Support Your Local Slave Patrol

Phyllis Bear, a convenience store clerk from Arizona, called the police after a customer threatened her. The disgruntled patron, seeking to purchase a money order, handed Bear several bills that were rejected by the store’s automated safe. Suspecting that the cash was counterfeit, Bear told him to come back later to speak with a manager.

The man had left by the time the cops arrived, and Bear was swamped at the register. Offended that she was serving paying customers rather than rendering proper deference to an emissary of the State, one of the officers arrested Bear for “obstructing government operations,” handcuffed her, and stuffed her in the back of his cruiser.

A few minutes later, while the officer was on the radio reporting the abduction, his small-boned captive took the opportunity to extract one of her hands from the cuffs, reach through the window, and start opening the back door from the outside. The infuriated captor yanked the door open and demanded that the victim extend her hands to be re-shackled. When Bear refused to comply, the officer reached into the back seat and ripped her from the vehicle, causing her to lose her balance and stumble into the second officer.

Bear, who had called the police in the tragically mistaken belief that they would help her, was charged with three felonies: “obstruction” – refusal to stiff-arm customers in order to attend to an impatient cop; “escape” – daring to pull her hand out of the shackles that had been placed upon her without lawful cause; and “aggravated assault” – impermissible contact with the sanctified personage of a police officer as a result of being violently dragged out of the car by the “victim’s” comrade.

The first two charges were quickly dropped. During a bench trial, the prosecution admitted that the arrest was illegal. Yet the judge ruled that Bear – who had no prior criminal history -- was guilty of “escape” and imposed one year of unsupervised probation. That conviction was upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals, which ruled that although the arrest was unwarranted and illegal, Bear had engaged in an illegal act of “self-help” by refusing to submit to abduction with appropriate meekness.

Decades ago, when Arizona was a more civilized place, the state “followed the common-law rule that a person may resist an illegal arrest,” the court acknowledged.  But that morally sound and intellectually unassailable policy was a casualty of what the court called “a trend … away from the common-law rule and toward the judicial settlement of such disputes.” Referring to the act of unlawfully seizing another human being and holding that person by force as a “dispute” is a bit like calling assault rape a “lover's quarrel.”

“Permitting an individual to resort to self-help to escape from an illegal arrest, rather than seeking a remedy through the legal system, would invite violence and endanger public safety,” pontificated the court -- carefully ignoring the fact that arrest is a violent injury, and illegal arrest is nothing more than an abduction. “The same public policy that permits a conviction for resisting arrest even if the arrest is unlawful should authorize conviction for escape despite the unlawfulness of the underlying arrest.”

Furthermore, it’s not necessary for a police officer to explain why the arrest was made; according to the court, “only the fact of [an] arrest is a necessary element” for the victim to be charged with “escape.” In an earlier case, the same court ruled that a woman who jerked her arms away from a police officer committed the supposed crime of resisting arrest. Anything other than immediate, unconditional submission to the demands of a costumed enforcer is treated as a criminal offense – even when those demands are not valid as a matter of law.

From that perspective, all citizens are incipient slaves, subject to detention, abduction, and other abuse at the whim of uniformed slave-keepers.

A slave is somebody who cannot say “no” – as in, “No, I can’t talk to you right now because I’m on the clock and there are paying customers ahead of you.” This is because the slave doesn’t exercise self-ownership in any sense in the presence of a slave-keeper.

A slave-keeper is somebody who claims the legal right to take ownership of another person at his discretion, and use physical violence to compel submission.

This is the specific definition of the peculiar institution called “law enforcement,” as demonstrated by the following statement from theannual report of an entirely typical sheriff’s office: “A law enforcement officer’s authority and power to take away a citizen’s constitutional rights is unmatched anywhere in our society.”

The conceit that defines law enforcement is that all claims to self-ownership evaporate in the presence of a police officer. Some people have internalized that message to such an extent that they immediately assume the position of a submissive slave whenever a police officer approaches. Among them is actor and literacy activist LeVar Burton, whose breakthrough role – either ironically or appropriately, I can’t decide which -- was the fictional escaped slave Kunta Kinte.

“This is a practice I engage in every time I’m stopped by law enforcement,” explained Burton during a panel discussion on CNN. “And I taught this to my son who is now 33 as part of my duty as a father…. When I get stopped by the police, I take my hat off and my sunglasses off, I put them on a the passenger’s side, I roll down my window, I take my hands, I stick them outside the window and on the door of the driver’s side because I want that officer to be as relaxed as possible when he approaches that vehicle. And I do that because I live in America.”

Burton describes his ritual of self-abasement as his strategy for physically surviving an encounter with police. In order to avoid arrest it may be necessary to plumb further depths of personal degradation.

