[118472] in Cypherpunks
IP: Police armies of occupation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Sep 29 08:33:04 1999
Mime-Version: 1.0
Message-Id: <v04210131b417a50df290@[207.244.110.163]>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 07:14:30 -0400
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 21:50:59 -0500
To: Ignition-Point <ignition-point@precision-d.com>
From: Jan <Igniting@ticnet.com>
Subject: IP: Police armies of occupation
Cc: Point Of View <pov@usaradio.com>
Sender: owner-ignition-point@precision-d.com
Reply-To: Jan <Igniting@ticnet.com>
Police armies of occupation
Tue, Sep 28, 1999
http://civilliberty.about.com/library/weekly/aa092799.htm
On August 9, in the downright shitty Los Angeles neighborhood of
Compton, 64-year-old Mario Paz had all his fears of crime turned on
their head. That night, the El Monte Police Department's Special
Emergency Response Team, warrant in hand, shot the locks off Paz's
doors, stormed into his home, and killed him in bed as he lay next to
his wife. The Paz incident found an interesting counterpoint a month
later when LAPD officers from the Rampart Division admitted to
shooting helpless prisoners and planting evidence 11 cops, so far,
have been suspended. One police officer from the unit had already
been sentenced to 14 years in prison for robbing a bank.
Understandably enough, this sparked an uproar and an investigation
that is expected to reveal only more of the same.
It'd be nice to think of the Los Angeles-area incidents as more
West-Coast wackiness, though a tad more pernicious than chardonnay
and feng shui. But these incidents occur against a backdrop of
revelations about the FBI barbecue and turkey shoot at Waco, and the
Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima incidents in the NYPD's continuing war
of attrition against Rotten Apple taxpayers. It's becoming
increasingly clear that sometime during the early 1980s, instead of
expected shipments of course material, police academies across the
United States received an accidental consignment of texts intended
for the Heinrich Himmler Charm School. The result has been what
Amnesty International refers to in its recently released report,
Race, Rights, and Police Brutality, as "patterns of ill-treatment
across the USA, including police beatings, unjustified shootings and
the use of dangerous restraint techniques to subdue suspects."
Well, if only the matter was as simple as the wrong shipment of
textbooks. That'd be pretty easy to fix a nice note to the trucking
company would resolve the issue. Instead, the spread of
not-just-acknowledged excesses, but routine, by-the-book overkill in
American policing is a result of the conscious adoption of new
tactics and philosophy.
The Cato Institute's Diane Cecelia Weber summed up her concerns in
Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police
Departments, saying, "[o]ver the past 20 years Congress has
encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and
training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture
of para-militarism in American law enforcement." She points to the
adoption of automatic weapons, body armor, and army-of occupation
tactics where once police considered themselves part of the community
and patrolled in short sleeves.
Taken together, the Amnesty and Cato reports identify two different,
but complementary problems. Amnesty's Race, Rights, and Police
Brutality focuses on LAPD-style situations. These are incidents
all-too-common of rank illegality among the police officers and
false testimony to cover fellow cops' abuses. The results are the
shooting and framing of a 19-year-old by Los Angeles Police Officer
Rafael Perez, or the arrest and torture in a police station bathroom
of Abner Louima by New York City cops. Investigations of such
incidents have to overcome codes of silence that must send a chill of
nostalgia through whatever's left of the old Sicilian mob.
Cato's Warrior Cops, on the other hand, looks at deliberate choices
that law enforcers have made about their attitudes toward civilians
and suspected law-breakers, and the tactics and tools that they use.
These choices lead directly to Mario Paz, who died when police blew
his doors off their hinges, tossed in grenades, and blazed away at
anything that moved -- all according to the current rule book. The
same choices also led to Amadou Diallo's death in a hail of gunfire
when the unnarmed man was accosted in a doorway by members of New
York's "elite" Street Crimes Unit, who pride themselves on tough
tactics. And, of course, these choices led to a massive raid by
scores of submachine gun armed BATF agents on a religious settlement
in Waco, Texas, to serve a warrant for alleged firearms tax
violations.
The two types of incidents overtly illegal and institutional are
different, but inseparable. Police abuses have existed, of course,
ever since somebody gave the toughest guy in the neighborhood a club
and told him to go thump anybody who acted up. Abuses are relative to
what's allowed. When police departments deliberately set out to
emulate the Waffen SS and treat suspected evil-doers as if they were
subject peoples defying an army of occupation, would-be thugs have
that much more official sanction for their innate sadism.
