While writing this article, I googled "police brutality," and google delivered 4,100,000 results. If a person googles "police brutality videos," he will discover that there are more videos than could be watched in a lifetime. And these are only those acts of police brutality that are witnessed and caught on camera.
It would take thousands of pages just to compile the information available.
It would take thousands of pages just to compile the information available.
Reports of police brutality are commonplace, but hardly anything is ever done about them. For example, on September 10, AlterNet reported that Houston, Texas, police routinely beat and murder local citizens.
The threat posed to the public by police psychopaths is growing rapidly. Last July 19 the Wall Street Journal reported: "Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment -- from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers -- American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the US scene: the warrior cop -- armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties."
The Wall Street Journal, being an establishment newspaper, has to put it as nicely as possible. The bald fact is that today's cop in body armor with assault weapons, grenades, and tanks is not there to make arrests of suspected criminals. He is there in anticipation of protests to beat down the public for exercising constitutional rights.
To suppress public protests is also the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security Police, a federal para-military police force that is a new development for the United States. No one in their right mind could possibly think that the vast militarized police have been created because of "the terrorist threat." Terrorists are so rare that the FBI has to round up demented people and talk them into a plot so that the "terrorist threat" can be kept alive in the public's mind.
The American public is too brainwashed to be able to defend itself. Consider the fact that cops seldom face any consequence when they murder citizens. We never hear cops called "citizen killer." But if a citizen kills some overbearing cop bully, the media go ballistic: "Cop killer! cop killer!" The screaming doesn't stop until the cop killer is executed.
As long as a brainwashed public continues to accept that cop lives are more precious than their own, citizens will continue to be brutalized and murdered by police psychopaths.
I can remember when the police were different. If there was a fight, the police broke it up. If it was a case of people coming to blows over a dispute, charges were not filed. If it was a clear case of assault, unless it was brutal or done with use of a weapon, the police usually left it up to the victim to file charges.
When I lived in England, the police walked their beats armed only with their billysticks.
When and why did it all go wrong? Among the collection of probable causes are the growth or urban populations, the onslaught of heavy immigration on formerly stable and predictable neighborhoods, the war on drugs, and management consultants called in to improve efficiency who focused police on quantitative results, such as the number of arrests, and away from such traditional goals as keeping the peace and investigating reported crimes.
Each step of the way accountability was removed in order to more easily apprehend criminals and drug dealers. The "war on terror" was another step, resulting in the militarization of the police.
The replacement of jury trials with plea bargains meant that police investigations ceased to be tested in court or even to support the plea, usually a fictitious crime reached by negotiation in order to obtain a guilty plea. Police learned that all prosecutors needed was a charge and that little depended on police investigations. Police work became sloppy. It was easier simply to pick up a suspect who had a record of having committed a similar crime.
As justice receded as the goal, the quality of people drawn into police work changed. Idealistic people found that their motivations were not compatible with the process, while bullies and psychopaths were attracted by largely unaccountable power.
Much of the blame can be attributed to "law and order" conservatives. Years ago when New York liberals began to observe the growing high-handed behavior of police, they called for civilian police review boards. Conservatives, such as National Review's William F. Buckley, went berserk, claiming that any oversight over the police would hamstring the police and cause crime to explode.
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