Too Good for Government "Work": The Death of a Baton Rouge Peace Officer

Betty Smothers with her son, Warrick Dunn.

Every phone call that arrives after midnight is freighted with terrible expectations, and the one received by Warrick Dunn at about 12:30 a.m. on January 7, 1993 bore the worst possible news.

“You need to get to the hospital – quick,” directed the caller, a Baton Rouge police officer. By the time the 18-year-old Warrick arrived, his 36-year-old mother, Betty Smothers, had died from gunshot wounds received during an ambush at a nearby bank. Betty was killed in the line of duty as a private security guard for a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in an exceptionally crime-plagued section of the city.

A single mother of six young children and a corporal with the Baton Rouge Police Department, Smothers supplemented her income through an immeasurably more dangerous part-time job as a private peace officer. Baton Rouge at the time was experiencing a prolonged paroxysm of violent crime. As is always the case, city residents seeking protection for property had to pay for it themselves, with whatever they had left over after being taxed to pay for law enforcement “services.”

The night Smothers was murdered, she and store manager Kimen Lee discussed “the rash of grocery-store stickups in the area,” recalled a 1995 profile of Warrick, a much-lauded High School football and track star who became a national champion and Heisman contender at Florida State. “Lee remembers agreeing with Smothers that their nightly routine could easily make them sitting ducks.”

Smothers, who was permitted to use her patrol car while moonlighting, habitually entered the one-way drive-through from the “wrong” direction. This allowed Lee to unlock the night-deposit box through the passenger-side window and conduct her transaction in seconds. This also meant that Smothers would be partially shielding her client with her own body – as she was during the ambush that killed her. 

Lee was seriously wounded, but able to operate the vehicle from the passenger seat. She survived because Smothers, in keeping with her contract as a private security officer, placed the security of her client above her own, rather than making “officer safety” the chief consideration. Given what is known of her character, it is possible that Smothers would have behaved in a similar fashion while on duty, even though she had no legal obligation to do so.

By every available account, Smothers was a kind neighbor and a genuinely heroic mother who was fully invested in caring for her children. Unlike most of her professional colleagues, she was not “badge-heavy” during her 14 years on the police force, which prompted many who knew her to speculate that she had been transplanted from Mayberry. Among those she encountered during that career was a young miscreant named Kevan Brumfield, whom she caught shoplifting. Rather than handcuffing the thief and pressing charges, Smothers compelled him to return what he had stolen and urged him to take advantage of an opportunity most young men in his position wouldn’t receive.

Brumfield proved to be incorrigible. By the time of that encounter with Smothers, the teenager had lived in several group homes and been treated – most likely with the full suite of psycho-toxic drugs – for various emotional “disorders.” Owing in significant measure to the perverse economic incentives produced by prohibition, the intellectually stunted and morally obtuse teenager found a niche as a narcotics dealer and armed robber.

Although Smothers never spoke with Brumfield again, their paths intersected six years later on the day of her death: He was the one who fatally shot Sommers during the January 7, 1993 ambush.

Brumfield was convicted of first-degree murder and has spent two decades on death row. On June 18, the US Supreme Court granted his appeal for a review of that sentence in light of his claimed “intellectual disability” – a documented I.Q. of 75 and his history of psychiatric hospitalization. The Court’s ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which was issued following Brumfield’s conviction, held that the execution of an “intellectually disabled” convict violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. 

In his dissenting opinion, Clarence Thomas observed that Brumfield’s claim “that his actions were the product of his disadvantaged background is striking in light of the conduct of … Smothers’ children following her murder.” Warrick, who had just celebrated his 18^th birthday, essentially became a surrogate father to his five younger siblings. Following a record-setting football career at Florida State and then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, Warrick devoted himself to charity, establishing several organizations that provide for the needs of single mothers and traumatized children.

