These are the same guys that enforce every other “law” – including your precious tax laws, health care laws, environmental laws, and the like. Be sure to watch the video.
Police and government brutality on the streets, in prisons, and god-knows where else is the civil rights issue of our time. Yet it receives scant attention – maybe it’s because all we do is parade them around like they are heroes deserving of more respect than every other American. What is most sad and shocking is that there seem to have been dozens of onlookers including the filmers, who did not do a thing to intervene. And why would they, they would likely have been tasered and beaten themselves. Something is very, very, very wrong. Keep that in mind as you all bicker about the debt limit.
The cops simply murdered him. They can, and do, get away with this because the general population has been so indoctrinated with fear of their fellow man that they believe civilization is impossible without state-sponsored “law enforcement” and that the inevitable abuses are part of the deal. If there was a scintilla of integrity in the Fullerton, CA police department, the remaining force would refuse to report for work until these four murderers were arrested and indicted. But that’s not the way it works. Even if there should be cops that are professionals in the manner that we expect them to be, they don’t publicly denounce the monsters among them. But they do drive thousands of miles across country to attend the funerals of cops that they didn’t know. We’re talking about not a profession but a fraternity of evil.
Surely, you donate to the police when they call your house, right?
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/126494938.html
Power corrupts. Police candidates are investigated and examined. The application typically runs 40 pages. Psychological tests cull out those who are unfit. Yet, these tragedies are distressingly common, just as corruption runs through departments – in the case of New Orleans, repeatedly over decades; in NYC periodically for 150 years.
We know that women have fewer problems on patrol than men. We know that education correlates indirectly with use of force: officers with associate and bachelor degrees rely on force (especially deadly force) less often. Thus, the ideal police officer is a college-educated woman.
The structuralist criticism is that the paramilitary model of policing (sergeants, lieutenants; uniforms) makes turns the community into an occupied population; perpetrators become insurgents. Moreover, the police actually do not follow a consistent “incident response” model, but rather, see “incidents” as isolated events. Thus, the model fails when it is most needed. In this case from Fullerton, as in similar atrocities carried out by soldiers in war, the problem was lack of command and control: no one was in charge; the officers were all equals.
It still remains, though, that while Michigan has no capital punishment, the police are empowered to kill. There is no easy way to argue around that. Ayn Rand was woefully shallow on the problem and she was way ahead of everyone else. It is also true that private guards are far less likely to use force (and deadly force), but, then, themselves are victimized by aggressors who have no compunctions. If the government is debarred from deadly force, then rule of law evaporates into Hobbes’s war of all against all. It’s a tough problem and horrors such as this are in the solution set, perhaps of necessity. Charles Perrow calls them “normal accidents.”