him as a criminal suspect, but rather “bullying” him “under color of authority” as punishment for “contempt of cop.”

Incidents of this kind display a standard morphology:

A cop confronts a citizen and encounters brief, trivial, and often justified resistance. He summons “backup,” and a thugscrum – which is a phenomenon similar to a criminal “flash mob,” but generally more lethal – quickly coalesces and deals out hideous violence while terrified citizens look on in horror and apparent helplessness. 

Any officer who doesn’t play a hands-on role in beating the “suspect” will devote his attention to “crowd control” – that is, preventing intervention on behalf of the victim, and often confiscating any recording devices that might be used to gather incriminating video of the episode. 

Officially sanctioned gang violence depends on a chain reaction of conformity, and often a single rogue element would be sufficient to prevent it from reaching critical mass. A “rogue cop” – that is, a peace officer devoted to protecting life, liberty, and property, rather than a dutiful law enforcer determined to uphold “authority” – would interpose on behalf of the victim.

It’s difficult to know how often this happens, but we could round off that estimate to “never.” This is because “rogue” cops who commit such renegade acts of lawfulness are never treated with the union-organized solicitude displayed toward “good” cops who commit acts of criminal violence against Mundanes. 

Witness the case of former Austin Police Department Officer Ramon Perez, who joined the force as a 41-year-old rookie cop because of a sincere desire to protect people from crime. During a January 2005 domestic violence incident, Perez refused an order by a superior officer, Robert Paranich, to use his Taser on an elderly man who was not a threat to himself or anybody else. 

Owing to the fact that the subject was a frail man of advanced years, Perez was understandably concerned that the portable electro-shock torture device would kill him. Furthermore, using the Taser in that situation would have violated the explicit provisions of the Austin PD’s Taser Policy. Perez was able to resolve the situation through de-escalation, rather than by using potentially lethal force to “impose authority.”

Two days later, Perez was given what could only be considered a punitive transfer to the night shift. Two months later, following a second incident in which Perez chose de-escalation over armed compulsion, he was invited to what he was told would be a “counseling” session with the APD’s staff psychologist, Carol Logan. The purpose of that meeting, Perez was told, was to help him develop better “communication skills” with his fellow officers. In fact, it was a disguised “fit-for-duty review” convened to find a pretext to purge the probationary officer from the force before the “rogue cop” could infect others with his respect for individual rights.

 As the Austin Chronicle reported, Ms. Logan’s four-page report focused “entirely on Perez's moral and religious beliefs, which Logan concludes are so strong they are an `impairment' to his ability to be a police officer.” 

Perez, a self-described non-denominational fundamentalist Christian, an ordained minister, and home-schooling parent, was not as morally ductile as the typical police recruit. He saw protection of civil liberties as the paramount duty of a police officer, an obligation he viewed as a literal religious vocation. For this reason Perez was seen as unsuitable for a ministry in the State’s punitive priesthood. 

Perez was given an ultimatum by his superiors: He could resign and retain his peace officer’s license, or be terminated and lose it. This was done, once again, as punishment for Perez’s “rogue” conduct – which consisted of his refusal to break the law and violate department policy. 

If a “rogue” cop had intervened on behalf of Barron Bowling on July 10, 2003, the one-time cement worker from Kansas City, Kansas wouldn’t be a functional invalid at the age of 37. It was Bowling’s life-changing misfortune that day to be involved in a minor non-injury crash with an automobile carrying three undercover DEA agents.  In a fit of juvenile impatience, the driver, DEA agent Timothy McCue, attempted to pass Bowling’s car illegally on the right side of a single lane.

After the vehicles pulled over, agent McCue came boiling out of his car with a drawn gun. With help from one of his fellow heroes, McCue forced Bowling lie face-down on the pavement, despite the fact that the 98 degree heat had turned it into a frying pan. When Bowling attempted to push himself up, McCue began to punch and pistol-whip him while taunting his victim for supposedly being an “inbred hillbilly” and “system-dodging white trash.” One witness to the crime reported that McCue threatened to murder Bowling. With the help of his comrades, McCue handcuffed the victim and continued to beat and kick him after he was shackled and completely helpless.

In keeping with standard procedure, the assailants accused the victim of assaulting them, which would explain why the unarmed and outnumbered “aggressor” was left with severe brain damage, persistent tinnitus, incapacitating migraines, chronic dizziness, nausea, and lingering emotional trauma that led to at least one suicide attempt. 

While in police custody, Bowling was told by Officer Robert Lane that the facts of the case didn’t matter; he was the one going to prison because federal agents “do pretty much what they want.” Bowling’s only hope to avoid prison was Detective Max Seifert, who was assigned to investigate the case – which, in practice, meant to fill out whatever paperwork was necessary to ratify McCune’s perjury. 

For reasons that mystified his colleagues, Seifert actually conducted an investigation. His first question was: What happened to the witness reports collected at the scene? Officer Lane told him that those documents had been “lost,” because they served only to make the DEA agents “look bad.” 