Betty Smothers’ funeral, which was held at the Centroplex Exhibition Hall, was attended by 2,000 people. The four-mile-long procession to the cemetery included hundreds of police cars. The Governor of Louisiana and Mayor of Baton Rouge spoke at Smothers’ wake, and a city street in Baton Rouge now bears her name.Friends and neighbors were eager to help Betty's mother raise her orphaned children. The death benefits provided to Betty as a 14-year employee of the department provided her children with material security of the kind rarely enjoyed by the spouses and children of private security operatives who are killed on the job.

Smothers died as a private peace officer defending property from aggression, rather than as a State functionary exercising the government’s monopoly on violence. The government law enforcement agency that employed Smothers sought to bask in the reflected glory of the heroism she displayed in a significantly more dangerous occupation. 

Bart Starr recognizes Warrick's charity work.

The early and mid-1990s were an unusually dangerous time for many Baton Rouge residents, but the police department that supposedly protected the public didn’t expose itself to those dangers. Betty Smothers was one of 74 Baton Rouge murder victims in 1993. In a single year, the “civilian” murder toll was more than four times greater than the number of police officers who have been killed in the entire history of the Baton Rouge PD.

Over the past 104 years, a total of eighteen Baton Rouge PD officers have died on duty. More than one quarter of them were killed in motorcycle or automobile accidents. Betty Smothers was the only member of the department to die through violence or an accident during a sixteen-year period -- 1988 to 2004. Her name is included in the roster of “fallen” Baton Rouge police officers despite the fact that she was not acting as a police officer when she was murdered.

As Nietzche famously said, everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has is stolen. In this case, the State’s coercive caste, seeking to add undeserved luster to its institutional image, has stolen the valor of a private peace officer.

Private security officers are made out of the same flawed material as the rest of humanity. Unlike government enforcement operatives, however, they can’t take refuge in “qualified immunity” when they harm innocent people, or allow them to come to harm through neglect or malice. Private peace officers confront much greater occupational risks than their government-employed counterparts. They are also dramatically less inclined toward violence than American police officers, who kill much more promiscuously than law enforcement officers in other countries.

Examining figures compiled by the Washington Post, the Guardian of London, and the watchdog organization Killed By Police, professor Edward Peter Stringham points out that “the police-against-citizen kill rate” in the U.S. “is more than 145 per 100,000.” The overall homicide rate, by way of contrast, is 5 per 100,000.

The two most violent countries in the world, he continues, are Venezuela and Honduras, where the national homicide rates are 54 and 90 per 100,000, respectively. Both of those countries are subject to State Department travel advisories.

“If you are not comfortable vacationing in those countries, it is little wonder why so many Americans are uncomfortable with police who kill at a rate more than 1.5 and 2.5 times the homicide rates” of those two extraordinarily violent countries, he notes.

Stringham, the Davis Professor for Economic Organizations and Innovation at Trinity College, is the author of Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life, which he recently discussed in an interview with the indispensable Dr. Tom Woods. One of the key insights encoded in the title of that book is that governance does not require political government. One application of that principle is the private provision of security, a practice that exists because of the consummate failure of government police agencies to provide their advertised service.

Every monopoly offers an inferior product at higher cost than a competitive market would bear, and as Professor Stringham points out, this is emphatically true of government policing.

 

All but extinct: Chief Byard of S.F.'s Patrol Special Police.

In San Francisco at the time of Betty Smothers’ murder, the Patrol Special Police, a consortium of independent private security companies, “charged $25 to $30 an hour, depending on the particular service, while off-duty public officers charged up to $58 an hour of security service.”

“The need for private security is greatest for low-income families, since they are victimized by crime more often than other income groups,” Stringham observes in a paper co-written with Kai Jaeger. “All too often, regulations price low-income families out of the market for private protection…. Some cities only allow off-duty government police officers to patrol for private security firms, for example. Since hiring police officers costs two to four times as much as non-police private security guards, this type of regulation makes private security prohibitively expensive.”

Government intervention thus artificially prices private security beyond the reach of the people most desperately in need of that service. This is a very lucrative arrangement for police officers.

In San Francisco, write Stringham and Jaeger, roughly half of the police department “work off-duty, earning an extra $9.5 million.” That’s a sizeable and well-connected constituency seeking to insulate itself from purely private competition. The “Patrol Specials,” who are descended from patrols created in the 1840s to protect miners and merchants, are the only private security company allowed to operate in San Francisco under the city charter.

