Restoring the Right to Resist (UPDATED)

The stuff of nightmares -- tax-feeders with guns: Ray Nagin (r), the cosmically inept mayor of New Orleans, joins police supervisor Warren Riley in celebrating the NBA All-Star Game by goofing off with some of the weaponry recently purchased with a $6.6 million state police appropriation.

“One has an undoubted right to resist an unlawful arrest, and courts will uphold the right of resistance in proper cases.”

United States Supreme Court, United States v. Di Re, 1948.

It was well after midnight when armed strangers burst into the Houston apartment Pedro Oregon Navarro shared with his family. Adrenaline suring through his veins, Pedro grabbed a handgun and fled toward his room, the intruders pounding after him.

One of the assailants later claimed that Pedro pointed his gun at him. A short while later, the 22-year-old father was dead. Some 33 shots had been fired, twelve of which found their way into Pedro’s body. This wasn’t a case of “contagious gunfire”; one of the attackers took the time to reload and empty a second clip. Pedro’s gun wasn’t fired a single time.

The invaders were police, of course. They stormed into Pedro’s home without a warrant, acting on a tip from an informant that narcotics commerce was being conducted there – a charge regarded as sufficient justification for a raid by the kind of people who believe the State has jurisdiction over the individual’s bloodstream. The informant wasn’t “registered” with the police department, an omission that may be significant to the kind of people who can countenance working with compensated snitches.

More importantly, several searches of the home failed to produce so much as a particle of evidence that narcotics had ever been present therein.

So the police, who raided a home without a warrant or any semblance of probable cause, were arraigned on charges of murder, or at least manslaughter, for the needless death of an innocent 22-year-old man -- right?

Well, no.

“I don’t know of any authority at this point that gave them [the police] the right to be in that residence,” conceded John B. Holmes, Jr., the District Attorney for Harris County. “But that doesn’t make the shooting a crime.”

Holmes told the Houston Chronicle that, in effect, Pedro had committed a capital offense by arming himself when the police broke into his home illegally.

“They [the police] do not have to sit still for a citizen pointing a firearm at them, even if they entered illegally,” Holmes insisted. In comments to the Chronicle, Holmes asserted (in the newspaper’s paraphrase) that “because the law does not allow anyone to resist an arrest, even an illegal one, officers had a right to use deadly force against [Pedro] if he threatened them.” The “only exception,” he maintained, “is the right to defend yourself against unreasonable force, such as being beaten.”

Holmes didn’t deign to answer the logical follow-up question: What if the cops decide that your attempt to resist being beaten is a “threat”? Are they then permitted by what some people are pleased to call the “law” to kill you?

Yes, this bucket-headed fellow in Stormtrooper drag is a police officer.

There are many police who have done that very thing. A group of them from the Campbell County, Tennessee Sheriff’s Department were caught on tape beating and torturing a petty recidivist criminal and threatening to kill him if he didn’t sign a consent form permitting them to search his home.

At one point, following a long session of torture, threats, and mockery, one of the officers suggested that the victim be released from his handcuffs; “that way if he raises his damn hand to one of us, we have the right to beat the f**k out of him.” Another one suggested that the victim could be shot and the officers could plant a pellet gun on his body.

From the perspective described by John Holmes, the victim in that case had the right to resist the beating, but not the illegal arrest. Perhaps , for the benefit of those of us without law degrees or exalted government titles, Holmes could explain how one could do the former without doing the latter.

The six police officers who invaded Pedro’s home and shot him to death without legal cause or warrant were fired from the police force. Only one of them faced a criminal charge of simple trespassing, and he was acquitted. That outcome was predictable, given Holmes’s consummate indifference regarding Pedro’s murder: A few weeks after the incident, the District Attorney referred the matter to a Grand Jury without preferring criminal charges against any of the officers.

An increasingly common sight: A woman is needlessly tasered by an abusive cop.

This squalid episode took place ten years ago, beginning with the lethal raid on July 12, 1998. Since that time, misdirected paramilitary police raids on American homes have become nearly routine, and casual, vulgar abuse of citizens by police has become commonplace.

We’ve reached a point at which police can often kill innocent citizens with impunity – yet the slightest physical contact from a citizen can be prosecuted as “battery on an officer,” and a citizen wielding a flyswatter – yes, a flyswatter -- during a police raid can be accused of planning a “felonious assault” on a policeman.