 Seifert’s persistence led Deputy Chief Steven Culp chief to take him aside and order the detective to drop the matter. At the time, Seifert – who had been respected by both his fellow cops and the public at large – was less than a year from being “fully vested,” meaning that he could retire with his full pension. The leverage provided by that fact provided the tacit but unmistakable “or else” that hovered above the conversation between Seifert and Culp.

To his considerable credit, Seifert continued with his investigation. After Seifert filed his report, the district attorney announced that he was dropping the charges against Bowling. Deputy Chief Culp, however, pressured the prosecutor into reinstating the case. Seifert went on the testify on behalf of the defense in Bowling’s criminal trial – which resulted in an acquittal on the spurious assault-related charges – and on behalf of the victim in his federal civil rights lawsuit. 

For his insistence on telling the truth, Seifert was subjected to a campaign of ridicule and abuse from his colleagues on the police force. As U.S. District Judge Julie A. Robinson pointed out in a ruling that awarded Bowling more than $833,000 in damages, "Seifert was shunned, subjected to gossip and defamation by his police colleagues, and treated as a pariah.” More importantly, he was punished for insubordination by being forced into early retirement, thereby losing his pension. 

None of the law enforcement officers involved in the assault on Bowling and subsequent cover-up was disciplined in any way. The only one who was punished was the “rogue” officer who had acted in defense of the truth, and of the victim's individual rights. Steven Culp, the official who ordered Seifert to participate in the cover-up and then purged him when he refused to do so, is now the Executive Director of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training. Without so much as a faint whisper of irony, Culp claims that his new job is “to provide the citizens with qualified, trained, ethical, and professional peace officers” who act “in a manner consistent with the law while being considerate of the citizens….”

Residents of the Sunflower State can be confident that Steven Culp -- like those in charge of recruiting and indoctrinating police officers elsewhere in the Soyuz -- will do his formidable best to protect them from “rogue cops” like Max Seifert.

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 Dum spiro, pugno!

The Missing Lesson from Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform

 Roughly a decade ago, Al Pacino starred in a movie entitled S1m0ne, a cyber-era updating of the Pygmalion myth in which a film director creates an uncannily realistic digital actress. Despite the fact that “Simone” was a computer-rendered composite fantasy, the lustrous blond enchantress becomes a global pop culture sensation – a profitable illusion sustained through increasingly desperate acts of misdirection on the part of the director. 

It’s tempting to think that accused Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik is a S1m0ne-style digital fantasy drawn to specifications provided by Morris Dees’ so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. Breivik used social networking sites to create a cyber-persona seemingly made to order for left-leaning “watchdog” groups. Available photographs depict the blond, stereotypically Nordic Breivik as if he were a dress-up doll, his face oddly unmarked and expressionless as he poses in a variety of guises – including Freemason garb and a scuba outfit. 

In similar fashion, his recorded ideological pronouncements – the quotes attributed to him in the aftermath of the killing spree in Oslo and Utoya, and his bloated “manifesto” – could be the work of someone determined to embody every detail of the familiar caricature of the right-wing “hate criminal.” 

Breivik may be exactly what he appears to be – a murderous nationalist ideologue determined to precipitate a European culture war that would end with the expulsion of Muslims from the continent and the mass liquidation of “cultural Marxists.” Breivik’s uncredited borrowings from the “Unabomber” manifesto underscore the possibility – however distant – that he, like Ted Kaczynski, could be a product of a CIA-style “behavior modification” program, or a pawn in a false-flag operation. 

Whatever we eventually learn about Breivik’s background and motivations, one detail of the killing spree he allegedly perpetrated offers a timely and critical lesson practically everybody has missed: We should never trust an armed man wearing the costume of a police officer. 

According to the narrative provided by Norwegian investigators, Breivik detonated a remote-controlled bomb in downtown Oslo before traveling to Utoya, site of an annual summer retreat for young activists affiliated with the Labour Party, many of whom had parents or relatives who had been employed at the government offices targeted in the bombing. 

When he arrived a few hours after the blast, Breivik was disguised as a policeman. This allowed him to gain access to the facility, and the confidence of his victims: Trained to defer reflexively to someone wearing the insignia of “authority,” the young campers were psychologically disarmed when the assassin told them he had been sent to check on their “security.”

By the time a SWAT team managed to arrive an hour and a half later, Breivik had mowed down at least 86 scores of innocent youngsters. “It was a slaughter of young children,” one witness said following the massacre. They were sheep who had fallen prey to a wolf wearing what the victims had been taught to perceive as the attire of a “sheepdog.”

The uncomfortable but unavoidable fact is that every state-employed “sheepdog” is a potential murderer, and should be treated as such. We have this on the unimpeachable authority of “Jack Dunphy,” an active-duty officer in the employ of the Los Angeles Police Department. 

 In every encounter between a police officer and a “civilian,” Dunphy writes, the officer is “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.” 

What this means is that a Mundane who displays anything other than abject servility is perceived as a threat to “officer safety” – and, by Dunphy’s calculation, is a suitable subject for immediate termination.