Predictably, that relationship corrupted the organization. Although it has continued to provide contract-based protection for property owners, it was also given a limited role in carrying out police functions, such as issuing citations and enforcing city regulations – and found itself on the receiving end of several lawsuits arising from abuses of the kind such behavior entails. Rather than expanding the use of private security patrols, the city administration has treated the Patrol Specials as the extinction-bound remnant of a less enlightened time.

“Despite all the good we do and how effective we are, the police union doesn’t want us around,” complained Patrol Special Police Chief Alan Byard in 2010. The unions have all but killed their competition: By 2014, fewer than 10 active Special Patrol officers remained.

Critics of private security companies frequently complain that “rent-a-cops” are insufficiently regulated and inadequately trained. Government police organizations are state-regulated, but – as we are constantly reminded – they are also entirely unaccountable to the public. The work quality of private security operatives is variable, but in a competitive market a contractor or company that is corrupt or inept won’t survive for very long. 

Furthermore, in some states – such as Arkansas and Louisiana – the professional standards of private security officers are much higher than those of government-employed law enforcement officers.

No training required in Louisiana for part-time cops.

In Louisiana, the state government requires security officers to receive a modest amount of classroom instruction regarding legal and ethical issues, use of non-lethal force, “limits of force,” emergency medical care “including First Aid and CPR,” and firearms training prior to being certified. They are then required to undergo an annual refresher course in “security training” and re-qualify with their firearms.

By way of contrast, a Louisiana resident can become a government-employed police officer without any training or certification whatsoever, and continue in that occupation on a part-time basis without ever attending a POST academy. Some police departments in small rural towns employ full-time officers who are entirely untrained – and, owing to “qualified immunity,” selectively exempt from the criminal laws that private security officers must obey.

The government-imposed distortions in Louisiana’s security market probably made moonlighting as a security guard economically irresistible to Betty Smothers, a single mother seeking to buy a home for her large family. Betty's day job as a cop notwithstanding, her conduct the night she was murdered suggests that she was probably too good for government “work."

Notes and asides  

A few weeks ago I mentioned that our family is facing eviction after our landlord walked away from the mortgage (this is the second time we've experienced this over the past six years). Our "hard deadline" to vacate is this Thursday (June 25). We haven't been able to find a new home here in Payette that is large enough for our family and within our severely limited budget -- a situation that isn't uncommon in the Idaho rental market.

We are planning a move to Homedale, a small town in Owyhee County, but our new home isn't yet available. Any financial support you can provide to help us with our moving expenses would be tremendously appreciated.Thank you so much.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Ain't That Amerika: Routine State Terrorism in the Imperial Capital

"Officer Safety" uber alles, you know.

The eleven-year-old girl shrieked in horror as the shower curtain was ripped away, leaving her exposed to the view of a large male stranger. Her sense of  violation was compounded by the threat of immediate, violent death: The marauder was wearing body armor and aiming an assault rifle at the naked, terrified child.

Downstairs, the offender's comrades were ransacking the house and barking profane orders at the traumatized child's family. Sterling Harrison, her 19-year-old brother, was sitting in front of a game console when three of the invaders burst into his upstairs room, bound him, and shoved him down the stairway. Her terrified siblings – one thirteen years of age, the other seven – were corralled and imprisoned at gunpoint in the living room along with the rest of the family.

The invaders were police, of course. Nobody in the home was suspected of committing a criminal offense. No evidence of criminal misconduct was found. The SWAT raid was carried out after 10:00 PM, in violation of municipal ordinances. The rationale for this act of state terrorism was the drug-related arrest, nearly two weeks earlier, of Mordsen Box, the 11-year-old girl's estranged father, who hadn't resided at the address for several months.

This after-dark military raid took place at a residence located less than three miles from the White House.

Thirteen days before the raid, Mr. Box was arrested by Metro D.C. Police after five ounces of marijuana were found following a pretext traffic stop. Officer Taylor Volpe, who conducted the stop, claimed – falsely, according to the family’s lawsuit against the MPD – that the rear license plate of Box's car was partially obstructed by a plastic cover.