That’s not to say, of course, that such outrages were rare ten, or even twenty, years ago. But now they are more plentiful – and, thanks in no small part to the growing influence of cyber-samizdat, such as YouTube, much more visible. Acts of corrupt police abuse that once could be dismissed as figments of a troubled imagination, or the invention of vindictive criminals, are now routinely exposed to worldwide public scrutiny, and the fuel of growing public outrage.

Hands-on lessons in submission: A demented police officer in Hot Springs, Arkansas brutalizes a teenager for the supposed crime of public skateboarding. The same heroic officer was captured on video strangling two of the teenager's friends, including a 13-year-old girl (below).

Outrage of this kind is healthy and necessary, but it can curdle into impotent, resentful frustration if it’s not put to constructive use.

I have a suggestion: We should work to re-instate statutory protection of the right to resist unlawful arrest in the 38 states that presently do not recognize that ancient and indispensable Common Law right.

Unless a police officer is dutifully enforcing a legitimate warrant, or has unassailable probable cause to believe that an individual has committed a felony, he has no business attempting to arrest anybody. That was the understanding that prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon world, in one form or another, from 1215 until the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, at least here in the United States.

Fifty years ago, the statutes of nearly every state recognized the right to resist unlawful arrest. Today, it is recognized only Michigan, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Mississippi.* The question has been examined, and upheld in remarkably candid terms by courts in Mississippi. This is ironic, given that Mississippi is the same state where Cory Maye was convicted of first degree murder for killing a police officer who invaded Maye’s home in a late-night paramilitary raid at the wrong address.

A 1963 Mississippi Supreme Court decision (King v. State) favorably cited a legal scholar’s conclusion that “the right of personal liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, and any unlawful interference may be resisted. Every person has a right to resist an unlawful arrest; and, in preventing such illegal restraint of his liberty, he may use such force as may be necessary.”

Not quite four decades earlier, a judge presiding over the criminal trial of a police officer accused of murdering a man who resisted arrest underscored the fact that a citizen has the right to kill a police officer attempting to arrest him without probable cause or a valid warrant. The judge instructed the jury that if the officer had been attempting an illegal arrest, the defendant was permitted to employ “whatever force was necessary to avoid the arrest, even to the extent of taking the life of [the] defendant.”

In other words: A police officer who kills a civilian in the course of an unlawful arrest is a murderer; a citizen who kills a police officer when threatened with lethal violence in the course of an unlawful arrest is exercising his innate right to self-defense.

The jury agreed with that view, convicting the officer of murder. The verdict was overturned on appeal because the jury hadn’t been permitted to consider the officer’s argument that he acted in self-defense.

The Mississippi Supreme Court conceded that an officer “attempting to make an unlawful arrest is not cut off from the right of self-defense … he is only the aggressor in the difficulty and is in no worse attitude than any other aggressor.”

There is one significant problem with that view: Armed aggressors have no right to self-defense. An armed criminal has no right to shoot back if his victims offer armed resistance. That principle should apply to aggressors of any variety – including police who stage illegal and unnecessary home invasions, or who commit violent acts in the course of unlawful arrests.

Once again, all of this was widely understood until just a few decades ago. Today, not only is that right all but unheard of, it is increasingly common for people to be arrested for resisting arrest.

In an essay for the California Criminal Law Review, Craig Hemmens notes that the first “scholarly criticism of the right to resist an unlawful arrest” was published in an anonymous law review note entitled “Resistance to Illegal Arrest.” Taking notice of the well-developed legal doctrine that a citizen “may use all the force reasonably necessary to resist the illegal arrest,” the anonymous author protested that “the law seems to be too willing to glorify the right to personal liberty,” and argued that it was time to abandon this common law principle.

In 1942, when cultural and legal institutions were being restructured to accommodate FDR’s welfare/warfare state, Harvard law professor Sam Bass Warner resumed the assault in a law review article examining “The Uniform Arrest Act,” a model statute produced by a committee appointed by the Interstate Commission on Crime.

The Uniform Arrest Act was designed to standardize practices involving the detention, questioning, and arrest of criminal suspects. Section Five of the Act dealt with the matter of resisting illegal arrest: “If a person has reasonable ground to believe that he is being arrested by a peace officer, it is his duty to refrain from using force or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is a legal basis for the arrest.”

