Saviors in Uniform? (Updated, 2/2)

"The Army and the People Are One!" Don't count on it.

"The army is all good men but the police, every policeman is bad," explained Egyptian demonstrator Mustafa Abdel Wahab to Time magazine. Mr. Wahab is as tragically mistaken in the first assessment as he is correct in the second. 

In Egypt -- as is the case nearly everywhere else -- the police and army are what Alexander Hamilton called "correspondent appendages of military establishments." Not every individual soldier or policeman is exceptionally depraved, of course. But the institutional purpose of such establishments is to serve the depraved interests of those who control the State. This is why, as Hamilton pointed out, military bodies (which include police agencies) "have a tendency to destroy ... civil and political rights." Decades of "emergency" rule in Egypt have destroyed whatever trivial substantive differences may once have separated the police from the military. 

In the late summer of 1994 I spent a couple of weeks in Cairo covering a United Nations conference on population control. That event attracted thousands of people -- politicians, delegates, lobbyists, activists, and journalists -- from around the world. In anticipation of media scrutiny the Mubarak regime made a considerable effort to prettify itself. The cosmetic changes included issuing brand new white uniforms to the heavily-armed police officers who were deployed in small groups everywhere in downtown Cairo.

I remained in Cairo for a few days after the conference ended. It was my expectation that the departure of the Important People would bring about a change in the security situation. In a sense, I was correct: The white uniforms were put away, and the heavily-armed police who prowled the streets reverted to their standard military attire. Like other visitors, I had assumed that the high-profile police presence was the exception, rather than the rule. We were wrong.



The ongoing upheaval in Egypt offers a potent illustration of the fact that government police agencies are instruments of plunder, rather than protection -- and that protection of person and property is best handled privately.


When they weren't beating people in the streets or hauling them off to be murdered, plainclothes thugs from Egypt's Central Security Service (or Mukhabarat) brazenly looted private businesses or provided protection to those who did -- deputized criminals referred to by one protester on the scene as "prisoners who have been released by that bastard Mubarak in return for their services to beat up civilians." Egyptians not employed in the coercive sector responded by creating private anti-looting patrols. 

Private defense: Egyptians link arms to protect property.

Public loathing of the government's police force is widespread in Egypt, which is a healthy development in any society. However, as Mr. Wahab's comments illustrate, the growing disrepute of Egypt's police organs organs has actually enhanced the stature of the military.

Writes Steve Coll of The New Yorker: "There have been reports that protesters are relieved to see the Army in the streets; no doubt, as in many other like countries, the Army has more credibility than the corrupt and often torture-prone police." 

For 31 years, Hosni Mubarak has been a CIA sock puppet ruling through decree while maintaining a pretense of "legitimacy." Mubarak avoided naming a successor, most likely because Washington didn't give him permission to do so. In the terminal crisis of his reign, he has tapped Omar Suleiman, the head of the Mukhabarat secret police, to serve as vice president. Since Suleiman has been running Egypt's apparatus of imprisonment, torture, and murder for decades, this appointment wasn't really a promotion. And in his current position Suleiman would be in charge, even if somebody else is cast in the role of figurehead.

Dictator-in-waiting: Suleiman, left, with Israel's PM Netanyahu.

 Ian Black, Middle East editor for the London Guardian, points out that Suleiman "is the keeper of Egypt's and the president's secrets, a behind-the-scenes operator who has been intimately involved in the most sensitive issues of national security and foreign policy for nearly 20 years." 

Not only was he was the dungeon master and chief persecutor of Egypt's political dissidents, but he also coordinated rendition and torture operations with the CIA. He's also been a dutiful asset of the Pentagon, according to WikiLeaks. 

A Foreign Policy profile of Suleiman published two years ago points out that Suleiman was a rent boy for both sides during the Cold War circle-jerk: He attended "the Soviet Union's Frunze Military Academy" while Cairo was a Soviet client, and then "received training at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center" at Ft. Bragg in the 1980s. As head of the Mukhabarat, Suleiman was"one of a rare group of Egyptian officials who hold both a military rank ... and a civilian office...." His most important assignment was to monitor "Egypt's security apparatus for signs of internal coups." 

