The Cliven Bundy Standoff: Wounded Knee Revisited?

UPDATE, April 14 -- 

I'm en route to Bunkerville, and will be reporting from there later this week. Any help I can get to defray travel expenses would be most appreciated. And as always, we are very grateful for the generous help so many of you have provided. Thank you so much -- and watch this space.

We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less? –

General Philip Sheridan, who presided over the expropriation of the Plains Indians, in the 1878 Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army

Following the War Between the States, as the formerly independent South was being re-assimilated into the Soyuz, the US military took up the task of driving the Plains Indians off of land that had been promised to them through solemn treaty obligations – but was now coveted by the corporatist railroad combine.

In 1867, William Sherman wrote a letter to General Grant insisting that “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroad. About a year earlier, Sherman had urged Grant to “act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out that Sherman set out to make the Sioux “feel the superior power of the Government,” even if “the final solution to the Indian problem” required that they be physically annihilated.

Writing in Smithsonian magazine, historian Gilbert King observes that the post-war US military wasn’t adequate to carry out that ambitious campaign. General Philip Sheridan, who succeeded Sherman as Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, complained that he had only 14,000 troops with which to carry out “the reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country.”

Note that Sheridan didn't equivocate in describing his army's role as the occupier of a “country” that belonged, by right, to other people. He had no moral scruples against being an occupier; his objections were limited to practical concerns.

The Plains Indians were canny, elusive, and motivated. However, their dependence on the buffalo provided the aggressors with an exploitable vulnerability. Hunting the Indians was difficult and risky; slaughtering buffalo was neither.

The railroads, acting as a military force multiplier, began ferrying tourists to the West for the specific purpose of “sport-hunting” buffalo. 

Unlike the Indians, who never threatened to hunt the buffalo to extinction, or Bill Cody, who was restrained in his efforts to harvest them to feed construction crews for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the Eastern tourists had no property interest in the continued existence of the species, and didn't have to pay any price for the profligate destruction they wrought.

“Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake,” recalls King. “Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands,” leaving their ravaged bodies to bloat and fester.

When legislatures in some states attempted to enact measures to conserve the buffalo, their objections were overruled by the Feds. The higher “national purpose” required a “total war” strategy that included the destruction of the buffalo in order to break the resistance of the Plains Indians.

“These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years,” wrote General Sheridan with satisfaction. “They are destroying the Indians' commissary. And it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them [the private buffalo hunters] powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.”

Cattle became the successor to buffalo in the late 1860s and early 1870s. That was the era when the ancestors of Cliven Bundy settled in what was to become the State of Nevada, and began to graze cattle in what would later be called the Bunkerville Grazing Allotment. The Bundy family made peaceful and productive use of that allotment for more than 120 years, mixing their labor with the land to create original wealth.

Unfortunately, the Bundy family -- like the American Indians – had been living on a reservation: They were never allowed to exercise ownership of their grazing “allotment,” in much the same way that Indians were not permitted to have clear title to their lands. The land on which the Bundy family raised cattle was “owned” by the government, and the Bundys were required to pay rent – in the form of grazing fees – for the “privilege” of making productive use of it. The public-land grazing system has been described as “the nation’s most conspicuous and extensive flirtation with socialism” – except, perhaps, for the Indian Reservation System.

Indians whose lands were supposedly protected through treaties invariably discovered that the phrase “in perpetuity” means “pending the discovery of something valuable on the land that is desired by a politically favored constituency.” The desired commodity could be gold – as the Nez Perce learned after their homeland in the luxuriant Wallowa Valley, having been reduced to a tiny, barren tract, was seized from them by General O.O. Howard.  It could be fertile farm lands on the banks of the Niobrara River, as the Poncas discovered when they were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma.

Similar “adjustments” were made to practically every Indian band or tribe that signed a treaty in good faith with Washington – only to find themselves reduced to destitution when Washington withheld promised annuities and rations, and then evicted from their lands when it suited Leviathan’s interests. The high and holy purpose of Manifest Destiny nullified the property rights of Indians and any treaty obligations that would inhibit Washington's drive for continental expansion.