Once the stop was underway, Volpe – in keeping with his indoctrination as an opportunistic road pirate – asked if there was “anything illegal” in the vehicle. Like countless others in similar situations, Box made the tragic mistake of answering a question the officer had no right to ask. He stated that he wasn't “aware” of anything illegal in his car, and that Volpe could carry out the search “if you have to.”

“OK, so I can look?” Volpe reiterated, inducing the intimidated driver to make his consent explicit. Within seconds the officer had found the marijuana, which was confiscated along with $180 in cash that was found in Box's wallet. His expired driver's license listed 1054 Quebec Place NW as his home address.

Both Mr. Box and his domestic situation were well-known to the local police. During the weeks leading up to the April 18, 2013 raid, police had paid two visits to the home while searching for Box. On both occasions family members explained that Box didn't live at the address.

Those facts were carefully omitted by Volpe in the search warrant application filed after the traffic stop. Among the falsehoods included in Volpe's affidavit was the claim that a “utility listing” was found for Volpe at that address. In fact, all of the utilities were listed in the name of Shandalyn Harrison, Box's ex-girlfriend.

Invoking his “experience,” “knowledge,” and “training,” Volpe insisted that a search of the residence was justified by the supposed likelihood that a large quantity of narcotics and drug proceeds would be found at the residence.  For too many judges, the rote recitation of such claims will obviate the need for actual evidence.

“In many dozens of other warrant applications sworn by MPD officers to different Superior Court judges in the one-year period, MPD officers similarly claimed under oath, based on the same `training' and `experience,' that a broad category of people referred to as `drug traffickers' attempt to hide the evidence of their criminal activities in other places that are not their own home,” notes the lawsuit filed on behalf of Harrison and her children. “These statements of `training' and `experience' thus purportedly give agents of the District's government the ability to raid and search multiple homes and other locations for every traffic stop or street arrest in which they find contraband.”

At the time he filled out his warrant application, Taylor Volpe was a rookie officer with the MPD. He was assimilated into the department’s institutional culture very quickly.

In July 2013, just weeks after the home invasion that grew out of Volpe’s affidavit, the officer was given a “Rookie of the Year” award by the 5^th District Citizen’s Advisory Council of the MPD. Those to whom that award is given “are acknowledged … by cops who know good police work when they see it (and work alongside it),” observed the Council. Given their standards of behavior, Volpe and his comrades would be suitable for employment in some of the worst Third World despotisms. In fact, they might be a bit over-qualified.

Saddam Hussein famously said that “Law consists of two lines above my signature.” For the DC Metro Police, and the pathologically indifferent judges who enable them, “Probable Cause” consists of whatever speculative, unsubstantiated claims an officer makes, as long as they are prefaced with a reference to his “experience and training.” The result is an enforcement regime in which police in the nation's Capital behave in a manner indistinguishable from U.S. soldiers carrying out raids against the families of “suspected militants” in occupied Baghdad.

Sexual humiliation of captives during a judicially authorized home invasion appears to be a standard element of the ritual.

About three weeks before Ms. Harrison's 11-year-old daughter was dragged naked from the shower by an armored, masked assailant, Michael Pitts was thrown to the floor of his home by SWAT operators who tore off his pants and “probed his naked genitals and anal cavity” in front of his disabled mother. The 37-year old Pitts was in the kitchen cooking for his bedridden mother when the Berserkers kicked open the front door.

The rationale for this home invasion was the arrest, three days earlier in a different location, of Pitts' uncle Tyrone, who had been detained on the streets without probable cause by officers who demanded that the 64-year-old man submit to a body search. The pedestrian, who was not suspected of committing a violent crime, was arrested after the officers found a gun.

In the subsequent search warrant affidavit, Officer Mark Pugh listed not a single “particularized fact suggesting that guns, ammunition, or other contraband would be present in the Pitts' home,” the family pointed out in its lawsuit against the MPD. It provided only “generic and conclusory claims that, based on their `training' and `experience,' [police] are likely to find guns, ammunition, and other firearms accessories in a person's home after an arrest for gun possession is made away from the home.”

