The Chain of Command and the Executioner in the Classroom

“You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here.”

Jayne Cobb, demonstrating why he should never be left in charge of anything, from “The Train Job.”

“We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us,” purred 18^th Century arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre in the opening lines of his essay Considerations on France. “ The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance. Freely slaves, they act at once of their own will and under necessity: they actually do what they wish without being able to disrupt general plans.”

In this scheme, each “slave” is found “at the center of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the decision of the eternal geometry, which can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature,” Maistre pontificates. But that flexibility is enjoyed only by those enlightened few who understand the “eternal geometry,” and have been appointed thereby to preside over the rest of us.

On occasion, of course, one who is “freely” enslaved decides not to remain within the compass of his or her assigned role in the “eternal geometry.” It is at that point that the “flexible chain” becomes the “chain of command” as the expression was defined by Jayne – a scourge employed to beat the uppity slave into compliant submission. This is when the “flexible” nature of that chain is made apparent: While the chains that bind the common run of humanity are unyielding, those who are supposedly nearer to “the throne of the Supreme Being” find their restraints sufficiently supple to accommodate any act of violence necessary to enforce conformity – including summary homicide.

 Maistre’s obsession with hierarchy might reflect his lengthy involvement in oath-bound secret societies, rather than his devotion to Catholicism (see pages 3-4 in this edition of “Considerations”). Be that as it may, his authoritarian perspective largely defines modern conservatism. He insisted that “all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner.” The figure in whom the State’s capacity for lethal violence is made tangible is both “the terror of human society” and the “tie that holds it together,” Maistre observed. “Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears."

The “resource officers” who prowl the hallways of government-operated schools throughout the soyuz aren’t present to enhance the security of the inmates, but to be “authority figures” – that is, people who can inflict injury or death in order to force others to submit to their will. In principle, an SRO carries out the function of Maistre’s Executioner. That is certainly how many perceive themselves.

“You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons,” ranted self-styled counter-terrorism “expert” John Giduck in his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference. “You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers."

A more honest description would be that SROs are commissioned to act like prison guards with unlimited discretion to discipline misbehaving inmates.

When former Deputy Ben Fields placed hands on a girl who had refused a teacher’s instruction to put away her cell phone or leave the room, he was acting as Maistre’s Executioner ex officio, empowered to use any force he deemed appropriate to compel her submission. 

When the student, in a reflexive reaction to being seized by a much larger, armed aggressor, flailed pitifully at Fields, she supposedly committed an “assault upon an officer,” which – according to the disciples of Maistre – left Fields fully justified in doing anything he saw fit. Indeed, the teenager should be grateful that she was merely thrown to the floor, dragged across the room, hog-tied, and left with injuries requiring hospitalization, given that the punishment for her impudence should have been more severe.

“She was asked nicely by three different authority figures and given several chances to comply with their instructions,” lectured Matt Walsh of The Blaze. “She refused, she refused, she refused, she refused, she refused. It was at that point that the officer took her to the floor, dragged her out of the chair and across the ground….”

“Once she had brazenly disrespected the teacher’s authority and declined to comply with those instructions, she had to be removed from the room, one way or another,” Walsh continues, not ruling out the possibility that “another” could include being removed in a body bag. “A teacher cannot be backed down by a kid who says, `Nope, I won’t listen to you.’ A school cannot tolerate students who think the rules are optional.” At that “very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears” – or, in Walsh’s dumbed-down rendering of Maistre’s warning, “it would surely lead to anarchy in the classroom.”

Take away the discretionary “authority” of “a school resource officer” to inflict summary punishment on a sullen, uncooperative 16-year-old female student, and the terrorists will win, or something to that effect.

“Some might even say that Fields is the actual victim here,” contends an essay published in The New American magazine. “If you’re going to have police in schools, you have to expect police action in schools; the deputy was simply doing his job.”

This is an interesting, and entirely unintended, admission. The advertised job of school resource officers is to protect schoolchildren from serial killers and sexual predators. Their actual job, as this episode illustrates, is to impose punishment for misbehavior that does not involve criminal conduct. Witness the fact that Deputy Fields not only arrested the still-unnamed primary victim, but another student named Niya Kenny whose only “offense” was to urge her schoolmates to record the attack.

Significantly, Kenny – unlike the primary victim – faces criminal charges. The first girl was released into the custody of her foster parents. Kenny was threatened with physical harm, handcuffed, detained for several hours, released on bond, then suspended from school. Her “crime” was to undermine the officer’s “authority” by insisting that he should be held accountable for his actions.