In 1993, the same federal Leviathan State that unilaterally “modified” binding treaty agreements with Indian tribes and bands decided to “modify” the terms of the Bundy family's grazing permit. 

This was done in the service of a doctrine even more insidious than Manifest Destiny: A new religion in which all human property rights – including, some adherents insist, the right to live itself – are to be sacrificed on the altar of “biocentrism.” The central tenet of that religion is that “Human beings are not inherently superior to other living things.”

However, there are certain superior specimens within the ranks of humanity who possess a gift of seership that permits them to discern the true needs of nature. On occasion, these infinitely wise and limitlessly benevolent beings – most of whom have found a niche in some foundation-funded eco-radical lobby – will identify “endangered” or “threatened” species whose supposed claim to a “habitat” outweighs property rights and all human needs.

Since none of those non-human creatures can speak on their own behalf, we should consider ourselves extravagantly blessed by the presence of eco-seers capable of discerning their needs, bureaucrats willing to harken to their inspired counsel, and judges who dutifully ratify bureaucratic decisions without being unduly burdened by respect for property rights.

In 1993, acting on an infallible ecocentric pronouncement, the Bureau of Land Management decreed that the land on which Cliven Bundy and his neighbors had long grazed their cattle was actually the “habitat” of the desert tortoise. 

Although the BLM – like other agencies involved in administering Washington's illegal colonial occupation of western lands – has been influenced by biocentrism, it's not likely that its upper echelons are filled with True Believers in anything other than the Bureaucratic Prime Directive: “Maintain what we have, and expand where we can.”

The BLM's revisions were imposed during the reign of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who in a letter two years earlier (written while he was head of the League of Conservation Voters) declared: "We must identify our enemies and drive them into oblivion." Babbitt and his comrades have acted with what Sherman described as “vindictive earnestness” in pursuing that objective: In the past twenty years they have all but eradicated cattle ranching in the southwestern United States.

In his book War on the West, William Pendley of the Mountain States Legal Foundation observes that "the enormous might of the federal government has always meant that the life of the West was in the hands of strangers living thousands of miles away. Like the weather that can sweep down upon Westerners and change their lives in an instant, the federal government has always loomed as a distant threat." 

During Babbitt’s tenure at the Department of the Interior, the federal eco-jihad specifically targeted "the most enduring symbol of the American West - the cowboy - seeking to price and regulate the rancher off federal grazing lands and out of business, destroying the economy of rural areas." One of the first initiatives undertaken by Secretary Babbitt in pursuit of his vision of a "New West" was to seek a 230 percent increase in grazing fees charged to ranchers on federally administered lands. Although the proposed fee increase was thwarted by a Senate filibuster, the effort to destroy the ranching industry continued.

After the fee increase was proposed, an Interior Department memo surfaced which revealed that Babbitt wanted "to use price increases as a straw man to draw attention from management issues." While ranchers fought the grazing fee increase, Babbitt and company created "Range Reform '94," a cluster of proposed federal land use and environmental regulations which Pendley describes as "A Thousand and One Ways to Get Ranchers off Federal Land."

During the late 1990s – a period in which Babbitt, appropriately, was mired in a scandal involving decades of federal fraud, embezzlement, and graft in the Indian Trust Fund System -- ranchers rallied to hold off the federal assault. But like the Plains Indians, the ranchers were facing an implacable enemy unburdened with respect for the law and blessed with access to limitless resources. 

Of the 52 ranchers in his section of Nevada, Cliven Bundy is the only one who has refused to go back to the reservation. So the heirs to Sherman and Sheridan have mobilized an army to protect hired thieves who have come to steal the Bundy family’s cattle with the ultimate purpose of driving him from the land. 