Elucidating that provision, Professor Warner insisted that the arsenal of contemporary police (circa World War II) had rendered the common law right to resist unlawful arrest obsolete: “Constables and watchmen [in previous eras] were armed only with staves and swords, and the person to be apprehended might successfully hold them off with his own weapons and thus escape. Today, every peace officer is armed with a pistol and has orders not to desist from making an arrest though there is forceful resistance. Accordingly, successful resistance is usually possible only by shooting the officer to prevent him from shooting first.”

“Though at one time the innocent may have been as likely to resist illegal arrest as the guilty, this is no longer true,” pontificated Professor Warner, without bothering to explain the reasons for his oracular certainty. “An innocent man will not kill to avoid a few hours, or at the most several days, in jail. Besides, he will ordinarily have no gun, and therefore will be unable to resist successfully. Thus the right to resist illegal arrest by a peace officer is a right that can be exercised effectively only by the gun-toting hoodlum or gangster.”

Digested to its essentials, Warner’s argument for submission to illegal arrest is a variation of the rapist’s demand of his victim: You’re too weak to resist, and fighting will only get you seriously hurt or killed, so just submit and make it easier for everyone. And in a turn of phrase appropriate to a prosecutor serving a Stalinist or fascist state, Warner concluded that only “enemies of society” would resist arrest under any circumstances.

In 1961, notes Hemmens in his survey for the California Criminal Law Review, the American Law Institute published a Model Penal Code that contained a section denying the right to resist illegal arrest. This had a seminal influence on both case law and legislative action nation-wide: By 1998, the legislatures or courts of more than three-quarters of the states had effectively suppressed that right.

A legitimate individual right can be denied, ignored, or violated, but it cannot be abolished through human action. In recent years, notwithstanding the growth of the Homeland Security State and the ever-escalating aggression of law enforcement agencies, individuals living in the dozen holdout states have successfully defended that right in court:

*Ten years ago, in the decision Victoria Price Brown v. Commonwealth of Virginia, that state’s Court of Appeals vindicated the claim that a woman assaulted and arrested by police in a case of mistaken identity “had the right to resist upon self-defense principles. The Commonwealth cannot expunge that right even by showing the officers acted in `good faith.’”

The civilian in that case, after explaining that the police had confused her with another woman named on their warrant, put up what resistance she could before being pepper-sprayed, swarmed, handcuffed, and charged with obstructing justice by resisting arrest. The court upheld her claim that under Virginia law, “a person has the absolute right to resist an illegal arrest by whatever force is necessary and reasonable under the circumstances.”

“It has long been held in Virginia that where an officer attempts an unlawful arrest, the officer is an aggressor which gives the arrestee the right to use self-defense to resist so long as the force used is reasonable,” observed the court.

*In its 1994 decision State v. Stowe, the Louisiana Supreme Court stated: “The right of personal liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, and any unlawful interference with it may be resisted. Every person has the right to resist an unlawful arrest, and in preventing such illegal restraint on his liberty, he may use such force as necessary.”

That same court, in the June 2003 case State of Louisiana v. Jeremy Sims, acknowledged that “under the long-standing Louisiana rule, [the] defendant had the right to resist an unlawful arrest,” even though it upheld his arrest and conviction for “battery on a police officer” because he had resisted a “Terry stop” – a brief investigative detention for the purpose of frisking him for weapons.

*Last March, despite the fact that Florida is among the states that do not recognize the right to resist unlawful arrest, Circuit Court Judge John DeFuria ruled that a homeowner named John Coffin was within his legal rights to counter-attack two police officers who invaded his home without a warrant and assaulted his wife.

This was the second time Coffin or his family had come under criminal assault by police: He had been pepper-sprayed and repeatedly clubbed by a Deputy Sheriff after the officer mis-read the license tag on Coffin's automobile. So when he heard his wife scream, and saw her on the floor of the garage being trussed up by two officers who had no legal right to be on his property, the 55-year-old heart patient did what any honest and decent citizen should do in such circumstances: He beat the hell out of the intruders, at one point seizing a Taser pistol from one and using it to pistol-whip the other.

“Law enforcement was responsible for the chain of events here,” observed Judge De Furia. The officers “broke the law” by invading the garage without warrant or probable cause; they were armed aggressors, no better in principle than private thugs conducting a home invasion robbery.

“What took place in the house was unfortunate,” concluded De Furia, “but Mr. Coffin ... had a right to resist.” (Emphasis added.)