Unlike those who had previously held his position, Suleiman became a public figure several years ago as Mubarak -- who reportedly suffers from cancer-- became enfeebled. He and his handlers spent several years building internal coalitions and developing diplomatic contacts abroad. As Cairo-based journalist Issandr Amrani points out, "most Suleiman supporters recognize that to gain the presidency he would most likely have to carry out a coup -- perhaps a soft, constitutional one -- but a coup nonetheless."

Thumbs up for tyranny!

Well, how about a "People Power" coup, orchestrated with the help of the kind folks in Washington? That appears to be what we're seeing in Egypt now, and we could conceivably see something similar here in the United States before the decade is over.

The convulsion in Cairo brings to mind Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap's essay "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012," which was published in the Winter 1992—93 issue of the U.S. Army War College journal Parameters -- a subject I have discussed before.

Dunlap used the literary device of a smuggled prison letter composed by "Prisoner 222305759," condemned to death for "treason" by the American military junta of Gen. E.T. Brutus. Following a series of military disasters overseas and domestic crises at home, Brutus staged a coup in the name of protecting "public order" from the corruption of the political class. 

In the decades leading up to the putsch, the "Prisoner" recalled, "The one institution of government in which people retained faith was the military." Even as the public lamented the corruption and profligacy of Big Government, they had nothing but bottomless respect for the Regime's chief instrument of death and property destruction. The military retained its prestige in spite of the fact that its structural defects -- made painfully visible by a long, bloody, and futile war in the Gulf --  left it "unfit to engage an authentic military opponent."

While the military was no longer well-suited to fight and win wars, its subtle integration into every element of domestic life made it perfectly suited to carry out a coup: 

"Eventually, people became acclimated to seeing uniformed military personnel patrolling their neighborhood. Now troops are an adjunct to almost all police forces in the country. In many of the areas where much of our burgeoning population of elderly Americans live — [military dictator] Brutus calls them 'National Security Zones' — the military is often the only law enforcement agency. Consequently, the military was ideally positioned in thousands of communities to support the coup."

During Egypt's long "state of emergency," its army managed to lose two wars abroad, while fine-tuning its skills as an instrument of domestic suppression. Granted, it has announced that it will not fire on Egyptian citizens, which is always a welcome development. But why should the Egyptian Army fire on protesters, given that the citizen uprising is helping to entrench military rule, rather than end it?

With our own economy unraveling and our political class becoming shamelessly predatory and unbearably impudent, it's not difficult to imagine a similar scenario playing out in America, with Tea Party Republicans -- for whom the military (which in our system includes our own "torture-prone" police) is sacrosanct --  eagerly welcoming a military coup as "liberation" from Big Government. Perhaps Field Marshal Stanley McChrystal -- formerly military proconsul in Afghanistan, most recently seen flogging Soviet-style "national service" in the pages of Newsweek -- could be tapped to play the role of America's Omar Suleiman. 

UPDATE 

"`Why don't you protect us?' some protesters shouted at the soldiers, who replied they did not have orders to do so and told people to go home." 

This on-scene account from Tahrir Square described a coordinated attack by a mob of "pro-government protesters," some of whom were mounted on horses or camels. The assailants -- criminal subcontractors in the employ of the regime -- used clubs, whips, straight razors, and machetes. They acted with complete impunity, beating and killing at whim. Among their targets were journalists attempting to document the pogrom: Anderson Cooper discovered that international celebrity conferred no protection.

Among those chronicling the scene are Graeme Wood of The Atlantic, who was present in Tahrir Square during the last mass protest -- the 2003 demonstrations against Washington's assault on Iraq. 

"During those protests, the police encircled the protesters and let them scream for a couple days, Wood recalls. "Late at night, I stood among the police, asking them about their hometowns in Upper Egypt. Then, around midnight, they were called to attention, told to harden their lines, and finally to march toward the remaining protesters, letting none escape. Truncheons came down, and within a few minutes they had rounded everyone up into paddy wagons, and the square resumed its light evening traffic."