Their objective is not to protect the desert tortoise, but to punish a defiant property owner and entrepreneur. This potentially murderous aggression is being celebrated by Progressives as a worthy effort to make dangerous radicals “feel the superior power of the Government.”

For more than two decades, Bundy has defied the federal land management bureaucracy, and his continued resistance could catalyze a general revolt against their designs for the western United States. 

Their intent, as described by Pendley, is to transform the West into “a land nearly devoid of people and economic activity, a land devoted almost entirely to the preservation of scenery and wildlife habitat. In their vision, everything from the 100th meridian to the Cascade Range becomes a vast park through which they might drive, drinking their Perrier and munching their organic chips, staying occasionally in the bed-and-breakfast operations into which the homes of Westerners have been turned, with those Westerners who remain fluffing duvets and pouring cappuccino.”

The high priests of biocentrism and their bureaucratic allies aren’t going to let a handful of ragged but resolute ranchers “check and stop the progress” of Manifest Destiny.

In 1875, amid an entirely contrived Indian Scare in Corrine, Utah, Indian Agent William H. Danilson sent a telegram to Washington complaining about the dangerous “extremism” that had seized the restive Shoshones. “They are taught to hate the government, and look with distrust upon their Agents,” complained the bureaucrat. The Indians impudently maintained that “Bear River Valley belonged to them” and were preparing to resist efforts to evict them from their property.

“Their whole teachings [are] fraught with evil,” concluded Danilson, scandalized that Indians would believe in the sanctity of property, and thus expected the federal government to keep its promises.

Historian Brigham D. Madsen records that an Army investigation of that 1875 Indian Scare found that the Shoshones – who were, as usual, starving because of the government’s failure to deliver promised rations – posed no threat. Nonetheless, the military “issued an ultimatum that all reservation Indians were to return to their reservations at once or [the local commander] would use military force to compel them to do so.”

It didn’t matter that the Indians had done nothing wrong, and that the government had acted illegally: The cause of “law and order” meant that the government simply had to prevail. That was the central theme in Washington’s dealings with the Indians – and in its conduct toward western landowners as well.

Fifteen years after the Corinne Indian Scare, the final flickers of Indian resistance were extinguished by Leviathan in the bloody snows of Wounded Knee. Our rulers clearly intend to use the standoff in Clark County to suffocate remaining resistance to the western states land grab. The only matter left unresolved is the question of how much violence they are willing to employ to accomplish that end. 

Addendum, 4/13: The Regime Doesn't Take Defeat Gracefully 

When the ATF attacked the Branch Davidians outside Waco in February 1993

, the expectation was a quick and painless victory over an eccentric religious sect and a public relations boost for the scandal-plagued agency. This is why the assault was code-named “Showtime.”

The Davidians, however, refused to follow the script. When the ATF stormtroopers arrived at the sect’s sanctuary at Mt. Carmel, David Koresh – who had known of the impending assault, and released an ATF informant rather than holding him as a hostage -- attempted to de-escalate the confrontation, only to be answered by a murderous volley of gunfire. Rather than allowing themselves to be shackled or slaughtered, the Davidians stood their ground, killing four of the assailants in a morally unassailable exercise of self-defense and forcing the ATF to retreat.

Because the Regime cannot countenance resistance, the FBI laid siege to the Davidians for 51 days before the final assault that left of scores of Davidians dead from fire, asphyxiation, and gunfire.

In 1973, a band of Sioux activists at Wounded Knee held off the FBI and the US military for 71 days, demanding respect for their rights under treaty law, accountability for the corruption of federally installed tribal dictator Dickie Wilson, and investigation of unsolved murders. The Feds replied with the largest domestic military deployment since the last confrontation at Wounded Knee in December 1890, an undisguised slaughter carried out by the vengeful Seventh Cavalry that amounted to an American Babi Yar.

