Last month I described one example
of police insanity and constitutional travesty that still seems to have
stayed in Vegas for all the the uproar it failed to produce. Perhaps
it's a valid example about how America no longer cares about the core
issues of our war of Independence. Perhaps it's an indication of how we
always emulate our enemies, but there are so many examples that get
little notice while we assiduously obsess about what we're directed to
obsess about.
I'm talking about quasi-military
invasions of private homes with battering rams, obscenity shrieking SWAT
team members abusing citizens at gun point and often for no cause and
with no warrant. It's a rare week that I don't hear of such a thing and
I'm convinced that most go unremarked upon at the national level.
Sometimes people die. One never hears of consequences or even apologies.
I'm talking about the recent commando raid
on a small organic farm near Arlington Texas, ostensibly for the
purpose of our disastrous War on Drugs, but which turned out to be a war
on organic tomatoes. Is the threat of a couple of hippies growing
vegetables on a seedy little farm sufficient to warrant holding them at gunpoint and
not showing a warrant until hours after the 10 hour ransacking by
police WITH THEIR BADGE NUMBERS CONCEALED of their property began?
Apparently all they had was a complaint from a neighbor who thought the
upkeep on the farm was lax. Of course nothing illegal was found and the
victims, for such they are, didn't suffer any more than humiliation and half a day of terror in which police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers,"
The
use of SWAT teams using machine guns, armored vehicles, battering rams
and dogs to serve warrants is growing and one might argue that the
largest perpetrators of domestic terrorism are in uniform. Can anyone
explain to me why regulating oil drilling, explosive fertilizer storage
and food sanitation are an unwarranted abridgement of liberty, in the
minds of Conservatives, but armed assaults on peaceful unarmed citizens
by unidentified men in black with real assault weapons is permissible in the name of safety?
Terror-matos.
ReplyDeleteIt's simple: corporations are not safe from organic farmers who cut into their bottom line.
ReplyDeleteI think it was instigated by neighbors who found the farm to be unsightly. The forces of bourgeois conformity and propriety are no less powerful and jealous.
ReplyDeleteHere in Florida people have had their houses seized and foreclosed for not taking the garbage cans in soon enough or for flying too large a flag.
I’ve been hiding within the safety of my house – too afraid to show my face and arms (all 8 of them) in fear and trembling. What troubled me about this story, A shot in the Dark, which you wrote about earlier, was the response of the police chief who insisted that his force of armed brigands had followed "proper procedure" - always an excuse for a coverup.
ReplyDeleteThere is “no reasonable doubt” when official and officious thugs confront you in the middle of the night. One wrong twitch of the eyes, one wrong move, one misplaced remark, you get blasted away.
The scope of the problem is discussed here, Radley Balko: Once a town gets a SWAT team you want to use it:
“The rise of SWAT teams nationwide, the number of annual SWAT deployments in the U.S., has gone from a few hundred in the ’70s, to 30,000 per year in the early ’80s, to 50,000 in 2005.”
Meanwhile, citizens are crunched in the politics of crime as Democrats want to spend money on police, and Republicans want to appear tough and unyielding. As a consequence, all standards of legal search and seizure, presumptions of innocence, and due process are tossed aside.
"Jawohl, richtige Verfahren" -- proper procedure, said the Obersturmbanfuehrer to the Gauleiter. "alles in ordnung."
ReplyDeleteI can understand that the cop has a moment of terror and only a microsecond to react to someone who he thinks is about to pull a weapon. Same with soldiers with enemies disguised as civilians -- same with neighborhood watch vigilantes, but I've seen too many arrests that seem more like street theater, where the cops seem eager to start screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs at sometimes confused and usually terrified people. Do they really have the right to call you an *sshole or motherf*cker just for getting into your car in your own driveway? It's presumption of guilt.
But the idea of illegal search and seizure went out the window long ago - New York's "stop and frisk" and our essential repeal of the 4th amendment within 100 miles of the border - where more than half of us live. The public is so damned afraid of crime and criminals and minorities and guns they'll put up with tyranny in the name of safety.
The politics of fear has done this to us and no matter who is doing it, I'm against it.