While blood is being shed in Tahrir Square, government-organized bands of criminals are looting everything in sight. The police are actively protecting the thugs and looters. Meanwhile, the "good men" in the Army do nothing to protect those who had trusted them.

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About that "War on Cops"....

The War on the Streets: This is Miami, not Mogadishu.

What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?.... The [Security] Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"--

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's famous jeremiad about the passivity of Soviet subjects in the face of the Regime's armed enforcement agencies. 

Every week — actually, every day — innocent people across the country are harassed, abused, brutalized, tortured, and murdered by armed strangers in government-issued costumes. Most of the assailants are never held accountable. Often, they are placed on paid vacation (commonly called “administrative leave”) while their colleagues devise an official rationalization for their crimes.

According to one very conservative estimate, at least thirty citizens are killed in police shootings every month, many of which occur during paramilitary raids conducted, Soviet-style, at daybreak or nighttime. Innocent people are frequently found among those killed, wounded, or brutalized in those raids; one recent example is 76-year-old New York resident Jose Colon, who was shot in the stomach by a SWAT operator who pulled the trigger trying to operate a flashlight on his tricked-out pistol.

The grim but statistically inescapable fact is that the average American is much more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist. 

Those who publicize police abuses are routinely accused by apologists for government enforcement agencies of exaggerating the problem by focusing on a vanishingly small number of “exceptional” cases. When police are on the receiving end of criminal violence, however, those same apologists demand that we allow such exceptions to define the rule.


On the basis of recent trends, we can assume that two dozen or more Americans have been shot by police since January 1, 2011. In the same period, roughly half that many police have been shot, 11 of them either injured or killed during one unusually bloody twenty-four-hour period. This unconnected series of shootings has led many police officers to believe that they are targets in a “war on cops,” and that alarmist impression has been diligently propagated by police union officials who are always eager to exaggerate the very modest dangers of their profession.

“It’s not a fluke,” insists Richard Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. “There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on.” Craig W. Floyd of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund described a "very troubling trend" of "officers ... being put at greater risk than ever before."

"I think it's a hundred times more likely today that an officer will be assaulted compared to twenty, thirty years ago," agreed J.B. Smith, Sheriff of Smith, County, Texas, in an interview with Tyler's NBC affiliate KETK. "It has become one of the most hazardous jobs in the United States, undoubtedly -- in the top five."

Actually, where the risk of death on the job is concerned, law enforcement doesn't crack the top ten list of most dangerous occupations, as designated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, none of the jobs on that list involves people employed in the coercive sector.  Commercial fishermen, loggers, commercial pilots, farmers, and roofers all face a higher risk of work-related death than that confronted by the State's armed enforcers, for whom "officer safety" is job one.

Sheriff Smith, like others retailing the "war on cops" meme, recited the durable canard that police "work" is more dangerous today because they confront a more violent breed of street criminal. Five years ago, Joseph McNamara of Stanford's Hoover Institution, a former NYPD Deputy Inspector (and, unfortunately, an advocate of civilian disarmament), pointed out that police "work" may be safer now than ever before.

In 2005, McNamara noted, fifty-one officers died in the line of duty "out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today."

Yes, there is a war on the streets of America, McNamara allowed, but it is one waged by the cops, not on them:

"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on `officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed."

 

 Government police agencies were always designed to control the public, rather than to "protect and serve" it. As sociologist David Bayley memorably put it, "The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife." Thanks in no small measure to the proliferation of independent media, the public is coming to understand that fact.

A large and growing segment of the public likewise has become palpably disgusted with the casual elitism of the armed tax-feeders among us, who see themselves as a caste apart from, and superior to, those from whom they extract their livelihood. The police unions and media organs that take dictation from them insist that the purported "war on cops" is being fueled by a growing public "disrespect" for the "authority" of police.

"The palm-sized shield worn on a police officer’s chest should be viewed as a badge of honor, not a bull’s-eye," sobbed the editorial collective of the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader in a lachrymose house editorial that typifies media treatment of the supposed "war" on police. "Sadly, recent deadly shootings around the nation and alleged threats directed at Luzerne County law enforcers reveal a troubling lack of respect for officers’ authority and responsibilities, as well as their lives." 