Hell, if shooting your way into private homes in the middle of the
night is part of the job, where does the job end and pure abuse
begin? And whether it's a matter of official tactics or freelance
brutality, the people who suffer the most are the ones with the least
recourse for remedy; that means that racial and religious minorities
and the poor bear the brunt.
Amnesty suggests a comprehensive list of approaches for dealing with
police brutality, starting with, "[s]tate, federal and local
authorities should ensure that abuses including torture, brutality
and other excessive force by police officers will not be tolerated;
that officers will be held accountable for their actions; and that
those responsible for abuses will be brought to justice," and
concluding with "[s]tate, local and federal authorities should
establish effective, independent oversight bodies for their
respective police agencies, with powers to investigate and review
complaints against the police as well as broader policy issues and
patterns of concern, and to issue detailed public reports." Most, but
not all, of the fifteen recommendations treat police brutality as
unsanctioned conduct that can and should be reined in to existing
standards.
Cato takes tha matter a step further, suggesting that the existing
limits themselves be reined in:
Congress should recognize that federal policies have contributed to
the culture of paramilitarism that currently per-vades many local
police departments. Federal lawmakers should discourage
paramilitarism by restoring the traditional American principle of
civil-military separation embodied in the Posse Comitatus Act. The
Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act created a
dangerous loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act. That loophole should
be closed immediately. Congress should also abolish all
military-civilian law enforcement joint task forces and see to it
that all military hardware loaned, given, or sold to law enforcement
agencies is destroyed or returned. Armored personnel carriers and
machine guns, should not be a part of everyday law enforcement in a
free society.
Since the problems that Amnesty and Cato have identified go hand in
hand, it makes sense that so do the solutions. Once official police
tactics and conduct have been returned to the matter of actual
policing and not to training troops for the next brushfire war, the
police ranks can be monitored for overstepping and criminality.
Oversight boards and human rights investigations might have a prayer
of working once they can hold the boys in blue to something that
resembles legitimate civilian police work.
Law enforcement in the United States has become frightening. That
people are dying at the hands of rogue cops is bad enough. That
innocent people are being gunned down by cops who are going by the
rule book suggests that change is due now. Otherwise, if the cops
continue to play at being an army of occupation, they should expect
the subjects to play their role in return. Vive la resistance.
So you think Im full of it, eh? Then go to the source:
Race, Rights, and Police Brutality Amnesty International
Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in American Police
Departments Cato Institute
Police corruption roils Los Angeles Detroit Free Press
FBI Probes Fatal Drug Raid in California Washington Post
Critics call for inquiry of aircraft role in Davidian raid Forth
Worth Star-Telegram
New Yorks not-so finest Civil Liberties
Giuliani Time Civil Liberties
Why the police are hard to police Christian Science Monitor
-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
From the Notebook:
Support Your Local Sheriff
Rural sheriffs can have an undeservedly bad reputation. Often, they
have strong roots in the community and no special interest in busting
more long-time neighbors' heads than necessary. They can act as a
discretionary buffer between folks just enjoying life, and
politicians with a passel of silly new laws to be enforced. And then
there's Lee County, Florida, Sheriff John McDougall, and his
Web-based list of folks he just doesn't like.
On his official, taxpayer-supported Web site, Sheriff McDougall has
posted an open letter denouncing (among other people), "The Gay and
Lesbian coalitions, rabid feminist groups, United Nations one-world
government radicals, and the American Civil Liberties Union."
Now, the (certainly) upstanding fellow is entitled to his opinions,
but his enthusiasm in using public resources to express himself might
just bring pause to any feminist, lesbian, ACLU members who might
have need of the forces of the law in Lee County. After all, if those
are the sheriff's public views, what's the fellow like in gulp
private?
Still, though, we can be sure that UN one-worlder house-breakers and
car thieves are getting no special breaks in McDougall's bailiwick.
© 1999 About.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 1999 About.com, Inc. "MiningCo.com" and "About.com" are
trademarks of About.com, Inc.,
a publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ under the symbol "BOUT."
For more information on About.com, visit Our Story, Be a Guide, Be an
Advertiser, or Investor Relations.
For rules of use, read our User Agreement; for privacy concerns, read
our Privacy Policy.
Having a Problem? Report it here.
**********************************************
To subscribe or unsubscribe, email:
majordomo@precision-d.com
with the message:
(un)subscribe ignition-point email@address
**********************************************
<www.telepath.com/believer>
**********************************************
--- end forwarded text
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