Dale Carson, a defense attorney, former cop, and former FBI agent, has written a revealing manual entitled Arrest-Proof Yourself. That book is replete with significant insights into the institutionalized sociopathy called police “work” – and it abounds in even more revealing advice about the kind of self-inflicted humiliation expected of Mundanes once their self-anointed slave masters appear. 

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine, Carson described law enforcement as a “revenue gathering system” in which predatory officers compete to see “who can put the most people in jail.” His most emphatic advice is to avoid attracting the attention of police officers – something that is becoming nearly impossible in our Panopticon society.

In the event that avoiding the police proves to be impossible, Carson offers etiquette tips for Mundanes seeking to avoid an arrest: Make eye contact, but don't smile; don't react when (not if) the privileged thug deliberately provokes you through foul, confrontational language and calculated acts of battery; be accommodating and extravagantly respectful.

If all of these tactics prove unavailing, then Carson recommends that the Mundane surrender what residue of personal dignity remains by crying or, if possible, deploying other bodily emissions. He suggests that you could foul yourself “so that police will consider setting you free in order not to get their cruiser nasty,” urinating in your pants, or, if possible, vomiting.

Remarkably, Carson's tactics for avoiding arrest track very closely with the notorious rape prevention advice provided by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. The college faculty, piously discouraging “violent self-help” (such as carrying and using a firearm), urged women confronting a potential rapist to “Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating” and that “Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacked to leave you alone.”

In similar fashion, Carson’s advice on avoiding arrest assumes a limitless capacity for self-denigration on the part of the Mundane. But it only applies to public encounters with police. It provides no direction for people victimized by lawless police violence in their own homes, something that is becoming commonplace.

Last May 28, 72-year old Fort Worth resident Jerry Waller was shot and killed in his garage by Officer R.A. Hoeppner. 

Displaying the competence for which government law enforcement is legendary, Hoeppner and his partner, Ben Hanlon, had responded to a burglary alarm by going to the wrong address. 

Hearing prowlers on his property, Waller grabbed his gun and went out to investigate. A few minutes later he was dead, shot multiple times by Hoeppner when he refused to disarm himself. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.

In describing the events of that evening, Hoeppner, a neophyte police officer from a multi-generational family of law enforcers, displayed the reflexive perplexity of a freshly-minted slave catcher confronting someone who didn't see himself as another person's property.

“His attitude toward us was very malicious – It, it was not pro-police at all,” recalledHoeppner. Although Waller was on his own property, and the police officers were the intruders, Hoeppner described the victim’s posture as “very aggressive toward us – and I mean like almost … attitudish.” That assessment makes perfect sense once it’s understood that Hoeppner had been indoctrinated to view any non-cooperation as “aggression” because police, in some sense, own the rest of us.

After Hoeppner made the unlawful demand that the alarmed homeowner disarm himself, Waller quite sensibly asked, “Why?” This struck the cop as an act of irrational defiance:

“What person in their right man – mind would ask a peace officer – a, a law enforcement officer `why' when he tells you and gives you verbal commands.... Your law-abiding citizen is not going to tell – going to ask you, why.”

From the cop’s perspective, the expression “law-abiding citizen” is a functional synonym for “Properly obedient slave.” Not only did the uppity Mundane refuse to submit, he actually behaved as if he was the rightful owner of his person and property: “It was almost like he had the attitude of you – you cannot tell me what to do with my gun in my, you know, in my castle.”

Slave-keepers don’t have to ask permission to invade the servants’ quarters, and slaves have no right to protect the sanctity of their person or effects. In his study of 18^th Century slave patrols – the largely unacknowledged ancestors of today’s “professional” police agencies -- historian Philip L. Reichel points out that “patrols had full power and authority to enter any plantation and break open Negro houses or other places where slaves were suspected of keeping arms; to punish runaways or slaves found outside of their masters’ plantations without a pass; [and] to whip any slave who should affront or abuse them in the execution of their duties….”

No-knock midnight raids; gun confiscation; “stop-and-frisk”-style demands for identification that quickly escalate to violence and arrest; summary punishment for “contempt of cop” – all of these practices would be immediately recognizable to 18^th century slaves. They would probably find it incomprehensible that people who consider themselves to be free would allow such practices to continue. 

Video Extra: Austin Slave Patrol In Action

 Blogger Chris Quintero captured the spectacle of Austin police officers detaining, abusing, and abducting a female jogger who had failed to produce ID when the slave-keepers demanded it of her.

 

Obiter Dicta

My sincere thanks to everyone who has donated to Pro Libertate. We could still use some help -- and we are very grateful for your generosity!