Congratulations -- You've been Protected and Served! A man accused of public intoxication in New Orleans lies handcuffed in a puddle of his own blood after being beaten by police.

Current dogma holds that citizens have a duty to defer to any order issued by an armed individual dressed in a State-issued costume. This includes permitting ourselves to be restrained, arrested, and incarcerated without just cause, on the assumption that the same State that stole our liberty will agree not to take any more of it when the matter is examined in court.

Without a right to resist, we have a duty to submit. And submission to unlawful police violence too frequently results in injury, sexual assault, and death.

Yes, resisting lawless state-authorized violence is dangerous, and can be counterproductive. Citizens confronting the prospect of an illegal arrest should be governed by the Just War test of proportionality -- that is, would forceful resistance result in more harm than submission? And the same consideration should define the actions of third parties thinking of intervening to prevent an abuse of police authority.

This assumes, of course, that the actors in question reside in a state where the right to resist is protected by law. Where this is not the case, an effort should be made to restore legal protection for that right, and to educate policy makers, law enforcement officers, and the public about the legitimacy of forceful resistance to unlawful arrest.

Can an effort of this kind succeed? It's difficult to say if success is measured in purely legislative terms. To the extent that a campaign of this sort compels the public to address the ever-escalating threat of lawless police violence, and to re-acquaint itself with a fundamental and long-neglected right, it can't fail.

As if to illustrate my point...


A swaggering, officious dink in a policeman's uniform arrived at a traffic accident on a Missouri interstate in 2003. Firefighters from a local emergency rescue team were already on-scene, tending to the severely injured victim. On the orders of their superiors, the firemen had used one of their vehicles to obstruct a lane in order to protect themselves and the accident victim.

Ah, but the badge-toting dink would have none of it. Deploying his supposed authority, he ordered the firemen to move the vehicle, and snarled that "someone is going to get arrested" if this didn't happen. The firemen -- more interested in saving a life than accommodating some retromingent T.J. Hooker wannabe -- quite sensibly ignored the guy.

So he waddled over and handcuffed fire Captain David Wilson. All the while the accident victim, Joe Mack, was taking in this conversation, wondering if he was suffering from hallucinations.

This is a good example of a situation in which resisting an illegal arrest is not only justified, but imperative. Were it not for the misplaced reverence for the costume Greeves was wearing, the firemen on-site could very easily have interposed on behalf of their on-site commander while calling their superiors to work out the policy questions away from the scene of the accident. Besides, in a situation of this sort it is the "principal participants" -- the emergency rescue personnel, not the police -- who are in charge.


When Greeves put his hand -- no doubt very slippery from a combination of donut grease and flop sweat -- on Wilson, three or four firemen should have intervened and made it clear to the jerk that he wasn't in charge. As it happens, Greeves has been ordered to pay $18,000 in compensation to Wilson for his illegal arrest -- so he, too, would have been better off now if he had been made to step off back in 2003.

Liberty In Eclipse is now available at The Right Source!

_____

*New Jersey’s proposed self-defense law, which would codify the principle that those under an aggressive attack have no duty to retreat, has an ambiguous passage dealing with this question. Those seeking to “resist an arrest … being made by a peace officer in the performance of his duties, although the arrest is unlawful,” would not be protected by the self-defense law “unless the peace officer employs unlawful force to effect such arrest….” But any force employed by a police officer to carry out an unlawful arrest would be itself unlawful.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Theater of the Absurd (Updated)

It's difficult to believe that viewing the epic cinematic debacle Troy could be the high point of an evening, but such was the case for two Utah couples on the evening of May 23, 2004.

Harold Curtis and his wife Leslie settled into their seats at a Provo movie theater after paying the extortionate admission price and absorbing a second hit at the concession counter. When the lights went down, they were unsettled to hear a persistent stream of chatter, much of it in Spanish, coming from the row behind them.

This is, of course, the creature that haunts every movie-goer's imagination: The Thing That Won't Shut Up. Most movie patrons have had at least one outing ruined by the incessant, deafening wind blowing out of some nit-wit's gaping skull-cave. As the previews continued, Harold politely but insistently asked the couple sitting behind them – Vanessa Arnold and her boyfriend, Lorenzo Castillo – to quiet down.