In response to the 1973 protests, Armed FBI agents, U.S. Marshals, SWAT teams, and teams of Wilson’s paramilitary “GOON Squad” formed an iron ring around the village of Wounded Knee. Colonel Vic Jackson, head of the Pentagon’s Civil Disorder Management School, was called upon by the FBI to implement the notorious “Operation Garden Plot” martial law blueprint. The FBI’s plan called for the Army would invade and “pacify” the village before the FBI went in to “arrest” whoever might survive the onslaught. Armored Personnel Carriers were on hand to deal with what were described as “bunkers” (and were, in fact, root cellars). Phantom F-4 jets flew low-altitude reconnaissance runs over the town.

At one point, the Bureau ordered the media to leave the area and then warned the occupiers to send out their women and children. The anticipated massacre might well have been thwarted by the presence of local white residents whom the FBI called “hostages” – but who were there voluntarily in order to protect their supposed captors from the Feds.

Over the next two years, the Feds were unable to convict the “ringleaders” of the Wounded Knee protest in court. So the FBI, following its COINTELPRO playbook, abetted internecine conflicts within the Indian resistance and carried out a campaign of low-intensity warfare that left several innocent people dead.

In 2003, when the Power Elite in Washington stretched out its hand a second time to confer the blessings on “democracy” on the people of Iraq,  was one of the first targets of this exercise in murderous generosity. Bridges were bombed, schools and homes were seized by Washington’s armed missionaries of armed benevolence, and Blackwater mercenaries abused and killed innocent people with arrogant abandon.

Fallujah residents reacted by killing several Blackwater operators and organizing small but effective resistance cells. This defiant ingratitude provoked the stern chastisement of Washington, which encircled the city and visited Carthaginian destruction on it.

Like any bully, the Regime in Washington chooses its battles carefully, generally avoiding fights with opponents capable of fighting back. But it will not accept defeat when clearly in the wrong. This is something Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters should remember.






Dum spiro, pugno!

Fleeing a Stalker in Uniform: The Sherri Watson Story

A resident of Santaquin, Utah, issues a warning about the local police.

Genola, Utah –

Chad Black professes to be terrified by Sherri Watson, his neighbor in Genola, Utah. A June 2011 stalking petition filed by Black claims that he considers the 48-year-old mother to be a threat and observes that “Sheriff deputies advised me to avoid” Mrs. Watson “at all costs.”

Why, then, did this supposedly intimidated man park in directly in front of the driveway to the Watson family’s home on March 29 of this year, after repeatedly driving slowly past their property? If he has been ordered – for his “protection” – to avoid any potential contact with Mrs. Watson, why does Black make a point of driving past her home practically every day?

Black’s house is about a third of a mile from Watson’s home, and it is located right next to an access road leading to the highway he uses to go to work. Black’s visits to the Watson home are not incidental occurrences; each of them is a deliberate act intended to taunt and intimidate a woman who neither harmed nor threatened him in any way.

Chad Black is employed as a police officer by the city of Orem, Utah. He is also a reserve officer with the Santaquin Police Department, which has a contract to provide “services” for Genola. For about five years, Black – with the aid of his comrades in the Santaquin PD – has waged a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and violence against Sherri Watson and her family. The abuse suffered by the Watson family became so acute that former Genola Mayor Danny Throckmorton threatened to cancel his city’s contract with the Santaquin PD. On the following day, Throckmorton’s barn burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances that strongly suggested arson.

The woman who terrifies Officer Black: Sherri with her dog, Shiloh.

After five years of unremitting conflict, stress, and anxiety, Sherri and her family are fleeing Genola, abandoning a beautiful house built by Sherri’s father. Although they are reluctant to leave a home that they love in one of central Utah’s most scenic locations, Sherri and her husband Tom are convinced that this is necessary.

“If we stay here,” Sherri told me during an interview in her dining room, “I think physical harm is going to be done to me or to our kids. I’m literally afraid that we might get killed.”