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 2014 Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, where I met some remarkably talented and thoughtful people. I was invited to participate in a discussion with the estimable Larken Rose (it was billed as a "debate," but we disagreed about very little) during the Friday evening session. That discussion was video-recorded, and I will let you know when it becomes available. My thanks to Ernest and Donna Hancock and to everyone else who organized that event.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Henry Magee, John Quinn, and the "Right of Resistance"

[The] constitutional security for `the right to keep and bear arms’ implies the right to use them … This is the only remedy suggested by the Constitution, and is necessarily the only remedy that can exist, when the government becomes so corrupt as to afford no peaceable one. The people have a legal right to resort to this remedy at all times, when the government goes beyond, or contrary to, the Constitution. And it is only a matter of discretion with them whether to resort to it at any particular time. –

Lysander Spooner, “The Right of Resistance," from "An Essay on the Trial by Jury" (chapter II).

Henry Magee was sleeping when armed intruders burst into his home at dawn last December 19. Knowing only that he and his family were at mortal risk, Magee grabbed a gun and opened fire, fatally wounding Sgt. Adam Sowders, who was part of a police task force carrying out a “no-knock warrant” in search of drugs.

Magee was arrested and charged with murder. On February 6, agrand jury in Burleson County, Texas declined to indict Magee, accepting his claim that he acted in self-defense because he believed his home was being burglarized. In defiance of recent trends, that grand jury vindicated the hope expressed by Lysander Spooner that such panels would recognize and honor the right of citizens to exercise lethal force in defending themselves against government lawlessness.

Adam Sowders was an irreplaceable human being whose family has been devastated by his death. It is a singular tragedy that Sowders died. It is compounded by the fact that Magee had a moral and legal right to kill him, just as he has the right to use deadly force in dealing with any other armed invader. 

Sowders’s death was not the result of a crime committed by the man who shot him, but rather of the criminal policy he was called upon to enforce.

Henry Magee’s case echoes an earlier one in which a resident of Texas was changed with a felony because he had tried to defend himself against a band of privileged home invaders.

Just after midnight on the morning of August 5, 2006, a SWAT team in McKinley, Texas used a battering ram to breach the front door of JohnQuinn’s home. The pretext for this crime was a warrant authorizing the police to search for narcotics allegedly in the possession of Quinn’s adult son, Brian. Awakened by the tumult, Quinn retrieved his rifle and went to confront the intruders. One of them, Officer Jesus Damian Guerrero, fired several shots in an attempt to murder the home owner.

 

McGee in custody.

The warrant named Brian Quinn, not his father, as the suspect, and it authorized a limited search of Brian's effects. Once Guerrero shot John, the cops had their excuse to search the entire home. Inside a safe they would not have been authorized to search, they found a minuscule amount of cocaine. 

Brian – who had no self-interested reason to say so – claimed that the cocaine was his, that his father had never used drugs, and was trying to help him overcome his drug habit.

Quinn, who suffered a relatively minor wound in his right hand, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault on a police officer. A test in the hospital confirmed that he had no drugs in his system. After waiting five years for a trial,  Quinn was acquitted on the aggravated assault charge. He was later found “guilty” of possessing less than a gram of cocaine (a test conducted during Quinn’s hospitalization found no evidence of drugs in his system) and given two years’ probation and a $500 fine.

The most interesting contrast between the John Quinn case and that of Henry Magee is the near role-reversal between the costumed assailant and the defender: Where a grand jury refused to indict Magee for shooting the police officer who had barged into his home, in Quinn’s case it was the assailant, Officer Guerrero, who was “no-billed” by the grand jury.

Magee and his girlfriend.

The dismissal of the murder charge against Magee suggests that at least some Texas residents recognize that a police officer who breaks down a door and terrifies people in their bed is a common burglar and should be treated as such. This represents modest but welcome progress. 

For his part, Quinn is appealing a Texas Appellate Court ruling that authorizes police to commit paramilitary home invasions anytime they learn that a citizen at a targeted address has the means to defend himself.

As is generally the case when police mount a paramilitary raid, the warrant was issued on the basis of two informants – both of whom had admitted to “activity related to Brian's drug dealing” -- who told the cops that “Brian kept a number of weapons in the house, including an AK-47 rifle.” One of the informants, at the behest of the police, sent a text message to Brian asking to buy Xanax. 

In his affidavit, Detective Christopher Grollnek (a relentless self-promoter who has gone on to carve out a lucrative niche promoting the Regime's war on the American population) claimed that neither informant was offered a deal in exchange for helping to set up Brian. This was almost certainly a lie, given that neither of the informants was prosecuted: One saw his charges dropped before trial, the other was never charged. Quinn appealed his conviction, arguing that the no-knock raid was unjustified, and that the evidence seized from his office safe was the product of an invalid search.

