Your "Duty" to Protect and Serve the Police

If you say something that hurts their feelings, you're no better than a "cop-killer."

Glenn Beck, acting in his self-appointed role as a punitive populist prophet, has urged his audience to join “hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm,” and “ring” their local police departments in prayer. The local police are “under siege,” Beck tremulously insists, and divine intervention on their behalf is necessary. 
 

Beck hasn't yet urged Americans to act as human shields on behalf of the heavily armed, body armor-clad functionaries who are supposedly paid to protect them. Some police union officials haven't shied away from suggesting that the public has a moral duty to protect the police, despite the fact that police have no reciprocal obligation to protect individuals threatened with criminal violence.

Residents of Huntsville, Alabama who declined to intervene to help a police officer subdue a suspect could face criminal prosecution under a state statute requiring them to assist an officer in trouble. Had the situation been reversed, however, police officers would face neither criminal nor civil prosecution for declining to aid a citizen under assault by a suspect.

A man named Devonte Conerly who was suspected in a hit and run incident, allegedly tried to disarm the police officer who stopped him. Several officers responded to a call for assistance and eventually subdued and handcuffed Conerly. They then rebuked several bystanders who had declined to intervene.

“I wouldn't ask anybody in the public [sic] sector to get involved in a shootout or anything like that,” commented Bill Davis, the immediate past president of Alabama's Fraternal Order of Police. However, he continued, “if it's just an altercation where someone is wrestling with the officer and it looks like they're getting the best of the officer, yes you need to help.”

FOP spokesman Davis.

In fact, under the Alabama state legal code (Section 13A-10-5), “A person commits the crime of refusing to aid a peace officer if, upon command by a peace officer identified to him as such, he fails or refuses to aid” the officer in effecting a “lawful arrest” or preventing “the commission by another person of any offense.” This dereliction of a supposed duty is described as a Class C misdemeanor.

This power of summary verbal conscription by police, as liberty activist Matt Agorist has noted, is written into law in 44 of the 50 of the state-level subdivisions within the American soyuz. Davis is hardly the first police official to express disgust and outrage over the reluctance of the public to intervene on behalf of an officer during an altercation.

“I was horrified,” quavered Philadelphia SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel, commenting on an incident in which Philadelphia transit officer Samuel Washington was thrown to the ground and pinned under a bench by a suspect. “I'm frightened for my cops..... To go out every day they work really hard and try to … make people feel safe but they rely on people to help.”

Like most people in his profession, Nestel apparently suffers from occupational tone-deafness: Police make people “feel safe,” he observes, but they rely on the public to protect them. Nestel expects the public to be governed by the assumption that anytime a police officer is involved in a violent encounter, the officer is in the right – and that if the target of the officer's attention is resisting, bystanders have a legal obligation to help subdue the “suspect.”

"I'm frightened for my cops": Chief Nestel.

Under Alabama's statute, onlookers are not liable to prosecution if the failure to render aid “was reasonable under the circumstances,” but the burden of demonstrating that this is the case is placed upon the accused: 

 "A person is not liable under this section if the failure or refusal to aid the officer was reasonable under the circumstances. The burden of injecting this issue is on the defendant but this does not shift the burden of proof." (Emphasis added.)

While this formulation doesn't require that a defendant prove his innocence during a trial, it assumes that a "refusal to aid" an officer is unreasonable, and places on the accused the "burden" of overcoming that presumption. The default assumption is that the accused committed an offense by doing nothing. 

Of course, in the event that a citizen obeys a police officer's command to intervene, and is unable to help subdue the suspect, he could conceivably find himself charged with obstruction, which is a Class A misdemeanor. This means that a police officer can charge an onlooker who declines to participate in an arrest, or – conceivably – one who makes an unsuccessful bid to help. It should also be remembered that a citizen, unlike a police officer, is not protected by "qualified immunity" in the event the subject of an arrest is injured without justification.

In any case, citizens are told that they have a legal duty to come to the aid of an embattled police officer – but police have no corresponding duty to intervene on behalf of a citizen. 
 
It is a well-established legal principle that police officers are not criminally nor civilly liable when they fail to protect individual citizens from specific acts of criminal violence. The seminal 1981 decision Warren v. District of Columbia held that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” (Emphasis added.)