Neither Sherri nor Tom has ever been charged with, let alone convicted of, a violent crime. Unlike their straitlaced Mormon neighbors, the Watsons openly enjoy an occasional adult libation, and Sherri’s taste in music runs to 1980s hair metal rather than contemporary country. Sherri’s 40^th birthday party in 2005 – which, in her words, “involved a band and a keg” -- ran a bit late into the night, prompting their first encounter with Black.

“He came over at about 2:00 a.m. and told us he was just coming home from work and could barely hear an echo of the music,” recalled Sherri. “He told us that nobody had called to complain, but that he could hear the music and wanted us to turn it down, which we did. What he told us at the time was that `You can have your music as loud as you want after 6:00 PM until 10:00 at night, and nobody can do anything about it.’”

The Watsons acted on that advice, adjusted their recreational habits, and avoided any further involvement with Black until 2009.

In January 2009, “I was walking my older son to the bus on a nearby intersection where two kids had been run over just a week earlier,” Sherri told me. “I saw white truck coming east that was being driven well in excess of the speed limit.  I was worried about [my son], but also about other kids who were waiting for the bus. All I could think of was the kids who had been killed there just a few days before. I yelled at the driver and motioned to him to slow down, but he seemed to speed up and swerve in my direction.”  The driver slammed on the brakes, then backed up and approached Sherri, who – in alarm – told her son to jump into a nearby canal. Sherri recalled that she was angry and anxious, and expressed herself in pungent terms, punctuated with a familiar gesture involving an upraised digit.

Officer John Savage with his wife.

The driver of the vehicle was John Savage, who at the time was employed as a fireman with the Orem Department of Public Safety. Savage sanctimoniously reproached Sherri for the “horrible” example she had set for her child.

“Two kids just got killed – my son is in the canal, and you want to tell me I'm horrible?” Sherri replied.

Sherri contacted the chief of the Orem Fire Department to report the incident, and at his request wrote a letter for an official inquiry.

“Savage’s boss told me that he had a good discussion with him, and that there would be no more problems with public safety,” Sherri said. “Then his wife paid us a visit and brought us some cookies and apologized, which was a wonderful thing to do. I told her, `This is the end of it – I’ll never mention this again.’”

Within a few weeks, Sherri inexplicably started having difficulty with Chad Black.

“I would play my music in our garage while working outdoors,” Sherri points out. “Black had told us that there wasn’t any problem with the volume, but starting in the Spring of 2009 we began having trouble with him over my music. He would come to our house and claim that he could hear my music while on the road near his house and that we had to turn it down. Then other Santaquin officers would show up to say that neighbors were complaining.”

Sherri would later be told by her next-door neighbors that they had never called to complain about the noise.

The problem, Sherri contends, wasn’t her music. It was the fact that “Chad Black and John Savage are buddies.” After receiving a reprimand as a fireman, Savage joined the Orem Police Department. Either Savage, or Black, or both of them, apparently decided to make life miserable for an uppity Mundane.

In June 2009, Sherri was arrested on charges of “lewd conduct” – for dancing, fully clothed, in her garage during mid-day hours; “public intoxication” – for drinking beer on her own property; and two counts of “disorderly conduct” – one of which was issued to punish her for telling a Santaquin Police Officer that Black is a “corrupt cop.”

Following the arrest, Black immediately contacted Sherri’s supervisors at the Nebo School District to inform them of the charges against her. As a result, she was immediately fired from her job as a lunch lady at the school attended by her sons, Conner and Cody.

Former Genola Mayor Danny Throckmorton is in the middle.

The Watsons appealed to Mayor Throckmorton, who intervened on their behalf at the district court in Santaquin. It took nearly two years, but Sherri was fully vindicated on May 6, 2011 when all of the charges were dismissed “in the interests of justice.”

At around this time, Black began stalking – no other word is appropriate – Sherri Watson in her home.

“The day before I went to court, I called to find out what time my hearing, and we were told that Mayor Throckmorton was trying to get them to drop all the charges,” Sherri reflects. “We had complained to him, and he stood up for us and did an investigation. The next day Chad Black showed up in his Orem police car, passed by my house at a crawl, did a U-turn, and sat near the house just watching us.”