Arnold later said that she was translating the previews into Spanish for Castillo, and that the two of them were quiet during the feature presentation. This much was confirmed by an eyewitness. Arnold also claims that Curtis glared at them several times, used a racial slur, and called her a “bitch.”

Following the movie, Curtis reportedly stood up and glared at the couple, and then followed them into the lobby, demanding that they reimburse him and his wife the price of a ticket.

This was a reasonable request made to the wrong party and at the wrong time. If Arnold and Castillo's conduct had robbed Curtis and his wife of their movie experience, Curtis should have complained to the theater management while the film was in progress. The management most likely would have refunded the ticket price or offered the couple a pass to another showing. And they would probably have evicted Arnold and Castillo from the theater, calling the police to do so if necessary.

(And, come to think of it, this was a perfect opportunity to score tickets to a better film -- and just about anything would have been an improvement over Troy.)

Ah, but therein lies the rub: Harold Curtis is a Utah County Deputy Sheriff, and to him this unfortunate episode represented a chance to assert his authoritah.

After Castillo refused to cough up the price of two movie tickets, Curtis flashed his badge and placed him under arrest. Curtis later claimed that this was necessary because Castillo had approached him with clenched fists. According to Arnold's account of the incident, it was Curtis who provoked the confrontation by approaching Castillo and sneering, “Do you want to play?” Betty Jo Searle, a witness who was 15 at the time of the incident, has also testified that Curtis acted as the aggressor.

Curtis insists that he arrested Castillo in order to “defuse” the situation – as if simply stepping off and taking his complaint to the theater management wasn't an option. After Searle and her date asked Curtis what was going on, he showed them his badge and “said we needed to walk away,” the young lady recalled.

Actually, this was a case in which butting in was eminently justifiable and desperately needed.

As Curtis moved to place Castillo under arrest, Arnold lost her composure, reportedly yelling “Don't do this! No, no no – stop it” and throwing herself on him. Arnold is 5'3 and 110 pounds. Curtis is approximately the size of one of the lesser Kuiper Belt Objects, although nowhere near as cool. (Like most members of the not-so-Thin Blue Line, Curtis is obviously not a slave to his conditioning program.) Yet both Curtis and his wife later professed to have been greatly alarmed by this “assault.”

Arnold, predictably, got the worst of it: She was shrugged off and ended up at the bottom of some stairs. She says Curtis threw her there; Searle says Curtis “just dropped her” down the stairs. Leslie Curtis later testified in court that Arnold jumped on her husband's back, wrapping her legs around his waist and putting her hands around his throat.

On cross-examination, it was pointed out that Mrs. Curtis's testimony different significantly from her account in the original police report, which stated only that Arnold had grabbed her husband at the waist. Apparently she had exercised a congressional privilege by “revising and extending” her testimony to make the supposed assault on her husband more dramatic, albeit thoroughly implausible. (For one thing, Curtis has no visible neck, which would make it difficult for a woman Arnold's size to strangle him.)

Leslie Curtis's version of events was largely supported by the testimony of Cheri Wolley, who told the court she had seen “a man and two Hispanics” arguing in the lobby, and that she had seen the Hispanic male “take a swing at the white man.” She didn't volunteer that she had served on the police force for several years, a fact she acknowledged only when it was pried out of her by Arnold's attorney. That fact, of course, doesn't impeach her testimony. The fact that she walked out of court holding hands with Mrs. Curtis, however, does – or at least it appeared to in the eyes of the jurors who noticed that detail.

It's curious as well that Curtis didn't remember Castillo taking a swing at him. The fact that Curtis released Castillo shortly after the arrest, rather than booking him on assault charges, also tends to undermine Wolley's version of events. Castillo later sued Curtis for false arrest, and settled out of court.

Arnold also sued Curtis for using excessive force and sundry violations of her constitutionally protected rights. She claimed significant and lasting injury as a result of her tumble down the stairs. That claim dissolved when the federal jury hearing the case was shown video, taken by a private investigator, of Arnold functioning quite normally despite supposedly debilitating injuries to her head and back.

Stymied by contending narratives that contradicted each other on several key points, the jury took about an hour to determine that the alleged injuries inflicted on Arnold by Curtis didn't “shock the conscience,” and found in favor of the deputy. This appears to be an appropriate end to an entirely contrived lawsuit. But that doesn't mean Curtis is entirely blameless.