“It should have been an adult” who intervened, Kenny told The State newspaper. “One of the adults should have said, `Whoa, whoa, whoa – that’s not how you do this.’ But instead, it had to be a student in the classroom to stand up and say, `This is not right.’” Like others sentenced to attend Spring Valley High School, Kenny was aware of Fields’ reputation, which had reportedly earned him the sobriquet “Officer Slam.” Accordingly, she urged other students to record the confrontation. More than one of the students acted on that suggestion, which suggests that their capacity for critical thinking had not yet been extirpated.

Even if we were to assume, contrary to the actual law, that classroom insolence is a criminal offense, there was nothing about Kenny’s behavior that warrants such a description. She didn’t “disrupt” an already-ruined learning environment; she was protesting the abusive behavior of a public official. Conservative media outlets routinely depict government-run schools as re-education centers devoted to subverting all that is good, true, and beautiful. Why aren’t they applauding Miss Kenny for her principled individualism, and her insistence that the rules should apply to everyone?

It is tempting, perhaps irresistibly so, to conclude that this reflects a conservative variant on identity politics. Fields, a member of the sanctified Blue Tribe, has been sacrificed to placate the apparently omnipotent Black Lives Matter movement, which has been – in all apparent seriousness – compared to ISIS. Criticizing Fields for arresting Niya Kenny without just cause would complicate the preferred narrative, and could prompt troublesome second thoughts about the propriety of the deputy’s behavior during the entire episode. 

 

Wherever an altar and an executioner are found, "civilization" exists.

Ironically, if predictably, there was no outpouring of outrage in the conservative media over the protests of Spring Valley students who walked out of class – in defiance of “rules” and authority” – as a purported gesture of solidarity with Fields. As someone not too told to remember High School I suspect that the demonstrations weren’t inspired by devotion to the deputy, but by an understandable desire to relieve the unremitting tedium of the classroom. 

None of the protesters was thrown to the floor, handcuffed, or even threatened with a suspension, despite the fact their behavior was immeasurably more disruptive than that of an individual student who refuses to put away her phone. Rule-breaking in defense of state-licensed Executioners is obviously more palatable for those who subscribe to Maistre’s doctrine.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast discusses the incident at Spring Valley High School and the "experts" who defend Deputy Fields:

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Commissar Avakian's War Against Property Rights

Keeping -- or making -- Portland free would be even better.

Until April of this year, Christopher Penner was an entrepreneur. Now, despite the fact that he has never committed a crime against persons or property, he is an indentured servant.

For several years, Penner owned an embattled but marginally successful nightclub in Portland, Oregon. Today, according to his attorney, Jonathan Rademacher, Penner has a job managing a bar owned by somebody else – and twenty-five percent of each paycheck is garnished to pay off a $400,000 civil judgment imposed by Brad Avakian, the Commissar of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) as punishment for trying to save his business. 

Reduced to peonage: Former business owner Penner.

Between his ordinary tax burden and the BOLI-inflicted garnishment, Penner probably devotes more than half of each workday to state-imposed involuntary servitude. He suffers the added indignity of being constantly exposed to the smug face of his slavemaster. 

Business owners who have the misfortune of living in Oregon are required by the BOLI to post a “notice of rights” in their work area. The most recent version of that document, Rademacher told me in a telephone interview, contains a color photograph of Avakian. No previous BOLI commissar has been given the “Dear Leader” treatment, but none of the functionaries who have filled that role have entertained Avakian’s ambitions or been similarly suffused with sociopathic self-regard. 

Last August, Avakian announced his candidacy to become Oregon’s secretary of state. In Oregon, that  position combines the duties of Lt. Governor, public auditor, and chief election officer. The Secretary of State also holds a position on the state land board, which supervises forest lands and navigable waterways, and the “Sustainability Board,” an eco-soviet growing out of a grandiose agenda for “global governance.” 

In principle, a sufficiently ambitious Secretary of State could find an excuse to insinuate himself into every land use, property rights, or business activity occurring anywhere in the Beaver State. Avakian has never neglected an opportunity to aggrandize his powers, and if he becomes Secretary of State that office would fill the measure of its creation.