“I started to complain about him,” Sherri continues. “The Mayor and the police told me I could videotape his actions to document harassment. Because he was employed full-time by the Orem and part-time as a reserve in Santaquin, the Utah County Sheriff got involved in the matter. The Sheriff’s Office told me that every time I saw Black I should call them.”

Accordingly, “I began videotaping every incident,” Sherri told me. “During one of Black’s drive-by visits, I videotaped him from our property. Ten minutes later, all of his kids came walking down to my home, and I videotaped them, as well.”

Drussel (center) named "Officer of the Year."

On May 27, 2011, both Sherri and Officer Black called the Sheriff’s office to file harassment complaints. In response, several Santaquin cops pulled up to the Watsons’ house and demanded to speak with Sherri. One of them, Officer Matt Drussel, “told me I had one hour to fill out a `voluntary’ statement or they were going to invade my home,” Sherri recalled to me.

Weary of the abuse and persecution his wife was enduring, Tom Watson greeted the officers at the front door wearing a holstered gun. The family placed an urgent call to Mayor Throckmorton, who, Sherri testifies, told them: “Do not talk to them until I get there.”

“Drussel was coming to the door with his gun drawn when Danny [Mayor Throckmorton] came zooming up on his four-wheeler,” Sherri recounts. “He told them to stop harassing me and my family or he’d pull the contract” – in other words, that he would throw the Santaquin PD out of Genola. Grudgingly, the officers backed down -- but Tom and Sherri believe that someone on the police force retaliated against the mayor.

“It was after this that I was mowing my lawn and I saw smoke coming from Danny’s property,” Sherri told me. “I found out that his barn was burned to ashes. He and his wife told us that the night the fire happened they were told by the fire department that to find the cause, they need to look no further than the Santaquin PD.”

Throckmorton, who is no longer Mayor of Genola, declined a request for comment. The woman who answered my telephone call told me that “he’s just trying to put all of this behind him.”

Harassment: Chad Black's vehicle parked near Watsons' home, March 22.

Worried about her personal safety and the well-being of her family, Sherri filed a petition seeking a protective order against Black.

In denying that petition, Judge Darold McDade insisted that Black’s habit of driving slowly and menacingly past the Watson’s home did not constitute “stalking.”

Black retaliated by filing his own petition against Sherri claiming that she had somehow “stalked” him and his children by videotaping them from her own property.

Citing a supposed conflict of interest, Black’s attorney had Judge McDade recused from hearing his petition. His replacement, Judge James Taylor, “didn’t look at the video, the past history, or any of the details of the case” before granting Black’s petition, Sherri recalls.  In that fashion, an armed purveyor of state-licensed violence was designated the “victim” of a terrorized woman – who has never done harm to anybody – because she had videotaped him in the act of harassing her family.

The Watson family has set up surveillance cameras that record every visit from Officer Black, who is under orders to avoid them and to report every incidental contact that occurs. Black attempted to get a court order forcing the Watsons to remove the cameras, but wasn’t successful. This matters little, since his supervisors aren’t inclined to punish him for violating the terms of the court order.

“He constantly drives by our house, but he never reports those contacts,” Sherri laments. “After the injunction was issued, every time Black sees my car, or his kids see me at the grocery store, I’m reported to the cops.” Tom and Sherri say that they have been reported to the police at least twenty times, and have had to endure numerous visits from the Santaquin PD.

“Last December 20, after Black called the cops, we had three squad cars pull up to our house,” Tom Watson told me. “They started pounding on our door demanding to be let in.” Among the officers who responded was Chief Dennis Howard.” Tom locked the deadbolt and called attorney Ed Flint, who “told me I didn’t have to answer the door.”

“When someone is out there with guns, and your kids are hiding under their beds, you don't know what to do,” Sherri told me, struggling to maintain her composure.