 

The "threats" in question were allegedly made by 45-year-old Scanton resident Ray Mazzarella, who was arrested and charged with several counts of making "terroristic threats" for inflammatory comments he had posted about the local police chief on his Facebook page. Were the rational for Mazzarella's pre-emptive arrest applied consistently, scores or hundreds of police officers would have to be locked up and put on trial for equally inflammatory statements posted on chat boards frequented by LEOs. Of course, by even making that point I'm undermining public "respect" for police "authority" -- thereby, one supposes, abetting violence against our sanctified protectors.

Although Steve Groeninger, spokesman for the D.C.-based National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, admits that “we don’t have any data,” he told MSNBC that “there seems to be a type of criminal out there looking to thwart authority” (by which he means any directive issued by an armed government functionary) and warns that “cuts in police budgets could exacerbate the danger,” according to MSNBC.

This is an interesting variation on a familiar police union theme. As previously noted in this space, as municipal budgets shrink amid the ever-deepening depression, some police unions are literally trying to terrorize the public into supporting their budget demands. Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts announced several months ago that because of budget cuts citizens shouldn’t expect police to respond to calls involving 44 kinds of crime, including burglary, grand theft, and other serious offenses. The hideously corrupt Camden, New Jersey Police Department adopted a similar policy after half the force was laid off. In Sacramento County, the Sheriff’s Office published an ad depicting what appeared to be a sexual assault on a child. “Don’t let them cut deputies and put your family at risk!” screamed the ad copy.

Reduced to its essence, the message here is this: Give us what we want, or people will get hurt. Those of us who oppose the demands of police unions can now expect to be told that we’re morally indistinguishable from cop-killers.

Every traffic stop, we are told, is pregnant with potentially lethal danger -- for the one party in that confrontation we know to be armed and invested with the supposed authority to kill another human being. In fact, encounters of this kind are freighted with peril for the member of the productive population who has come under the unwanted scrutiny of an armed emissary of the State. This is true of any interaction between the police and the private citizens on whom they subsist.

One likely product of the ongoing panic over a "war on cops" is the increased likelihood that police will resort to potentially lethal force in such routine encounters. After all, isn't it better to have the taxpayers absorb the cost of settling with the family of a murdered Mundane than to suffer the uniquely poignant anguish of burying one of the State's Anointed Ones?

Most of the potentially dangerous encounters between police and the public grow out of their roles as enforcers of drug prohibition and armed revenue collectors (those roles overlap, of course). Those dangers will grow more acute as the economy continues to sicken and people who have done no harm to others start to lose patience with the demands of the wealth-devouring class.

Rather than abating their demands and ratcheting down the conflict, however, those in charge of the State clearly intend to escalate it, making whatever use they deem necessary of all of the charming instruments of regimentation and mass violence originally developed for use overseas. One particularly unsettling illustration of this principle is the expanding domestic use of unmanned surveillance drones, which were originally developed for battlefield applications but will probably become as commonplace as SWAT teams within the next several years.

If they have it, they will use it; if it's been deployed by the military abroad, it will be employed by the paramilitary police at home; once it's been tested against criminal suspects, it will become part of the standard arsenal of social regimentation. At this point it appears that the only thing that will cause the machinery of repression to grind to a stop would be a fully realized economic collapse. Another grim possibility is that the State's relentless persecution of harmless people will grow so vicious that the "war on cops" being spoken of now becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- thereby creating a personnel shortage of the kind Solzhenitsyn described.



Anybody who takes the life of any human being through aggressive violence is a murderer and should be treated as such. That being said, this should be also: If the wildly exaggerated fear of being killed on the job results in increased attrition from the ranks of the State’s armed enforcers, one happy result will be a net decrease in the amount of criminal violence afflicting our society.

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Fewer Snouts in the Trough, Less Crime in the Streets

Officer Roid Rage: New Jersey tax victims footed the bill for this poser's hormonal enhancements.