The insular political clique that rules Oregon out of the northwestern quadrant of that lovely but miserable state is astoundingly casual it its corruption. In 2012, when Avakian was poised to lose the May run-off election for the “non-partisan” position as BOLI Commissioner, fellow Democrat Kate Brown, who at the time was Secretary of State (and has since become Governor), simply rescheduled the election for November, when the heavier turnout would favor the Democratic candidate.

Der Kommissar: Avakian.

If elected to be Secretary of State, Avakian would be in a position to protect other ailing Democrats. He would also enjoy expanded opportunities to shake down potential victims. 

During the 2012 campaign, Avakian – who had been BOLI Commissioner since 2008 -- admitted to receiving campaign donations from interests that were subject to his administrative whims.  When this provoked a much-too-modest controversy, Avakian dispatched a press aide to assure the public that this arrangement was entirely appropriate, given the Commissar, like Robespierre of old, was incorruptible, or something to that effect. 

In announcing his bid to become Secretary of State, Avakian said that if elected he would use his new office to continue his pursuit of “corporate accountability in the workplace” and “combating climate change.” In substance, he is promising to continue his onslaught against property rights in general and small businesses in particular. His campaign literature boasts that he has “directed more than $22 million into the pockets of Oregonians who’ve been treated unfairly.”

In practice, most of that supposed mistreatment consists of exposure, on the part of a person identified as part of a “specially protected class,” to words or gestures that offend them. Avakian has been using the expansive and ill-defined powers of the BOLI to build a loyal constituency by redistributing money from the productive class into the pockets of privileged “victims.” Sticks and stones may break one’s bones, but “hurtful” words are lucrative.

Penner’s case, which has previously been discussed here, involved two polite but urgent voice mails to the “administrator” of a group calling itself the “Rose City T-Girls.” That club’s membership chiefly consists of biological males who “identify” as female in a variety of ways, most of which are related to couture. The T-Girls were familiar and welcome customers at Penner’s club, which routinely hosted “pride” events and otherwise offered ritual homage to Portland’s officially approved version of “diversity.”

However, when the T-Girls essentially took over Friday nights, the business – which was trying to recover from a previous run-in with the BOLI – faced a potentially fatal downturn in weekly receipts. College-age males weren’t interested in socializing with the T-Girls; college-age females didn’t relish the prospect of sharing lavatory facilities with them; and the T-Girls weren’t spending enough to make Fridays profitable. 

Not a Monty Python Skit: The "T-Girls."

Penner left a message for the “administrator” of the group politely asking them not to monopolize the club on Fridays, and pleading for an opportunity to discuss other ways of accommodating them. He did not ban them from his club, which – as a property owner – would be within his rights, whether or not this is recognized by the Marxist retreads ruling the People’s Republic of Oregon.

As somebody whose business was failing, Penner had no interest in driving away customers. As creatures of the coercive sector who have never been gainfully employed, Avakian and his comrades would find this incomprehensible. The entities that employ people of that ilk cannot go out of business, and thus don’t have to worry about earning and retaining customer loyalty. From their perspective, businesses exist to generate tax revenue, and enact policies ordained by visionary social engineers.

The morally appropriate way to deal with irrational discrimination is to use the invisible hand of the market, rather than the mailed fist of the state – but that approach doesn’t empower the state and enrich its pet constituencies. Like those who stand to profit from the agency’s rulings, the BOLI has no incentive to seek resolutions that do not involve ruinous financial penalties. As Rademacher points out, there were many ways that the dispute involving the T-Girls could have been handled without imposing a grotesque punitive award. However, this wouldn’t have served Avakian’s chief interest, which is “using this process to seek a higher elected office.”

Invisible hand: Protest, boycott. criticize -- but don't coerce.

The same perverted priorities were displayed in a $2.4 million settlement reached with Daimler Trucks North America last January. Six former employees filed a civil rights complaint alleging that they had been subjected to discrimination on the basis of “race, color, and national origin,” including “racial epithets,” harassment, threats, and workplace sabotage.

None of those charges – one of which involved an allegation of a very serious crime – was ever corroborated. Once Avakian’s agency became involved, furthermore, no corroboration was necessary. In keeping with standard procedure, Avakian filed a “commissioner’s complaint” that was referred to a prosecutor employed by him, and examined in a legal “forum” presided over by an administrative law judge whose rulings Avakian could set aside.

Given that arrangement, it’s not surprising that Daimler decided to pay the Dane-geld. As Kipling warned, this means that Oregon’s small business owners, who operate on much tighter margins than Daimler, “will never get rid of the Dane.”