Peter Stirba, Curtis's attorney, notes that “Your reputation and the way you serve is a big part of being a police officer.” Curtis went into the case with a troubled reputation, having been sued – unsuccessfully – for alleged abuses committed as a guard at the county jail. However boorish and inexcusable the behavior of Arnold and Castillo, Curtis is, by his own admission, the one who precipitated the altercation, doing so needlessly under the color of his supposed authority.

A ruling issued last August 1 by the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals notes that, according to Curtis's narrative, he told Castillo “he could not leave until the matter [of buying replacement tickets] was settled”; it was then, according to Curtis, that Castillo “clenched his fists, and Mr. Curtis understood him to threaten a fight.”

Well ... no, the last assumption doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Clenching one's fist is a reflexive expression of anger; cocking a fist constitutes a threat. More to the point: Curtis was trying to detain Castillo before identifying himself as a police officer.

Castillo's theater etiquette is badly in need of repair, but how was he supposed to react when a corpulent, officious guy who called his date a “bitch” and used a racial slur (a charge, notes the Tenth Circuit Court's ruling, Curtis effectively conceded) threatens to keep him in the theater to “settle” the dispute?

Clearly, on the basis of Curtis's own account, it was he who instigated whatever scuffle took place, as the eyewitness Betty Jo Searle confirmed. And it was after he had done so that Curtis whipped out the chintzy piece of costume jewelry that he apparently thinks elevates him above the rest of us.

That same poisonous assumption was the basis of the federal jury's ruling in Curtis's favor. As Austen Johnson, Arnold's attorney, points out, Curtis “enjoyed a higher legal burden of proof” because he was trying to arrest Castillo. A mere civilian wouldn't be entitled to such deference. And apparently this is the case despite the fact that Curtis was acting as a civilian when he provoked Castillo.

Of course, even if Curtis had identified himself as a police officer before threatening to detain Castillo in the lobby, the proper response would have been to say, “So what?” An officer who is a party to a dispute of this kind cannot in propriety be the officer who intervenes to settle that dispute.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened in Utah. Back in August 2006, a Kosovar refugee in Salt Lake City was threatened with arrest after a pick-up basketball game at a Gold's Gym got a little rough. One of the players was an off-duty police officer who wanted to arrest the refugee, on the belief that his aggressive low-post game constituted “assault.”

Armed with a shotgun and supported by some of his buddies, the policeman chased the refugee to his car, prevented him from leaving the parking lot, and treated him to several choruses of profane verbal abuse as he dialed 9-11 and waited for other officers to arrive:

““You want to start something [Oedipal epithet deleted]? What you pulled in there is called an assault... You want to start sh*t right now?... Get out here [Oedipal epithet again deleted]. You're f*****g with the wrong people.... You know what I am?... I will put you under arrest! Get out of the car right now. If you don't get out of the car I will place you under arrest for resisting arrest. Get out of the car right now!”

The officer, Marcus Barrett, later pleaded no contest to a disorderly conduct charge, paid a $200 fine, and left the police force. Given that the entire incident began when he attacked the refugee with his fists, Barrett should have been prosecuted for assault and for false imprisonment. But the most serious charges were dropped, most likely because – once again – as an off-duty police officer Barrett was the beneficiary of “a higher legal burden of proof.”

Here's the real outrage:

Despite being described by one member of Utah's Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) board as “an officer completely out of control” who should not be on the streets, Barrett was not permanently cashiered; instead, he and the Utah POST board agreed on a three-year-suspension last June. That means he should be eligible for reinstatement as early as 2010.

Here's where the outrage deepens:

Utah state senator Chris Buttars (who is – need I even specify as much? -- a Republican) has proposed a measure, SB260, that would “classify a record of formal charges or disciplinary actions against a peace officer as a private record, unless the peace officer consents, in writing, to make the record public.”

If that measure is enacted it would mean that next time an off-duty cop in Utah provokes a melee in a theater lobby, or beats up another player in a pick-up b-ball game and chases the guy into the parking lot with a shotgun, the victims wouldn't be able to learn if the incident was part of a larger pattern of abusive behavior.

Oh, should I even bother to mention that Utah County Sheriff James Tracy said that an internal investigation of Curtis's conduct found that his actions “did not violate office policy”?

It's Footloose gone fascist: Bucket-heads from Utah County SWAT teams attack party-goers at an August 2005 dance party.