In that case, two women reported an assault on a friend to the police. Officers were dispatched to the scene of the crime, but declined to enter the building. The desperate women called again, and this time the department didn't even bother to respond. The attackers overheard the second call, and punished the women who had sought police assistance by detaining and assaulting them for 14 hours.
 

Coward cop with killer: Howell (l.) with Gelman.

Police have “no special duty” to aid a citizen facing an immediate lethal threat, contended David Santoro, City Attorney for New York, in a successful bid to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Philadelphia native Joe Lozito. Lozito was nearly killed while subduing a slasher-killer named Maxim Gelman during a 2011 subway attack. Lozito, an unarmed man trained in mixed martial arts, tackled and subdued Gelman, who was being sought for the murder of three people.

As Lozito desperately sank a chokehold on Gelman, the maniac cleaved open the back of Lozito's head. Bleeding and struggling to retain consciousness, Lozito pleaded for help from NYPD Officer Terrance Howell, who was cowering behind a locked partition and refusing to get involved. It wasn't until Lozito managed to pin Gelman down and disarm him that Howell emerged from his secure location, officiously telling Lozito, “You can get up now.”

Howell did nothing to detain or subdue the murderer, but he was the one photographed triumphantly escorting Gelman away from the scene in handcuffs, and was hailed as a “hero cop” in the media. He later admitted to a member of a grand jury that he hid from the suspect out of fear for his safety -- and no moral or policy consideration is more important than the sacred principle of "officer safety."

The unqualified duty to protect the police extends from the streets to the jury room. Nowhere is this assumption more deeply entrenched than Harris County, Texas, where Sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth was murdered last week. 
 
In a multi-part investigative series published a year ago, the Houston Chronicle found that Harris County grand juries “have cleared HPD officers in shootings 288consecutive times.”
This reflects the fact that the Harris County Courts use a board of commissioners to select grand jurors, a process that tends to fill grand juries with older, more conservative panelists – retirees who are “elite members of the community,” in the assessment of District Judge Denise Collins. The ideal Harris County juror would be sort of person who nods along with, or chuckles approvingly over, Bill O'Reilly's authoritarian monologues.

A second filter for police shooting inquests has been the official in charge of reviewing police shootings on behalf of the District Attorney, Clint Greenwood, a police officer. Last year, Greenwood was hired as a major at the Harris County Sheriff's Office, a position he most likely wouldn't have landed had be pursued police shootings with vigorous impartiality.

The most significant factor behind the long string of police exonerations, however, has been the DA's practice of having jurors “play the role of police officer” in a training simulator as part of their deliberations.


Terri Burke of the Texas state ACLU describes this procedure as a form of “brainwashing” that “all but guarantees immunity for the cops.” Former grand jury foreman Tom Kennedy stoutly disagrees, insisting that the experience is “extremely beneficial” for jury members, because it helps them empathize with the officer who used lethal force by showing them “the split second he or she needs to make sometimes a life or death decision.”

It is not incidental to this discussion that Kennedy “edits the Houston Police Officers' Union publication,” the Chronicle reported. Not surprisingly, criminal indictments of police officers who use lethal force are all but unheard of in Harris County. This would suggest either that police officers within that jurisdiction are beings untainted by human weakness, or beyond human accountability. 
 
“We heard `black lives matter,'” complained Sheriff Ron Hickman following the murder of Deputy Goforth. “All lives matter. Well, cops' lives matter too, so why don't we drop the qualified and say `lives matter' and take that to the bank.”

Sheriff Hickman's anger was genuine and understandable, but his exhortation was either insincere or not fully thought through. The official view of the caste to which he belongs is that police lives matter more than those of mere Mundanes – because every police officer is an incarnation of the divine state, to whom reflexive obedience is to be given, and whose sanctified personage is owed protection by the lesser beings who surround him. 

This means shielding police not only from violence directed against them, and the legal consequences of violence used by them, but also from the “rhetorical violence” supposedly committed by people who scrutinize their conduct and condemn their abuses.

Authoritarian herd-poisoners of all varieties claim that the murder of Deputy Goforth demonstrates a dramatic escalation in the purported “war on police” that is supposedly propelled by “anti-police rhetoric.” 
 
During the thirty-day period in which Deputy Goforth was murdered, the number of people shot by police (at least 84 -- remember, the killings of Mundanes are not officially tallied) was roughly equal to the total number of police killed on-duty by all causes – including traffic mishaps, work-related accidents, heart attacks, and other non-violent episodes – through September 2. Firearms-related line-of-duty police deaths are down by 13 percent so far this year.