 "What happens when you lay off nearly half of the police in one of the most dangerous cities in America?" begins a recent account of personnel cutbacks by the municipal government of Camden, New Jersey.

My guess would be this: The crime rate -- as experienced by the affected public, rather than measured by the local government -- will go down, and the public appetite will be whetted for further personnel cuts. This is because the Camden Police Department -- which has laid off 167 of its 360 officers -- has long been a major source of crime, rather than a deterrent to the same.

New Jersey is one of the wealthiest states in the soyuz, but it is also afflicted with a large and immensely powerful population of unionized tax feeders. 

On January 19, a New Jersey Superior Court Judge refused to grant an injunction sought by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) to reinstate the 167 officers who were laid off by Camden. On the same day, the union rejected a proposed compromise that would have reinstated 100 officers to the force. The deal would involve three days a month of unpaid furloughs for patrol officers for six months, followed by one unpaid monthly furlough day for the following year. 

This arrangement would amount to a modest pay cut, but it shattered against the FOP's impregnable sense of privilege. As commentator George Berkin pointed out, the union had erroneously assumed that it could "get a court to trump economics" -- or, at least, that it could browbeat Camden City Hall into devising some way to extract wealth from the productive on its behalf. The police unions have become accustomed to getting whatever they want. For example: In New Jersey, it's become standard practice for police to use their tax-funded health plans to pay for illegal steroid treatments. 

Camden County is among the state's poorest subdivisions, with an official (which is to say, understated) unemployment rate of 16.3 percent, a per capita income of about $23,300, and a median annual household income of roughly $48,000. Its municipal government confronts a $26.5 million budget shortfall. 

The average Camden police officer receives $144,000 in salary and benefits, most of it paid for by taxpayers elsewhere in the state.  Since 2003, Camden has been under the fiscal supervision of Trenton, which provides more than 80 percent of the city's operating budget. Over the past seven years the state government has lavished nearly a quarter of a billion dollars on Camden in the name of "economic revitalization" and "transitional" funding. 

Five year before Trenton assumed responsibility for Camden's finances, the state took control of the Camden Police Department following the resignation of Police Chief William Hill. This left the department "without a person clearly in charge" in the midst of a wide-ranging corruption probe.

At the time of Chief Hill's resignation, a federal grand jury was investigating allegations that a clique of corrupt Camden police officers had operated a shakedown racket targeting local cocaine dealers, thereby helping the market prosper in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. One of the first results of that inquiry was an increased attrition rate for the Camden PD as about one-ninth of its force of about 460 officers suddenly retired, claimed their pensions, and -- perhaps most importantly -- sealed their personnel files. 

Camden County Prosecutor Lee Solomon negotiated an agreement with the president of the local police union, Detective Dan Morris, permitting the investigation to have access to personnel records of officers -- both active and retired -- who served on the force from 1997 on. "The prosecutor has assured the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] the confidentiality of these files will not be compromised," Morris announced in 2000.  

Camden Mayor Dana Redd (c.) and Police Chief Scott Thompson (r.).

Morris had access to those files as well, and there's reason to believe that he gleaned critical intelligence from them -- which he used to create his own little protection racket, which he operated for several years before retiring on disability last January at the age of 46.


Last September, Morris pleaded guilty to multiple charges outlined in a multi-count federal indictment. As commander of a five-officer Special Operations unit, Morris committed numerous criminal offenses, including illegal searches and seizures of property, theft, extortion, perjury, and various kinds of assault. 


The federal indictment against Morris's subordinates describes their Special Operations unit as a criminal conspiracy that planted evidence to justify false arrests, routinely lied about the quantity of narcotics seized in raids in order to "expose the arrestees to greater penalties," regularly bartered drugs for sundry favors, and made a habit of stealing money and drugs. Public exposure of the crimes committed by Morris and his little street gang led to the dismissal of 185 drug cases, and the release of dozens of people who had been wrongfully imprisoned. 