That's the same Utah County Sheriff Tracey, of course, who dispatched SWAT teams to break up a peaceful dance party a couple of years ago. And this is the same Utah County, of course, where elderly women can be thrown to the ground and arrested for not watering their lawns.

The next time I hear a sheriff or police chief admit that the bullying, corrupt, needlessly provocative, or abusive behavior of an officer does violate department policy ... will be the first.

UPDATE

"Just what the hell is the matter with the police in this country?"

I'm asked that question constantly, and can't adequately answer it despite the fact that I've studied this issue for literally decades -- including for a stretch waaaaaaaay back in my teen years when I seriously considered a career in law enforcement. I can diagnose the issue in political, demographic, and ideological terms; I describe the insidious influence of federal subsidies, regulations, and blackmail (in the form of litigation, consent decrees, and the like); I can sermonize about the unhappy results when unchecked power is combined with the results of Original Sin....

And even then, I still find myself unable even to begin to explain spectacles like this, or to witness them on video without wanting, at the very least, to track down this power-intoxicated punk-a$$ bully and beat the snot out of him:



Officer Rivieri presents an impressive recital of pseudo-tough-guy mannerisms -- from the affected "Command Voice," to the comically theatrical flaring of non-existent lats, to the swagger-waddle (call it a "swaddle") of supposed authority, to the criminal assault on a skinny, terrified kid. I'm forced to agree with him in one respect, though: He's not a man, nor any part thereof.


Nor should we neglect episodes like this one, in which a group of deputy sheriffs dump a quadriplegic on the floor like so much soiled laundry. This incident, by the way, resulted in one of the very few instances in which a police official -- in this case the Chief Deputy, not the Sheriff himself -- initially refused to defend the actions of the officers:






The emerging homeland security state is the subject of my new book, Liberty in Eclipse, which is on sale now.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Makers vs. Takers: A Firebell in the Night?

“The only way I can put it in context,” Gerald Thornton told CNN, “is that my brother went to war tonight with the people that were of the government that was putting torment and strife into his life.”

Gerald's brother Charles “Cookie” Thornton shot seven people at a City Council meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri, murdering five of them before being shot and killed by police. The murder victims included two police officers, two city council members, and the Public Works Director. The wounded include town Mayor Mike Swoboda.

About seven years ago, Charles Thornton, a contractor who ran a small asphalt and demolition business, became engaged in a legal and political struggle with the city government, which he believed was acting out of a “plantation mentality.” During that period, “Cookie”'s business received around 150 tickets for parking commercial vehicles in a residential neighborhood; in the aggregate, the fines amounted to about $30,000.

Thornton apparently believed that his business was being strangled by degrees, and that race might have been a factor (Thornton was black). He became a frequent and unpleasant presence at City Council meetings, heckling the Mayor and councilmen persistently and displaying occasional flashes of creativity.

For instance: After being evicted from one meeting for telling Mayor Swoboda that he displayed “jackass-like qualities” and using various epithets (including “idiot” and stronger pejoratives) referring to Council members, Thornton showed up at a subsequent meeting with a sign-off sheet containing the objectionable terms and asking the Mayor and Council to “Cross a line through the word or words from the Holy Bible and Webster's Dictionary which you believe is not guaranteed by the Constitution.... If you choose not to respond, this will be understood as my right to use freely these words in my presentations.”

Twice arrested for disorderly behavior, Thornton filed a federal lawsuit against the city government, claiming that the City Council was denying him the freedom of speech. That claim – whatever its merits, which appear to be dubious at best – was rejected by federal District Judge Catherine D. Perry in a ruling handed down ten days before Thornton's eruption.

“[Charles] has [dealt with the dispute] as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue,” Gerald told a local television reporter. Franklin McCallie, the principal of the local high school, was a friend of long standing who attended Charles's wedding. After the shooting McCallie insisted that “outside of this, he was just a wonderful and wonderfully loved man in the community. [The dispute] descended into a fight that just couldn't stop.”

Planning Commissioner Edward D. Golterman offered a markedly different view: “It is beyond belief that someone would go shooting people over a zoning dispute.”

Actually, given the misery that frequently – if not constantly – occurs because of the retail-level socialism and social engineering called “planning and zoning,” I'm amazed that this kind of retaliatory violence doesn't happen much more frequently. The key to this story is not the late Mr. Thornton's sense of racial grievance, but the exasperation he apparently experienced as a business owner who saw his livelihood imperiled by city planning officials and their uniformed collection agency.