Neither firearms, ammunition, nor evidence of criminal wrongdoing were found during the raid – and as Michael Pitts can testify, the search was nothing if not thorough. Neither Officer Pugh nor his comrades bothered to explain how a body cavity search could produce evidence of a weapons-related offense. Presumably, their “training and experience” authorize them to inflict pointless humiliation of that kind, and their “qualified immunity” protects them against civil and criminal liability for such actions.

Ella Lane, a 71-year-old woman whose home was raided in October 2012, endured a different variety of sadistic abuse. The elderly woman, who had been watching television when her door was broken down by the SWAT team, was dragged to her front lawn and held, at gunpoint, in view of her neighbors for six hours while occupation troops ransacked the home in which she had lived for 37 years. During that time she was not allowed to eat, drink, or use the restroom.

Once again, the invaders failed to find any evidence of criminal activity. As they left the shattered home, one of the Stormtroopers told Lane that if he were ever called back to the house, he would “make sure that she lost her home,” recounts a lawsuit filed against the department.

As in the case of Tyrone Pitts and his family, this SWAT raid grew out of a warrantless search in which a gun was discovered. The subject of the earlier arrest – a 28-year-old man named Terrence Crossland – was the victim's grandson. Crossland and two friends were smoking on the sidewalk when they were accosted by officers from an MPD Vice unit. Crossland was arrested for violating the District’s open container law after one of the officers found a gun in a jacket belonging to one of his friends.

It was on this basis that Officer John Wright swore out a formulaic and perjurious affidavit claiming that because of his “training and experience” he just knew that “persons involved in illegal activities maintain books, records, documentation and other papers relating to the ordering, sales, and servicing of their firearms.” He didn’t even bother pretending that Crossland’s friend lived in Lane’s house; he simply used the only address he could find. 

Karakatsanis (l.) with fellow civil liberties litigator Phil Telfeyin

Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, who filed the civil complaint on Lane's behalf, correctly observes that “it was not and is not illegal to possess a firearm at one's home in the District. Nowhere did [Officer] Wright allege … that the residents of the home did not possess valid licenses or that they had been disqualified from lawful firearms ownership.” 

Nor did he establish a basis for treating Mrs. Lane as a suspect in a crime: Her only involvement in this matter consisted of living in a home near the scene of the arrest.

As Karakatsanis points out, Wright's warrant application “sought permission for what amounted to a Colonial Era general warrant, requesting that `a Search Warrant be issued for the entire premises … for any other evidence of a crime that may be found.'”

General warrants of the kind routinely used by Washington's Metro PD figured very prominently in the angry letter sent to London by Jefferson and his colleagues explaining the moral basis for the use of lethal defensive force against colonial-era law enforcement officers.

That comparison is unfair, given that colonial-era Redcoats tended to be more restrained than contemporary American police officers, and they were also more liable to punishment for any abuses they committed. A more appropriate comparison would be to the behavior and methods employed by the Regime's occupation forces overseas.

The MPD's warrant applications adapt the “pattern of life analysis” used in counterinsurgency operations – both Special Forces raids and drone strikes. “Probable cause” isn't necessary to authorize such measures. All that is required to unleash the strike teams or dispatch the drones is for analysts to establish connections of some kind – kinship, known association, a single cell phone conversation or text message – between a potential target and a “suspected militant.” In the fashion of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, anybody who is killed or injured in the operation is classified as either a “militant” or an associate of one. 

The execution of Miriam Carey.

Unlike the residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area, people living in D.C.’s majority-black neighborhoods aren’t terrorized by the Empire’s robotic heralds of mass destruction. They are merely haunted by the knowledge that police can invade their home without cause, strip-search them in front of their families, or drag their naked, screaming grade school-age daughters out of the shower – and then threaten them with the loss of their home if they pay a return visit.