 

Grollnek strikes a pose.

Communications among the officers at the time of the raid proved that they were aware that Brian wasn't at the residence. Thus they had no reason to conduct a raid, let alone one involving assault rifles and a battering ram. Assuming, for the purposes of this discussion, that drug use is a crime of some sort, the police could have waited for Brian to return, taken him into custody, knocked on the door, and conducted their search.

However, according to a genuinely deranged opinion handed down last May by the Texas Fifth District Court of Appeals, a military-style assault was justified because “the circumstances presented a threat of physical violence in this case, based upon the informants' statements that Brian kept a number of guns in the home.... Unannounced entries have been upheld as reasonable when the police had information there were guns on the premises to be searched.”

Officer Safety is the paramount consideration in all public policy, so the appellate court placed particular emphasis on the fact that some of the intrepid heroes who beat down Quinn's door at midnight “testified [that] the presence of an AK-47 particularly concerned the team, because the officers' body armor would not protect them from its shots.” The mere presence of the “exceptionally dangerous AK-47,” the court insisted, “made the no-knock entry reasonable under the existing circumstances.”

Only in a universe in which the rules of logic follow the contours of a Salvador Dali painting would that warrant be considered “reasonable,” if the objective had been to avoid unnecessary violence. 

The purpose of having firearms, as Lysander Spooner pointed out, was to use them in self-defense against “bandits” and “ruffians,” a category that includes anybody who kicks in a door at midnight, armed and prepared to do lethal harm to those who reside inside the home. Staging a police raid of that kind on a home where the residents are known to be armed is a reliable recipe for a shooting, a fact underscored by the tragically necessary death of Adam Sowders, and the near-murder of John Quinn.

Mr. Quinn has filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. A richly documented and tightly argued amicus curiae brief filed on his behalf by the US Justice Foundation, Gun Owners Foundation, and several other public interest groups contends that the ruling by the appellate court in Texas “establishes a per se rule that, every time the police have a valid warrant, they can execute it without knocking, violating the Fourth Amendment at will,” if they discover that a resident has a legally owned firearm.

“If the police are now permitted to justify no-knock raids any time there is a firearm in the residence,” observes the brief, “no American home is safe from a terrifying, middle of the night home invasion.”

That state of affairs would suit the enforcement caste just fine – unless and until more victims respond with the tragic but justified efficiency of Hank Magee. If and when this happens, no rational and honest person should have any doubt as to which party is responsible.

An Update, and an Appeal 

Last September, I reported on a police riot in Idaho Falls that led to the invasion of two homes, acts of aggravated assault on several people (including a pregnant mother and a 79-year-old grandmother), and the filing of spurious charges against Victor and Delosanto Madrigal. 

All of this began when IFPD officers, led by Clark Lund, barged into the backyard of the Madrigal home (rather than knocking on the front door, like civilized people), then needlessly escalated a problem that could have been solved by a simple request. 

After the abduction of Victor and Delosanto, IFPD Chief Mark McBride wrote a libelous op-ed for the Post-Register newspaper in which he retailed unsubstantiated gossip about the family from a conveniently anonymous "source."

Victor and Delosanto, the victims, were charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer. Last Friday (February 7), a jury in Idaho Falls rapidly acquitted Victor of all charges. Delosanto's trial is still pending, and there's reason to hope the prosecutor will simply drop the matter, as he damn well should. 

Thanks to a friend (and Pro Libertate reader) in Idaho Falls, I was able to travel there a couple of weeks after the incident. The story published here was picked up by Joyln Thomas of East Idaho News, who gave it prominent and effective local coverage. Apart from one decent story that prompted McBride's puerile little screed, the Post-Register lost interest in the matter. (I prepared a 450-word op-ed column on the incident that was rejected by the Post-Register's editorial page gatekeeper, who insisted that the case was no longer newsworthy.)  The local TV stations that had recited the dishonest police accounts of that episode were content to defame the victims, and then move on. 

I don't want to exaggerate my role in this, but I do want to impress on you the importance of what I'm doing -- and to share my satisfaction at this small but valuable victory on the part of liberty and decency. 

The state-aligned media rarely, if ever deals honestly with stories of this kind. I suspect that this is one reason why I've never been able to find gainful employment in the "legitimate" media.

As Rabelais -- or was it Voltaire? -- is said to have written in his last will and testament: "I have nothing, I owe much -- the rest I leave to the poor." I have bills coming due, and nothing coming in, and would really appreciate any help I could get. Thank you so much for reading what I publish -- and I will continue to do this for as long as it is financially feasible. God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!