Police And Thieves

Many years ago I worked in a place which was used as a sort of vocational training segment for criminal justice students at the local college. People who were on their way to becoming law enforcement officers, or LEO's. Some time later when some of them had become police officers, I had them as friends on facebook. I kept seeing these memorial banners for police officers who had been killed in action. I had the bad taste to ask how many people the cops killed every year. This led to some unfriendings after bitter words and name-calling. This was years before the Black Lives Matter movement, before anyone had done any research and found out the true scope of the problem.

I decided to take it a little further and do my own research. I found, as did the journalists who researched it later, that law enforcement in the US is not obligated to release those numbers. What numbers they do release are incomplete and skewed. Everybody the police killed was listed as a suspect they were chasing. So no good data to be had from the local, state or federal level. I decided to search Google for local news reports of someone being killed by the police. It was the best I could do, but according to that it was something like 600-800 people a year. Another 100,000 people are treated for nonfatal injuries inflicted by law enforcement officers. In any other country, that would be unthinkable. In the Netherlands they have to do a lot of paperwork if they so much as unholster their gun. Most of the cops don't even have a weapon. If they killed that many people a year, the public would be calling for an investigation and a housecleaning. Not in America. In America the police are accountable to nobody.

So right about the time that people started asking questions about how many people the police kill in America, a lot of people happen to have smartphones with video recorders. The cops hated this. They also hate the body-cams they're made to wear nowadays to keep them honest. Municipalities in the US will go to great lengths to confiscate footage of officers doing bad things or to avoid releasing body-cam footage so as to avoid having to pay a settlement for police brutality or wrongful death.

Around the same time, the police were also becoming militarized. They gave preference in hiring to veterans and white supremacists. The government was giving them used military surplus like body armor and paramilitary gear and armored humvees. Of course with all of those military toys, they couldn't have them without being allowed to use them, so they made up excuses any time they could to break it all out and do a SWAT raid on a pensioner who was late paying a fine. Another feature of this was that when they broke down the door they'd often shoot the dog. No matter what, they always shot the dog. Sometimes they'd do it in front of the children. Sometimes they'd shoot the panicked homeowner in front of their kids or their wife. Sometimes they'd be at the wrong house.

Then we come to civil forfeiture. This was a policy saying that the police could confiscate anything they suspected to be connected with a crime. Sometimes they'd pull someone over and find that they were carrying a lot of cash. Automatically they would say that they had found drugs and the cash was connected with that. The cash would disappear, and if the person they'd taken it from was acquitted and released and tried to get it back, they'd get a lot of police harassment. They didn't get it back. One police department used civil forfeiture money to buy themselves a margarita machine.

They were also out there raping people. One cop was carefully selecting his victims from the most marginalized in society, people who had no credibility. In other words, nobody would believe them if they filed charges against him. It was their word against a cop's, and besides, who's going to believe a junkie? He was far from the only cop taking advantage of his job to sexually assault people. There's more than one serial killer in the mix too.

There's also the matter of 9-11 and the War on Drugs. In America since the WTC attacks, the reaction was to tighten up on security in the name of fighting terrorism. It's how we got the TSA in airports. It's also how we got a band of all territory within 100 miles of a US border in which constitutional rights are suspended and the fourth amendment search and seizure protections are null and void. With the War on Drugs, there were special "drug free zones" which were supposed to provide for higher fines for being caught with drugs within a certain distance of a school. Except that this was expanded to basically cover entire cities so that anyone caught with drugs was automatically subject to the highest penalty. We got used to having drug sniffer dogs walked through the locker area in school. We got used to metal detectors and a continuous police presence in schools. We're conditioned to accept this authoritarianism as normal from a young age.

This is why Americans are so nervous around cops. They spook easily and their pride is easily offended. You do what they say because you're always aware of the gun at their belt. With the amount that they rape, murder, steal and beat people up, you can never be too careful. They're more of a proven danger to us than the criminals they're supposed to be protecting us from. To us it's best to just avoid attracting their attention. Any interaction with them carries the risk of getting shot, after all. All of this and more are the reasons why we don't trust them. Anything less than instant submission could lead to escalation. And the police are convinced that there's a war against them, hence the military hardware.