The three incidents described above, which are typical of the estimated 80-124 SWAT raids that occur every day in the American Soyuz, took place within a ten-mile radius of the White House. Two of those raids, interestingly, were carried out a few months before Miriam Carey was executed in the streets of Washington, D.C. after inadvertently driving through a traffic barricade near the White House.  

No other country endures routine state terrorism of this variety.  Perhaps we should consider this one facet of “American Exceptionalism.”

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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Trouble with Kids Today: Too Much Deference to "Authority," Too Little Respect for Property

Staking his claim: A state-authorized dispenser of violence asserts ownership of a Mundane.

We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey. –

Veteran demon Screwtape, counseling apprentice devil Wormwood, in C.S. Lewis’ allegory The Screwtape Letters (letter XXV).

“The President of the United States should say to all children … here’s the rule, kids: When the cop tells you to go, you go,” declared Rudolph Giuliani. “You say, `Yes, sir, no sir. Yes, police officer; no, police officer. You don’t disrespect a police officer. He’s a symbol of authority.”

The besetting problem of our era, we are insistently told by police and their apologists, is not widespread abuse and other misconduct by law enforcement officers, but increasing “disrespect for authority” that is being abetted by “liberals” and those even more dreadful people called “libertarians.”

Cpl. Casebolt threatens to kill teens concerned about his victim.

Giuliani’s comments were made during an interview with Fox News herd-poisoner Bill O’Reilly following the host’s recital of a familiar jeremiad.

“Young people [are] disrespecting authority,” O’Reilly complained, pandering to the prejudices of his superannuated and incurious audience by insisting that “young people in America, especially teenagers, have a defiance toward authority not seen since the Vietnam days.” So pronounced is this social affliction, according to O’Reilly’s diagnosis, that the entire population under the age of 25 should be written off as a “lost generation” – a proposal he made with blithe indifference to an audience roughly three times that age.

“If you were around in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you know that history is repeating itself,” pontificated O’Reilly. Young people subject to enslavement through conscription grew distrustful of government – understandably so, as any reasonable person would point out. O’Reilly, a stranger in the house of reason, laments that this healthy distrust “led to a breakdown of authority, and the rise of the `Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll’ era.”

O’Reilly’s personal legal history powerfully suggests that he is not a martyr to sexual self-restraint. For his part, Giuliani’s colorful carnal dissipations offer an interesting counterpoint to his stern public moralizing, the central theme of which is the unconditional duty for unqualified submission to “authority” as embodied by the political class and its armed emissaries.

“Freedom is about authority,” Giuliani explained in a 1994 speech. “Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”

In that formula – “freedom” through submission to state “authority” – we hear echoes of Mario Palmieri, the chief ideologist of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

“According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man,” wrote Palmieri in The Philosophy of Fascism (pg. 99). “The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, with this need of raising the State to its rightful position.”

The State’s “rightful position,” from this perspective, is one of ownership. As the property of the State, the individual is free to do only that which is permitted by those who act in its name. When a police officer, “a symbol of authority,” addresses a Mundane, he does so from a position of ownership. This is what the term “authority” means.

People have authority over only that which legitimately belongs to them – beginning with their physical selves and the content of their thoughts, and extending to such things as the property they have acquired through legitimate commerce or inheritance, and the performance of services that have been promised through freely negotiated and agreed contracts.

In his Second Treatise, John Locke pointed out that parents have authority within their home to care for and educate their children. However, children themselves – contrary to the Roman doctrine of patria potestas – are not the property of their parents. The duty of parents is to care for, protect, and instruct children in sound morality as they learn to take ownership of their lives. Successful parenting instills in children an understanding of, and respect for, the Golden Rule, which requires reciprocal respect for property rights.

As Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education recently pointed out, it is possible to have a police system that focuses entirely on the protection of property rights.  Tucker likes to smoke, and he doesn't like having the government tell him where and when he can indulge that habit. In fact, as a self-described anarchist, Tucker – a free market economic analyst – doesn't like government at all, particularly law enforcement.

Yet when a police officer in Atlantic Station, Georgia explained to Tucker that smoking was prohibited, Tucker readily complied – because Atlantic Station is, in effect, a privatized city. Tucker recognized that property rights include the ability to enforce rules that visitors must obey.