As is demonstrated by the actions of Patrolman Daniel Harless of the Canton, Ohio Police Department, that assessment is not hyperbole.

In a June 8 traffic stop that was captured on video, Harless repeatedly threatened to murder the driver, William E. Bartlett, for carrying a concealed handgun for which he had obtained a the appropriate permit. At the time, Bartlett was attempting to comply with the state ordinance by notifying Harless that he was carrying a weapon, and displaying his concealed carry license. Bartlett was composed and deferential; Harless’s behavior was that of a borderline psychotic eagerly seeking an excuse to kill somebody.

“As soon as I felt your gun I should have took [sic] two steps back, pulled my Glock 40 and just put 10 bullets in your ass and let you drop,” snarled Harless. “And I wouldn’t have lost any sleep.” Thus did Harless slay the diligently propagated fiction that police officers are burdened with a bone-deep dread of pulling their firearms.

After threatening to “put lumps on” a witness to the incident, Harless told Bartlett, “I’m so close to caving in your f*****g head…. You’re just a stupid human being…. F*****g talking to me with a f*****g gun. You want me to pull mine and stick it to your head?” He later threatened to stop Bartlett every time he saw him, towing – that is, stealing – his car and taking him to jail. 

After the video was made public by the civil liberties group Ohioans for Concealed Carry, Harless was put on paid vacation. 

“Obviously, whatever transpired on that video was an isolated incident,” sniffed Bill Adams, commissar of the local police union. The “whatever” Adams blithely dismissed was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon: Rather than continuing to receive a paycheck for sitting at home swilling beer and consuming internet porn, Harless should be in jail awaiting trial. 

Furthermore, this incident was an “isolated” one only as that term applies to those individuals and that particular location; it is anything but atypical of the behavior of the State’s thuggish enforcer caste. 

Harless merely threatened to pull his gun and stick it to William Bartlett’s head. According to the eyewitness testimony of his former partner, Officer Sergio Vergillo, that’s what Phoenix Police Officer Richard Chrisman did to 29-year-old Danny Rodriguez just seconds before he gunned down the family’s dog and murdered the unarmed man.

 Chrisman and Vergillo responded to a call from Rodriguez’s mother, who was upset with her son’s behavior. Rodriguez demanded that Chrisman present a warrant. Drawing on the same lexicon of public service used by Patrolman Harless, Chrisman shoved a gun against Rodriguez’s temple and sneered, “I don’t need no warrant, mother****r.”

Within seconds Chrisman had shot the dog, which – according to his partner – exhibited no threatening behavior. This left Rodriguez understandably upset.

“Hey, why did you shoot my dog?” Rodriguez bellowed at the intruder. Five seconds later, he was dead – thereby validating Officer “Jack Dunphy”’s warning that summary execution is considered condign punishment for any Mundane who annoys a member of the Exalted Brotherhood of Coercion by asserting his rights. 

Chrisman, who had previously been captured on video plantingdrug paraphernalia on a homeless woman, was fired and charged with second-degree murder. Significantly, the local police union, the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), held a barbecue at its headquarters to raise money on behalf of Chrisman. Following Chrisman’s arrest, PLEA commissar Mark Spencer commissioned a fishing expedition into Vergillo’s background in the hope of impeaching his credibility as a witness. Even after the net came up empty, Spencer publicly denigrated the character of Officer Vergillo, who had violated the most important canon of police conduct by telling the truth about a fellow officer’s criminal conduct – in this case, aggravated murder. 

In New Orleans, the trial continues of five police officers accused of murdering two people, and grievously injuring four others at the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The victims were unarmed refugees seeking to flee to higher ground. The police officers responsible for this atrocity concocted a cover story – complete with planted weapons and fabricated “witnesses” – in which the victims supposedly opened fire on the police and were killed in self-defense.  

One of the victims, a 40-year-old disabled man named Ronald Madison, received a shotgun blast to the back of his head, and then was shot at least three more times while he was face-down on the ground. Lance Madison, an eyewitness to the murder of his brother by the police, was arrested and charged with “attempted murder of police officers” – a charge that was eventually dismissed. 

While the murders at Danziger Bridge differed in scale from the bloodletting in Norway, it was also a fatal ambush in which the perpetrators were attired in a costume signifying “authority” -- and they behaved with the same pathological ruthlessness displayed the perpetrator of massacre on Utoya. 

Whenever an innocent person is confronted by an armed stranger in what appears to be a government-issued costume, one danger is that he is an imposter. An even more dangerous possibility is that he isn’t. 

By the way....

...  here's a link to the second hour of last week's Pro Libertate Radio program, which features a discussion of the demented Daniel Harless and other distinguished defenders of public order.

My thanks, once again...

... to everyone who has donated to Pro Libertate, and for the patience many of you have displayed in awaiting your copies of Global Gun Grab, which will be arriving within the week. Thank you once more, and God bless!

 

Dum spiro, pugno!