Eventually the officers left, much to the family’s relief – given that Chief Howard had previously expressed a willingness to kill Tom.

“After the earlier confrontation with police at our home, Howard said that if he had been there when I came out with my gun in a holster, `I would have put you down,’” Tom informed me.

Chief Howard, incidentally, is paid $119,000 a year to preside over a tiny police department in a town with a population of fewer than 10,000 people.

Since that incident in December, the Watsons have been spared another official visit by the police. But Black persists in driving by their home, in defiance of a court order and the directions of his superiors.

 “When we went to complain to the Orem Police Department, we were told that there had been an investigation and that Chad Black had been ‘cleared,” declares Sherri. “We asked him, `Really? Did you talk to the mayor? Did you speak with all of our neighbors?’ No – they only talked about this with Chad, and then decided that he had been `cleared.’”

About a year ago, Tom and Sherri paid a visit to the Orem Police Department, where they spoke with Sgt. Wade Robb about Officer Black’s relentless campaign of harassment. According to Sgt. Raab, the Utah POST Council had already investigated their complaints against Black. This greatly surprised the Watsons, because Al Acosta, the Council’s chief investigator, had told them that no investigation would take place until after Sherri had personally filed a complaint with the Orem PD.

Robb blithely replied that an unnamed POST official had spoken with Orem PD Chief Michael Larsen -- and that brief contact, as far as he was concerned, constituted an “investigation.”

“Acosta bragged to us that `When I walk into a police station, all of the officers' knees are quivering, because they they know someone is getting fired,’” Tom bitterly recalled. “What Acosta didn’t explain is that Chief Larsen is a member of the POST Council, and that he reported to Chief Larsen – which means that he couldn’t be trusted to investigate him and his department.”

During his meeting with Tom and Sherri, Orem PD Sgt. Raab admitted that Black’s persistent and unwelcome visits to the Watson home had been “documented,” while assuring the couple that there was nothing inappropriate about the officer’s malicious and vindictive behavior.

“I can’t go outside” because of the injunction, Sherri wept. “I guess it’s OK for a police officer to harass me.”

Seeking refuge in Clintonian dissimulation, Raab (whose annual share of plundered compensation is $128,000 ) replied: “I guess it depends on what the definition of `harassment’ is.”

Just a few days prior to the visit with Sgt. Robb, Sherri had received a phone call from police in nearby Payson. They were investigating a complaint from Black that Sherri had violated the injunction by shopping at a local grocery store while members of the Black family were there. Although the injunction acknowledges that “incidental” contact between Sherri and her purported victims would take place, Officer Black is exploiting every trivial encounter by filing a police report.

By going out of his way to drive past Sherri’s house, and reporting every trivial contact that occurs elsewhere, Black is trying to make her a prisoner in her own home. His superiors and colleagues are aware of what he is doing, but because the victim is a Mundane they simply don’t care.

“If he’s driving by, that’s his fault,” acknowledged a Santaquin Police Officer during a recorded telephone conversation with Tom and Sherri. When Sherri pointed out that her sons are terrified of Black, the officer wryly replied: “None of us here in Santaquin are fond of him, either.” This isn’t because of Black’s treatment of the Watson family, but because his actions prompted former Mayor Throckmorton to renegotiate the Santaquin PD’s lucrative contract with Genola.

“About a year and a half ago, the Santaquin PD got caught baiting dogs off of private property and then forcing owners to pay impound fees,” Tom explained to me. “We were attending town meetings to complain about the harassment we were facing, and then this mess happened and people got really upset. Finally the Mayor’s dog was lured off the property and caught. So the Santaquin Mayor ordered the police department to rip up every `dog at large’ ticket they had issued. The contract here in Genola was reduced, which meant less overtime for the Santaquin cops. So despite the fact that he’s still an unpaid reserve officer, nobody on the force likes him. They blame him for wrecking overtime.”