Assuming that the expression “rule of law” encompasses official compliance with existing statutes, court precedents, and constitutional limitations, Avakian is a serial offender, the agency over which he presides is a criminal enterprise, and the Oregon Court of Appeals is an accomplice.

A perfunctory ruling handed down by the Court of Appeals in late September upheld the agency’s unprecedented $400,000 “discrimination” award in the T-Girls case. In his motion to reconsider, Penner’s attorney Jonathan Rademacher pointed out that the BOLI’s Deputy Commissioner Christie Hammond violated the law by overruling the judge’s factual finding regarding Penner’s credibility.

The administrative law judge’s ruling in favor of Penner was “a factual issue uniquely decided by the person hearing the testimony,” Rademacher observed. Because Hammond was not the finder of fact, she had no legal authority to rule on that question, and her finding in favor of Avakian – the official who signs her paycheck --- “strips all sense of fairness from the process, and should not be condoned by this Court.”  

Unfortunately, Rademacher’s motion asks the Appeals Court to reverse its own ruling, a development about as likely as a BOLI ruling that runs contrary to Avakian’s preferences.

Avakian sees himself an enforcer plenipotentiary on behalf of the “progressive” movement – even on matters that fall well outside the BOLI’s legislative mandate. During the 2012 campaign, Avakian earned a rebuke from the editorial board of the thoroughly leftist Oregonian newspaper for trying to inject abortion into the race by accusing his Republican opponent of being a pro-life “extremist.”

“In addition to forgetting, apparently, that he is not the commissioner of in-labor, as [his opponent] quips, Avakian has forgotten that he's involved in a supposedly nonpartisan race,” complained the Oregonian. Besides, "what the heck does an easily ridiculed plank in the GOP platform have to do with  the Bureau of Labor and Industries? Labor commissioners enforce laws. They don't make them."

That's not strictly true of the BOLI, given that Avakian's agency considers itself empowered to carry out legislative functions as well. It also wants to make feticide racket the only industry free from invasive regulation -- or even critical public scrutiny.

In 2013, Avakian announced that BOLI would conduct an “anti-discrimination” investigation of a pro-life group that staged protests outside the Lovejoy Surgicenter abortion clinic in Portland. The supposed authority for that investigation was the same statute the agency had employed to destroy Christopher Penner’s business.

This facility discriminates on the basis of age. Avakian's fine with that.

That “investigation” wasn’t opened as the result of a citizen complaint. It began when one of the apparatchiks employed by Avakian happened to see a protest on her way to work and, in a fashion worthy of an East German spitzel, reported this impermissible act of dissent to her agency’s “civil rights” division.

On August 26 of that year, Avakian reportedly sent an official letter to Pastor Charles O’Neal, who led the peaceful demonstrations, announcing the investigation and threatening “one year in prison and fines of $6, 250” for each “civil rights violation” his agency might find.

Avakian is a singularly resourceful sophist, but even he couldn’t contrive a rationale for claiming that people protesting against a business were somehow discriminating against people employed by it, or customers who sought to employ its (in this case, lethal) services.

In any case, the Commissar lost interest in the abortion clinic matter after BOLI received a discrimination complaint against Sweetcakes by Melissa. This presented to him a perfect opportunity to extort a huge sum from Christian entrepreneurs who had done no injury to a living soul.

That case, which involves a $140,000 “damage” award imposed on the bakers for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony not legally recognized in Oregon at the time, will most likely be grinding its way through the courts for the next three years. By its end, Avakian will most likely be ensconced as Secretary of State, busily carrying out new initiatives to reduce independent business owners to the status currently enjoyed by Christopher Penner.

Oregon’s coastal nomenklatura, of whom Brad Avakian is repellently typical, is expansively contemptuous of the values and priorities of the state’s productive population, and is determined to reduce it to outright peonage.  Not surprisingly, residents of rural Oregon are becoming terminally disenchanted with the state’s existing political arrangements.

Since it appears to be impossible to uproot the parasite class embodied by Avakian and his comrades, a quixotic – but growing – secession movement has sprouted in eastern Oregon. It’s impossible to believe that the parasites would allow their long-suffering host to escape without a fight.

If the state’s political class continues to harass and destroy small businesses, and prosecute harmless people for heresies against “progressive” dogmas, they’re likely to provoke a fight that won’t be contained within political channels.