Police union officials and the pundits who regurgitate their pre-chewed soundbites are pretending that "anti-police rhetoric" is inhibiting cops and emboldening cop-killers. The available use of force statistics suggest that something akin to the reverse may be true. That possibility hasn't occurred to those who urge the public to form a protective barricade around their armed overseers.

(This essay has been slightly expanded to include more details about Alabama's "Refusal to Aid" statute.)

Dum spiro, pugno!

Vester Lee Flanagan, Social Justice Avenger

A Communist is merely a socialist in a hurry. Vester Lee Flanagan, by his own description, was an impatient social justice warrior. The murderous means he employed to punish those he accused of bigotry made visible the latent lethal violence that resides in State policies oriented toward the same objective.

Flanagan, also known by the professional name Bryce Williams, was a promiscuous petitioner to the EEOC. After apparently growing weary of seeking to bureaucratize the violence he wanted to inflict on his former colleague, he chose a more direct approach, one we could call retail-level Leninism. As a representative of the "Who" -- presumptive victims of discrimination -- Flanagan exercised "power without limit" by killing two individuals numbered among the "Whom" -- those presumed to be motivated by prejudice. 

In calculating the moral price of the murders in Roanoke, psychologist James Garbarino of Loyola University – like most of the Custodians of Correct Opinion – gave the Social Justice Avenger an identity-based discount, and passed the costs on to others who don't belong to a specially protected category.

"The culture that we live in that supports and fosters violence that has such a strong theme of racism and homophobia all of that obviously was building up inside this man's head,” Garbarino pontificated.

Assuming that Garbarino intended to convey an intelligible argument, rather than leaving the air clotted with thought-stopping buzzwords, his statement actually ratified Flanagan's rampage as an understandable reaction to private bigotry. On this construction, the amorphous abstraction called “society” is implicated in Flanagan's consummately anti-social act – and his victims own at least a portion of the blame for the criminal violence that ended their lives.

A more reasonable assessment is that he was an apt pupil of the Regime – “the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

“Crime is contagious,” observed Brandeis in the Olmstead v. U.S. decision nearly a century ago, when the surveillance state was in its larval stage and wiretapping by police was looked upon with horror. “If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it invites every man to become a law unto himself.... To declare in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.”

In the deranged outpouring that has inevitably been christened a “manifesto,” Flanagan name-checked prior mass murderers and claimed that “what sent me over the top” was the murder spree in Charleston by the similarly demented bigot Dylann Roof. Acknowledging that it is perilous to seek a thread of rationality in the tapestry of delusion woven by Flanagan, I would suggest that he clearly regarded the “nasty racist things” he supposedly experienced as a “gay black man” as offenses worthy of violent reprisal.

On those occasions when someone of Dylann Roof's persuasion – broadly defined – engages in an act of large-scale criminal violence, somebody in the State's stable of collectivist chin-pullers will issue an indictment against the “authoritarian personality,” which is supposedly found only on the rightward end of the political spectrum. Authoritarians are supposedly characterized by rigidity in thinking, deep distrust of diversity, and an irrepressible urge to punish those who deviate from traditional norms.

It's hardly a novel observation that many conservatives live down to that description – but any honest observer will admit that there is a plethora of punitive progressives, as well. One key distinction between authoritarian conservatives and their progressive counterparts is the fact that people in the latter category expect the targets of punitive intervention to be not only penitent, but grateful, for State-administered correction that can destroy reputations, ruin businesses, and rend families asunder.

Those refractory, incorrigible people who simply resist the chastening hand of progressive correction must be banished from “respectable” society. During the Obama Era, this familiar doctrine of totalitarian “tolerance” has expanded to include actual bloodshed – not yet of the official variety, at least domestically, but as part of a breathtakingly cynical political trade-off.

Divine dispenser of lethal violence: Obama at hate crimes bill signing.

In 2009 – as previously noted in this space – the Obama administration attached federal hate crimes legislation to a $680 billion military appropriation bill, thereby creating a remarkable hybrid – a measure that would authorize unremitting slaughter abroad and aggressive pursuit of thought criminals at home.

Chris Hedges, a political progressive burdened with a conscience and blessed with a gift for astringent honesty, dispelled the self-enraptured rhetoric of the “tolerance” coalition by describing how they had implicated themselves in the ultimate “hate crime”:

"It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game."