Police in Atlantic Station are employed by business owners and merchants and answer to them, rather than a political clique. The rules of the enclave are strict, but not onerous. Rather than detaining people and filing charges for trivial misbehavior, police – acting as peace officers – encourage or, when necessary, compel them to leave. As Tucker observes, “The right to … walk away makes all the difference.”

Similar arrangements existed within mining camps, wagon trains, cattle drives, and other pre-political arrangements in the Mountain West before the arrival of government and what we're expected to call “civilization.” People who cherish liberty understand that order exists where property rights are protected – and that the protection of property is too important to be left to the State. This is best accomplished through what conservatives often call “mediating institutions,” such as private associations and, most importantly, the family.

Ironically, people of O’Reilly’s cast of mind are entirely correct in lamenting the disintegration of the family and the increasingly barbarized condition of our culture. This is not because Americans are becoming impudently disdainful of “authority.” Worship of “authority” – meaning armed people given State authorization to kill – is ubiquitous in contemporary America, as is the contempt for property rights that characterizes every collectivist society in terminal decline. In keeping with Screwtape’s prescription, statists are seeking to fix the public mind on the vice of which we are least in danger.

...insist those belonging to the least accountable segment of American society.

The authoritarian formula peddled by Fascists both ancient –  Palmieri and his comrades – and contemporary – O’Reilly, Giuliani and their ilk – requires that parents indoctrinate children in the protocols of submission to the State and its agents. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Golden Rule, either as a matter of public policy or as a restraint on the private behavior of those who urge authoritarian nostrums on the rest of us.

Public “authority,” O’Reilly and others of his persuasion instruct us, is a uniquely fragile thing, particularly when exercised by police officers. It appears to be a “Clap for Tinkerbell” proposition: Unless we truly believe in the authority of the police, they cannot protect us.

Police have been “so demonized by zealots … that some of them have grown tentative,” O’Reilly insists, lamenting a development that is welcomed with grateful relief by people who have known the dubious blessing of unremitting police attention.  “When the police see disrespect to them, they say, `I’m not going to bother anymore,’ in many cases,” continues O’Reilly, alluding to the much-circulated and entirely specious claim that we are witnessing a “spike” in violent crime as poor Officer Tinkerbell sulks in his patrol car out of petulant spite because people will no longer clap for him.

There is a sense in which O’Reilly is correct that Vietnam-era history is repeating itself: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police unions, their media courtesans, and authoritarian conservatives in Congress sounded the tocsin regarding a “War on Police.” No such war occurred then, nor is one underway now. The rhetorical barrage by the “law and order” lobby was an overture to Nixon’s decision to declare “war” on crime – which led to the first wave of outright police militarization.

“Is there a national conspiracy to kill policemen?” asked the October 19, 1970 issue of U.S. News and World Report. “Congress dug into this question in early October. One witness after another told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that a pattern of attacks on police indicates a plot.”

Captain Honey in action.

Among those who offered testimony was Captain Joel Honey of the Santa Barbara, California Sheriff’s Office. As summarized by U.S. News, Honey “told of confiscating pamphlets giving detailed instructions on manufacture and use of weapons to kill police. He said wires have been strung across California highways to decapitate motorcycle policemen.”

“Police officials keep saying it’s just the hazards of the job, but we should face it for what it is: a conspiracy to kill policemen,” insisted Carl Parsell, director of the Detroit Police Officers Association.  Police union commissar Edward Kiernan insisted that shootings of police officers were “part of a cold, logical, hard-eyed revolutionary strategy.”

Fellow police union kingpin John J. Harrington agreed that nothing less than a revolution was underway.

 “The thin line between civilization and the jungle – which is us [sic] policemen – is being shot to hell and something has to be done about it,” Harrington harangued the crowd at a Washington rally of “local” police. “It’s time the people of this country face up to it – there is a revolution taking place.” A significant part of that “revolution,” Harrington advised, was rock music, which he characterized as “a Communist plot to destroy our youth.”