If the legislature wants to foreclose that possibility, they must, at the very least, take action to lance the festering boil that BOLI has become. If all efforts to end Avakian’s collectivist jihad against property rights prove unavailing, somebody might want to take the Commissar aside and quietly ask him if the name “Ceausescu" means anything to him.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast examines demonization as a prelude to selective disarmament, which leads to subjugation -- or worse:



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Please, Dear Leader -- Ban Firearms By Decree

Dr. Barbara LeSavoy, gun confiscation advocate and Director of Women and Gender Studies at The College at Brockport in New York, may be the authentic embodiment of contemporary totalitarian leftism. She might be LARPing – that is, Live-Action Role-Playing – in the character of a self-lobotomized ideological drone. Or perhaps she’s in the middle of an immersive, Andy Kaufman-style long-form comedy sketch.

Either she, or the character she is playing, is the post-feminist equivalent of the New Soviet Man. Programmed at a chromosomal level to think and act in collectivist terms, LeSavoy looks upon Barack Obama with the same enraptured, unalloyed devotion once directed at Stalin and Mao by their most dutiful cadres. 

To her, Obama is social justice incarnate. Anointed by history and endowed with powers that are coterminous with his magnificence, he can change society by decree. Delusions of that variety were at high tide in the summer of 2008, when every syllable Obama read from a teleprompter caused adoring women to disintegrate into uncontrollable weeping. 

For many of Obama’s acolytes, passion has yielded to disillusionment. LeSavoy remains devout – but puzzled by the diffidence of the political deity she continues to adore. Why, she asked plaintively in an October 10 op-ed column for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, doesn’t Obama stretch forth his hand and banish guns from his domain?

Writing “with a bleeding heart,” LeSavoy declared: “I admire Obama. But he has let me down.” Her embattled but resilient faith in her collectivist savior could be fully restored if he would simply “ban firearm possession in America.” Doing this would be a matter of utmost simplicity, she insists, since Obama “is the president of the United States. He can change the country. He can do it today. I believe in him.”

In fact, the only thing about America LeSavoy apparently finds worthwhile is Barack Obama and what she thinks he represents. 

“While politically minded, I am not overly patriotic,” she explains. Yet during the 2008 campaign, “my two daughters, partner, and I ate every meal in our house on Obama placemats [that were] plastic-coated, plate-sized paper rectangles with an image of his face framed by colors of the flag.”

By making such a bourgeois purchase, LeSavoy committed an act of capitalist apostasy, but it was in what she earnestly believed was a good cause. While “this mealtime ritual of American allegiance was odd for me,” she found strength in the act of looking “at the image of his face each day and [believing] that he really could be the change in America.”

To be sure, she continues, that faith has been sorely tested. She describes herself as “jaded” in 2012 as Obama stood for reelection, because some of his promises weren’t fulfilled. And yet, she proudly recalls, “I did not waver. I dug into our old dining room cupboards, and found our worn but resilient Obama placemats.” 

Those sacred totems were restored to their proper place in the dining room, where LeSavoy, her daughters, and her partner could take strength from the visage of the Dear Leader as they dined on whatever non-exploitative, social justice-compatible fare people of that persuasion eat. 

Obama-worship at its apex, or nadir, depending on your perspective.

Assuming that Obama doesn’t find a way to make himself ruler-for-life – a prospect that would thrill LeSavoy to the depths of the soul whose existence is denied by her ideology – his term as elected dictator is evaporating. Before giving someone else a turn to inflict misery on countless millions, Obama could ensure his legacy by disarming the public through a presidential decree.

“Firearm possession should be banned in America; president Obama can orchestrate this directive,” insists LeSavoy – who somehow obtained a doctorate degree without learning even the rudiments of constitutional law. (Perhaps she is more familiar with the Soviet version, circa 1938.) Her prose likewise suggests that she enjoyed the dubious benefit of very uncritical English teachers. 

Obama’s presidency “can be remembered as a remarkable turn in United States history where a progressive leader forever changed the landscape under which we live and work,” LeSavoy exults in giddy ignorance of the significance of her mixed metaphor. 

Apart from miners, sanitation engineers, and others who toil underground, Americans generally aren’t found living and working “under” the “landscape” of our country. However, the history of mass gun confiscation is replete with examples of disarmed people – or the mortal remains thereof – being disposed of beneath the “landscape” where they had once lived and worked. 

They had "gun control" in Cambodia, too.

This was true of genocidal hell states such as Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Rwanda during the 100-day orgy of government-orchestrated ethnic slaughter in 1994. In both instances, gun registration laws provided the state with the means to locate and confiscate privately owned firearms as a necessary precursor to systematic slaughter of people deemed unsuitable for the new, “progressive” order. 