Yes, the war funding meant, as a moral certainty, that innocent “people of color” – including women and children – would suffer violent, unnecessary death or permanent disfigurement. This would, in turn, expand the recruiting pool for anti-American terrorists, given that every time a drone-fired missile kills a child it simultaneously creates several dozen potential suicide bombers. But of such broken eggs are policy omelets made.

Besides, they're not all that important, you know.

Among the groups who endorsed the legislation, thereby taking ownership of the slaughter, were the so-called Anti-Defamation League, the self-styled Human Rights Campaign, the fraudulently named Southern Poverty Law Center, and nearly every other foundation-funded, State-centered “watchdog” group. Because of their involvement, they enjoyed a huge windfall in fund-raising, enhanced stature in Obama's Washington, and expanded influence with domestic law enforcement and administrative agencies. 
 
Yes, brown people overseas would die horribly as a direct result of an arrangement endorsed by the self-anointed leaders of the Tolerance Industry – but this was a tragically unavoidable sacrifice in the service of the larger good. After all, there are racist, homophobic, and misogynist “micro-aggressions” to be dealt with, and surely the traumatized feelings of victims exposed to such cruelty are injuries worthier of immediate attention. 
 

No "micro-aggression" here.

Never forget: Bombs and drones break human bones, but only “hate speech” can truly hurt us. Besides, when indiscriminate drone strikes are carried out by a paladin of progressivism, they're acts of applied tolerance, not violence.

Some commentators, in an ill-advised riff on Barack Obama's familiar and equally wrong-headed observation about Trayvon Martin, have suggested that if Obama had a son, he might look like Vester Lee Flanagan. Much more importantly, if the alliance that created the 2009 federal hate crimes act – call it the Coalition for Progressive Mass Murder and Thought Control – had begotten a child, he would think and act the way Flanagan did. 

Dum spiro, pugno! 

License to Prey

 

On the hunt: Serial predator and Police Chief Butterfield.

Early one morning in July 2014, a woman in Myton, Utah was startled awake by an uninvited visitor named Thomas Wayne Butterfield.

“I'm a cop,” Butterfield explained to the intimidated woman when she asked how he had gotten into her bedroom. “They teach us how to do those things.”

When the woman moved into the living room, Butterfield followed her, placing his hand on her leg in a gesture at once proprietary and predatory. The unexpected arrival of the woman's father prevented what likely would have been a sexual assault – and Butterfield's firing as the tiny town's police chief ended a four-month campaign of harassment during which he forced his unwanted attentions on at least four women.

This behavior was not out of what passes for Butterfield's character: During a career that spans nearly two decades and roughly a half-dozen police agencies across Utah, he has routinely preyed upon women. This has led to numerous complaints, criminal charges, and a suspension – yet he remained employable in an occupation that selects for predators and tends to reward their misbehavior.

Salt Lake City NBC affiliate KSL reports that two days prior to Butterfield's July 2014 invasion of the unnamed woman's bedroom, the victim had called the police seeking “help getting her car, purse and other personal items back from her estranged husband.” After Butterfield arrived, the woman testified during a July 30 pre-trial hearing, the officer held her against her will for about two hours, driving her in his patrol car and making clumsy sexual overtures and ignoring her repeated pleas to be released.

“He asked me if I ever thought about having sex with a cop,” the woman related in the courtroom. Acting on the assumption that the victim's reluctance reflected concerns about confidentiality, rather than her chromosome-level revulsion, Chief Butterfield assured her that “My car is like Vegas: What happens here, stays here.”

Trapped in the custody of an armed stranger with a state-issued license to use lethal force, the woman was concerned about not only her bodily integrity, but her physical survival – and she knew that his account of the incident would be considered definitive because of his position.

“With him being in authority, he could make things a lot worse for me because he's a cop,” she observed during her testimony.

Although she escaped that encounter, Butterfield – displaying a heedless, clueless ardor reminiscent of the libidinous cartoon character Pepe LePew – materialized in her bedroom two days later.

Other women have provided sworn testimony of similar treatment by Myton's only full-time law enforcement officer.

“I told him that I wasn't interested in any sort of sexual relationship,” a second woman testified during a May 11 hearing. Rather than accepting the rebuff, Butterfield plied the victim with unsolicited personal disclosures, telling her that he and his wife hadn't been intimate for several years and that he “needed a cool kind of friend that wouldn't cause drama in his life.”