By the time Harrington addressed that October 1970 rally, he had been an ex-cop for four years. In 1966, Harrington “marked his 26^th anniversary on the force by announcing his retirement to protest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ensuring the rights of individuals suspected of committing crimes,” observed his 1989 obituary in the Philadelphia Daily News.

“I’m fed up – I am disgusted,” exclaimed Harrington. “You can’t do police work anymore.”

Rather than operating within the restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights, Harrington suggested during the FOP’s 1971 national convention, police should be emancipated to act as death squads. “Unless the courts stop this permissiveness … then the feeling of policemen is, maybe we better resort to the old Mexican deguello – a shootout in which we take no prisoners,” Harrington told his exuberantly approving audience.

Significantly, the Spanish verb from which that word is derived – degollar – refers to throat-slitting. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, Mr. Harrington – one of the most prominent and widely respected police union officials – was saying that his troops were ready to behave much the same way that ISIS does today.

The previously mentioned Captain Honey was likewise obsessed with fantasies of decapitation, albeit in his case carried out against the police. Like Harrington, Honey – whose sober testimony before the Senate Subcommittee was dutifully reported in the press and remains part of the official record – yearned for a restoration of pre-modern means of asserting “authority.” This explains why he was photographed brandishing a Spanish-style broadsword and a spiked medieval mace as he commanded riot police and SWAT operators who dealt with a campus riot at the University of California-Santa Barbara a few months before his testimony in Washington.

Honey’s lurid clams of a conspiracy to murder police made national headlines. His subsequent firing for official misconduct didn’t receive as much attention.

Sgt. Edward Piceno, who along with his partner was suspended for 10 days for seizing and destroying a reporter’s camera during the riot, later testified that Honey had ordered deputies to “go out there and beat the living hell out of anybody that was away from the crowd, get in our cars and leave.”

Other officers testified that Honey’s unlawful orders included exhortations to commit arson and murder, and instructions on how to cover up those crimes.

“Honey was accused of telling an officer at the riot that `if your people go into a building and kill all of them, have them set fire to the building, because that’s what they did in Watts,” summarized the January 21, 1972 San Francisco Chronicle. Another officer recalled Honey’s suggestion that he “get some throwaway guns for your people so when you kill one of [the rioters] you can leave a throwaway gun” as evidence to “justify” the killing. He also told the officer to deploy his men “in teams of at least two, to corroborate an alibi if they killed anyone.” (That accusation, interestingly, was itself corroborated by multiple officers.)

Honey was fired in November 1971 for “illegally dropping tear gas on rioters from a helicopter … striking handcuffed prisoners … and telling a subordinate to frame a suspect.” It is possible that the deranged officer would have kept his job had his psychotic demeanor and palpable sadism not made him an operational liability. Police officers from other jurisdictions who had responded to a call for assistance made it clear they wouldn’t do so again if Honey were given on-scene command during future disturbances.

The role played by Honey and his subordinates during those riots was that of asserting “authority,” not protecting property. The only person who lost his life during the riots was 22-year-old UCSB economics major Kevin Moran, who had arrived on the scene “in response to an urgent plea from the student body president “for moderate and peaceful students to try and calm the angry mob,” recalled the April 5, 1996 Saratoga News.

Moran (inset photo) and riot police.

Moran and his roommates rushed to Isla Vista, where they extinguished a fire at a fast food restaurant and then hurried to the local branch of Bank of America, which had been attacked by arsonists. As they battled the blaze, the police – indifferent to property destruction, but determined to assert dominance – closed in and began firing tear gas. One officer discharged his rifle, killing Moran as he performed, at considerable personal risk, the kind of service police supposedly provide.

The police initially insisted that Moran had been gunned down by a radical “sniper” concealed within the crowd. A ballistics test later confirmed that the bullet had been fired by a police officer. Since this act of homicide was consecrated by “authority,” it was ruled “justified” and the killer suffered no legal or professional consequences. After all, that officer was acting from a position of ownership, and an owner has a plenary right to destroy what belongs to him.

 

Dum spiro, pugno!