Significantly, this is the second time in recent months that an aggrieved business owner has erupted in lethal violence at a City Council meeting.

Last October, Ronald “Bo” Ward, owner and operator of a barber shop in Clarksville, Tennessee, shot himself to death during a City Council meeting.

Bo – who took a paternal interest in the soldiers at nearby Fort Campbell, often giving them haircuts for free -- had incurred debts by expanding his shop. He could get a debt consolidation loan on his home if it was re-zoned as a commercial property.

When he put in a request to the City Council in September, Bo explained that if the loan didn't go through, “I lose my home, I lose my shop, I lose everything I got.”

Bo's real problem, of course, is that he was a small businessman, rather than a representative of a large corporation with financial and political clout. Had the latter been the case, the planning and zoning board would have been positively giddy in its enthusiasm to accommodate his every whim, and the city government would have been eager to use its powers of eminent domain on behalf of his corporation.

But Bo, once again, was a small businessman – a well-beloved pillar of the community. In other words, he was the kind of person to whom things were done by the municipal government, rather than the kind for whom things were done. So at the Clarksville City Council meeting last October 4, Bo's request was finally and definitively turned down, no doubt by very polite, well-dressed people who contorted their faces into the appropriate expressions of condescending pity as they sentenced that unassuming man to financial ruin.

Bo had asked to make more profitable use of his own property, only to learn that he didn't really own “his” property. After all, one doesn't need permission of another to use something that belongs to him as he sees fit. Like Charles Thornton, Bo most likely felt that he was little better than a slave on a plantation.

“Y'all have put me under,” Bo said in resignation, pulling out a handgun. “I'm out of here.” He then killed himself. His suicide left the community shocked, and prompted a personal note of condolences from Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schlosser, who commands the 101^st Airborne Division at nearby Ft. Campbell. But there's no sign that Ward's tragic death prompted anyone to think deeply about the entrenched, commonplace injustices committed by planning and zoning bureaucracies in Clarksville and across the country; it was simply filed away under the heading, “I guess it just sucked to be him.”

Similarly, the murder spree by Charles Thornton is already being framed as a sudden and unforeseeable fit of irrational violence by an eccentric and most likely unbalanced individual. It very well may have been that. Or it could be a “firebell in the night” -- a portent of even bigger, uglier things to come.

In its reply to Thornton's lawsuit, Kirkwood's city government – seeking to underscore its benevolent generosity -- wrote that the aggrieved business owner “believes that he can make ... unsubstantiated accusations [against the Mayor, City Council, and other officials] without any repercussion because no one has threatened [him] with any physical harm....”

Whatever may be the truth about Thornton's claims, or however one assesses his relationship to reality, it is manifestly and indisputably untrue that the city government never threatened him with “physical harm.” Every decree, sanction, punishment, summons, policy prescription, and order issued by any government is always coupled with the threat of lethal force – generally tacit, but sometimes overt.

Thornton had been issued $30,000 in fines; he had been arrested, handcuffed, and dragged bodily away from Council meetings. Once again: Those actions, or some part thereof, may have been justified, but they were unambiguously accompanied with threats of lethal force. The police officers who seized Thornton, after all, carried guns.

A very good friend of mine who works closely with county governments has described to me a conversation with the head of a local planning and zoning commission. She pointed out to my friend that the decisions she hands down always result in painful impositions on somebody's rights and property. However, she insisted that “if they [her decisions] don't make people mad, I'm not doing my job.”

It wasn't surprising to me when I learned that officials who do that job almost always receive police escorts to their cars after their public meetings adjourn. After all, if your job description specifically requires that you make innocent, honest, hard-working people angry over the loss of their property, then there is an element of risk in your chosen occupation – and, to be blunt, there should be. Which is why people of that sort should leave government “service” and find a way to make an honest living.

The unfolding economic collapse is already starting to leave city and county governments scrambling for new sources of credit and revenue. I've described before how this will lead to more aggressive and intrusive enforcement of regulations and ordinances. The demands of cash-strapped municipal governments will increasingly put them in direct and potentially deadly conflict with overburdened, financially desperate citizens.

It is at this level that the elemental conflict between those who make a living, and those who take a living, may erupt into actual warfare.

A friendly reminder -- my new book is available!

Dum spiro, pugno!