“I've told a lot of people that,” Butterfield admitted when asked about the claim that he had complained to women about intimacy issues with his wife. He described those comments as “facetious” while grudgingly conceding that such comments “may have been in poor taste.” His misconduct wasn't limited to breaches of etiquette.

Despite the utter absence of any hint of reciprocal interest, Butterfield called the woman repeatedly and showed up at her home without an invitation, announcing his intention to “finish the conversation” about sex – which, given that the “conversation” was one-sided and involuntary, left the woman understandably alarmed and frightened.

Remarkably, the Myton woman who found Butterfield standing in her bedroom was not the first to have that experience – nor the first to be told that breaking into the home of a would-be victim is part of his skill set as a police officer.

Holli Stewart told the Deseret News that after breaking up with Butterfield in 1999, she found him sitting on the edge of his bed. When she asked how he had gotten in, Butterfield replied: “Holli, I'm a cop. They teach us how to do that. I can get in anywhere.”

At the time, Butterfield was employed as an officer with the police department in Lehi, Utah. He was charged with criminal trespass, a class B misdemeanor. A plea bargain reduced that charge to an infraction in exchange for a no contest plea. His peace officer certification was suspended for a year by the Utah Peace Officer Standards and Training Council (POST).

In an interesting contrast, last year the POST Council imposed a two-year suspension on former police cadet Shawnn Hartley for “not disclosing a prior use of marijuana in a timely manner." Under the institutional priorities of the Utah POST Council, which haven't changed appreciably over the past decade and a half, a lack of candor about marijuana use is a graver offense than using the skill-set of a police officer to engage in sexually predatory behavior.

Butterfield's brief suspension, and his criminal record, did no lasting injury to his law enforcement career. In 2000 he found employment with police departments in Spring City and Roosevelt, eventually being hired as a deputy with the Duschene County Sheriff's Office.

In 2010, Butterfield resigned from the Duschene County Sheriff's Office during an internal affairs inquiry into alleged misconduct involving another woman. He was re-hired by the Roosevelt PD, but was fired in April 2013 after two women filed complaints claiming that he had acted inappropriately toward them.

Despite his severely tainted record and “gypsy cop” status, Butterfield was hired by Myton when the political clique in charge of the town of 604 people unaccountably decided that although the town has one stop sign and no measurable criminal activity, it needed a police department.

“We scraped together every cent we could to get a department together,” Myton Mayor Kathleen Cooper lamented to the Salt Lake Tribute. Perhaps as an economy measure, the city government didn't invest in a background check. Butterfield was hired in July 2014. By September, sexual misconduct allegations had begun to accumulate.

“People are innocent until proven guilty,” Mayor Cooper said with respect to the “mind-numbing” charges against Butterfield. “At this point, we stand behind our chief, and we'll defend him until we find out otherwise.” The mayor's determination to defend the chief evaporated shortly after the September 16, 2014 interview with the Tribune: Butterfield was fired by the city and surrendered his peace officer certification. 

 

She doesn't do due diligence: Myton Mayor Kathleen Cooper

8th District Judge Samuel Chiara found sufficient evidence to bind Butterfield over for trial on two counts of stalking, one count of illegal detention, and one count of criminal trespassing. The trial is set for early December. If Butterfield possessed even a particle of humility, or even the slightest capacity for contrition, he could have ended his legal travails on absurdly generous terms.

Originally charged with three misdemeanor counts of stalking, criminal trespass, and unlawful detention, Butterfield was offered a deal in March that would have dismissed everything but a single charge of stalking. He rejected this offer – which was incomprehensibly lenient, given his history – because the single stalking charge would have applied to three women. Butterfield apparently hopes that jurors will perceive him to be a flawed but decent police officer traduced by disreputable women.

“Most of the victims have had problems with law enforcement in the past, have had some kind of history," Duchesne County sheriff's detective Monty Nay testified during an Oct. 14 hearing for one of those civil stalking cases. When Butterfield was confronted with the allegations, Detective Nay recalled, he threatened to file criminal charges and pursue civil action against the accusers.

During the same hearing, one of the women – who had a pending drug possession case -- explained that whenever her dogs bark in the middle of the night, she finds herself wondering, “is it him? I'm scared.”


Her concern about the possibility of retaliatory violence by a state-licensed predator was entirely reasonable. After all, Butterfield was a cop; he had been taught how to do such things.
                                             

Dum spiro, pugno!