To LeSavoy it seems obvious that Obama must employ dictatorial means “to impose gun control laws in America that will reduce high levels of male violence and usher in a culture of peace and civility.” Trapped within the smelly little orthodoxy of post-feminist collectivism, she either ignores or doesn’t understand the fact that the means she endorses would involve “high levels of male violence” carried out by police officers and military personnel. 

As part of her ongoing mission to transform bright, talented female students into members of the permanent dependency class, LeSavoy publishes a journal called “Dissenting Voices.” Representative essays bear such titles as “Girls, Instagram, and the Glamorization of Self-Loathing,” and “Adiposity and Anarchism: Exposing and Examining Fat Oppression in a Capitalist Society.”

Like those suffering the misfortune to be indoctrinated by her, LeSavoy is exquisitely sensitive to “micro-aggressions” and other forms of “cultural violence.” And owing to the ideological equivalent of color-blindness, she apparently cannot perceive state-inflicted violence unless it is directed at people belonging to “specially protected classes” – or perhaps she simply assumes that the mechanism of disarmament and regimentation would always be controlled by transcendently noble beings like the incumbent president she adores.

For someone who makes a living condemning “male violence” against women, LeSavoy seems inexplicably eager to deprive women of the means of protecting themselves against prohibitively stronger, predatory men. It is possible that she believes that previously intractable human nature would be summarily transformed if the hoi polloi were disarmed. However, this would merely turn firearms ownership into the exclusive monopoly of the society’s most sinister stratum – the enforcement caste, which is notorious for making women the targets of its privileged violence.

She was "protected and served."

Women who are married to, or in a relationship with, police officers are at least twice as likely to become victims of domestic violence as are the rest of the female population. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that police are trained and licensed to commit aggressive violence and to treat non-submission as an offense meriting summary punishment. People accustomed to commanding others, and employing “pain compliance” to overcome resistance, often find it impossible to confine those habits to their professional lives.

 “Since the earliest days of law enforcement, domestic violence in police families was considered an officer’s personal business, one of those private realms into which departmental administrators chose not to involve themselves,” retired Chicago PD Homicide Lt. Dennis Banahan explained to Police Magazine. “Their attitude was that unless the problem affected an officer’s job performance, they’d prefer to ignore it. Whatever happened behind closed doors remained private. Since a large part of a cop’s M.O. is to maintain a game face, personal problems were considered just more of what we were expected to suck up and keep hidden.” 

“Police officers have always prided themselves on their ability to keep secrets within the law enforcement family,” acknowledged the law enforcement trade publication. “That’s the case in some departments to this day…. [N]o incident was more likely to bring down the Blue Wall or trigger the Code of Silence than a cop who beat his wife. Nor did agencies want to get involved.”

Damage control, rather than prosecution or protection of the victim, has long been the chief priority of police in dealing with domestic violence incidents. According to Banahan, the first officers on the scene “were expected to be the primary spin doctors.”

Blinded by a cop at a traffic stop.

Witnesses other than the victim and the offender would be removed from the scene. The victim – assuming she survived – would be separated from the abuser, not for her protection, but to isolate her and make her more vulnerable to manipulation.

“She’d be told that an arrest would serve no one’s best interest, and would absolutely jeopardize the officer’s job, thereby threatening the family’s security,” Banahan explained. “In effect, that’s telling a bleeding victim, `Hey, sorry about the broken arm and that your nose will never be the same again, but drop a dime on this guy and you’ll all be in the welfare line tomorrow.’”

In effect, the woman and any children would be blackmailed into protecting the interests of an abusive cop – sacrificing their personal security to protect the abuser’s job security.

The ministering angels who would carry out Obama’s divinely ordained mass disarmament – were he to answer LeSavoy’s earnest entreaty -- would be drawn from the ranks of the profession described by Lt. Banahan. She doesn’t understand the implications of what she is asking her political deity to do. But this is to be expected of campus progressives, who tend to be poster children for not thinking things through.

If Barbara LeSavoy is genuinely the person described in her op-ed column, she is owed a measure of pity tempered with wariness. If she is engaged in some kind of bizarre performance art, the skill she displays is worthy of applause – as long as she doesn’t lose herself in the role.  It’s worth remembering that sentiments of the kind she expressed are hardly uncommon within what we might call the “eliminationist left.”

Dum spiro, pugno!