In April 2007, Benjamin Daye -- who was 20 at the time --was stopped and assaulted by Morris and his goon squad. An illegal search of Daye's car failed to turn up any contraband and the terrified young man couldn't provide any information on local dealers -- so the police planted drugs in the car and arrested Daye, who served nearly three years in prison before the case was dropped. 


Joel Barnes, who spent nearly a year and a half behind bars, had a very similar experience. Two officers with the Special Operations unit, Robert Bayard and Antonio Figueroa, invaded Barnes's home, demanding to know "where the s**t is at." When Barnes truthfully replied that there were no illegal drugs on the premises, one of them pulled a small bag of cocaine from his own pockets and told Barnes, "Tell us where the s**t [is] at and we'll make this disappear." When Barnes repeated that he didn't have any drugs, the officers charged him with unlawful possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute in a "school zone" -- a charge that could have led to a 20-year prison sentence.


"I felt helpless and didn't know what to do," Barnes recalls. "I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but I also knew that the officers had all of the power and I had none."


Morris and his Special Operations squad are generally referred to as a "rogue" unit, implying that their criminal conduct was anomalous. Given the pervasive corruption of the Camden PD, the term "rogue" would more properly be applied to Rolan Carter. In 2008, Carter was fired from the force for "insubordination" as a result of an incident in which he attempted to arrest a man wanted on four outstanding warrants. 


Carter pulled the man over for using a cell phone while driving. As he ran a background check two plainclothes officers materialized and insisted that the driver was a police informant and should be released immediately. While Carter discussed the matter with the plainclothes cops, a police sergeant arrived and ordered him to let the driver go. Still unconvinced that this was the "proper procedure," Carter called his own command sergeant, who instructed him to do as the other officers demanded. 

Not a "team player": Fired cop Rolan Carter.

Six weeks later, Carter -- who had received multiple commendations for valor -- was charged with insubordination and cashiered from the force. But his problems had actually begun more than a year earlier. 

 As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, in January 2007, Carter was transferred from a patrol squad "when he raised concerns about one supervisor, Sgt. Dan Morris." After Carter was removed from the squad, he was replaced by Officer Jason Stetser, who is now facing multiple criminal charges for his actions as part of Morris's "rogue" Special Operations squad. 


Carter didn't lose his job because of personnel cut-backs; he was fired because he displayed symptoms of personal integrity. And his lawsuit against the Camden PD is one of at least ten filed by former officers describing "a department rife with cronyism" in which "commanders create a hostile and discriminatory atmosphere and seek retaliation against those perceived as defiant," observes the Inquirer. 

In addition to the lawsuits filed by former Camden police officers, the city is dealing with up to thirty active or potential lawsuits by victims of the Morris-led criminal syndicate -- with dozens more likely to come. It is possible that Camden's municipal government will soon suffer the same fate that befell the one in charge of Maywood, California. 

Buried beneath a deluge of civil rights lawsuits and settlement costs incurred by police misconduct, Maywood lost its liability insurance coverage and had to contract with a neighboring town for basic municipal services. As it happens, that neighboring town was Bell, California -- which, it was discovered, had an even more extravagantly corrupt municipal government. I suspect that entertaining little revelations of this kind -- in California, New Jersey, and all points in between -- will abound as the economic collapse accelerates.  


The Camden PD, following the example of law enforcement agencies in cash-strapped California cities such as Oakland and Sacramento, has announced that it will be rationing its services by refusing to deal with "minor" matters, such as non-injury vehicle accidents and petty theft. This announcement is intended to inspire public fear. It may have exactly the opposite effect.


Helene Pierson, executive director of Heart of Camden, a neighborhood development corporation, recalls that when her group was created several years ago it intended to be a "partner" with the police force. She and others "bought into the [idea] that police are stretched really thin, that they try really hard, that they need extra help." Much of what she has seen -- including dozens of cases in which people were falsely imprisoned in the service of a criminal racket run by the cops -- has disabused Pierson of such notions. 

In Camden -- and, for that matter, everywhere else -- the government police force has been a catalyst for crime, rather than a deterrent to it. There's every reason to believe that fewer snouts in the trough would mean less crime on the streets. 

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