Black doubtless finds sufficient consolation in the fact that he is unassailably secure in his $94,000-a-year job with the Orem PD. (His friend John Savage is paid $110,000 a year, and will probably wind up with pensions from both the police and fire departments.) In the meantime, Tom and Sherri Watson are preparing to sell their home at a loss and move to eastern Oregon out of fear for their lives.

Sherri Watson protesting police murder of Danielle Willard.

In March 2013, Sherri was nearly run off the road by somebody driving Chad Black’s vehicle.

“I was in front of [a] stop sign when Chad Black’s truck came barreling out towards me, he almost hit me and I had to swerve off the road to avoid a wreck,” Sherri wrote in a letter to Chief Howard. “I was not going to stick around and see if it was Chad or his son driving as that would be going against the stalking injunction.”

“Do I have to be dead for the Santaquin PD, or Orem PD to car about some middle-aged woman being harassed and stalked … by a cop?” Sherri pleaded. She struck a similar note in a despairing letter to then-Mayor Throckmorton: “I do not know how to protect myself from a cop with a vendetta. Please care about me and my children. I do not want to die at Chad’s hand.”

At least some of the officials who have refused to rein in the sociopathic officer who is driving Sherri Watson’s family from their home are descendants of people who settled Utah as refugees from official persecution in Missouri and Illinois. When the man whom their ancestors revered as a prophetic leader petitioned US President Martin Van Buren for assistance, his plea was deflected with a phrase that has become drenched in disrepute: “Your cause is just – but I can do nothing for you.”

In Van Buren’s defense, his constitutional mandate did not authorize him to intervene in the internal affairs of Missouri. The pious but indifferent local officials in Orem, Santaquin, and Utah County have no such defense. They have means to protect Sherri and her innocent family, and the moral duty to come to their aid, but simply refuse to do so – most likely out of a sense of tax-feeder solidarity with her uniformed stalker.

This stolid indifference to the rights of innocent people is one facet of the pathology of privileged violence that typifies law enforcement.

Notes and Asides 

The piece I wrote about the Mark Byrge case was excerpted at length in the Washington Post. I'm happy to report that Mark's story has also been picked up by local media in Utah; this may mean that the matter won't simply vanish into the Memory Hole, and Mark might be able to receive compensation for the injury done to him. I'm working on a follow-up story regarding alleged misconduct by the officer responsible for Mark's debilitating injury.

Dan Popkey, an alleged reporter for the Idaho Statesman, has published a petulant blog post about Mark Patterson's impending lawsuit against Sheriff Raney. Popkey was the conduit through which Raney smeared Patterson by using legally protected confidential information about an expunged felony conviction. 

As I recently reported, Patterson -- at the time a college-aged man -- was manipulated into accepting a plea for "assault with intent to commit rape" on the basis of an accusation that would not have withstood scrutiny in court. Popkey's "extensive reporting" on that matter carefully omitted several key points, not the least of which was the fact (documented in the police report) that the accuser was a mentally ill woman who had scattered five children (from several different biological fathers) across at least three states, and that the account given to the cops was self-contradictory. 

If Patterson had told the police that he wouldn't speak to them without an attorney being present, the charge almost certainly would have disappeared immediately. Instead, he was manipulated into taking a "lie detector" test that supposedly showed "deception" -- beginning a two-year ordeal that supposedly ended in 1976, only to be resurrected in 2013 by a vindictive, corrupt sheriff.

Gary Raney enjoys "qualified immunity." Mark Popkey, whose "reporting" may have left him legally exposed, does not. He can take comfort in the fact that he has a steady income. I do not.

The work I'm doing here is having an impact (and making me more than a few enemies), but it isn't providing an income. I am very grateful to everybody who has donated so generously; it has literally made it possible for my family to have shelter and sustenance. One measure of our difficulty can be found in the fact that today (April 7), in order to pay bills, I've had to start selling my guns. If you can help, we would be most grateful. God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!