Cops Gone Wild

It once was the case that joining the police force implied low-level risk. An officer could, and occasionally did, die in performing his duty. Today no level of risk is acceptable for police. Therefore, all risk has been shifted to the public anytime members of the public have encounters, mistaken or not, with the police. Consequently, police kill far more innocent members of the public than criminals kill police. The police have become like Wall Street and the federal government. The police serve no public interest.

When I was growing up in the forties and fifties, we understood that the police force attracted bullies because of the power of the badge, but unlike today the police did not have carte blanche. In the forties and fifties the American people had not been reduced to powerlessness or to the sheeple that they are today. Newspapers were still independently owned and served as a constraint on police power. Blacks did not always get this protection, but in large southern cities, such as Atlanta, where Ralph McGill was editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, blacks, too, had the protection of the press. I remember the first civil rights march in Atlanta. There were no police and no dogs set on the marchers. I know because I was there.

Bullies were one thing, but there was not the hostility toward the public that is ingrained in police training today. Standing up for one's constitutional rights in a police encounter today is a perfect way to enrage a bully whose authority is questioned. The likely result is a beating and arrest. Subservience is the easiest way to survive a police encounter. You might be a brain surgeon or a former high government official and the cop might be someone who barely made it out of high school. But if you want to get out of it without damage to your body and charges on your record, act like a peasant confronted by a baron, earl or duke centuries ago. This is America today.

Anything else and you might be history.

So, are police review boards the answer? Apparently not. In 1993, 27 years after New York Mayor Lindsay's failed attempt to impose some accountability on police, Mayor David Dinkins established the largely powerless Civilian Complaint Review Board. The police rose up in opposition and were egged on by Rudy Giuliani, who when he became mayor gave the police carte blanche. White New Yorkers applauded Giuliani. Finally, they were safe again -- as long as they did not have a run-in with the police or the SWAT team didn't go to the wrong address, perhaps a more likely occurrence than a criminal showing up at the door.

A number of cities today have review boards. Some have powers. Most don't. Even those with powers have been made hesitant to use them. When terror is such a threat that the country remains on Orange Alert, one step below Red Alert, for years, only a terrorist-loving liberal-pinko-commie would want to restrain the police.

As long as the US remains in the hands of the Establishment, police review boards will be ineffective. Wikipedia reports that in 2006, eight years ago, the NY Civilian Complaint Review Board received 7,699 complaints, approximately 6% resulted in a "substantiated disposition." In other words, 94% of the cases went nowhere.

The police have been set loose on us by "law and order" conservatives and by the "war on terror." The police are doing us far more damage than are the criminals and the terrorists.

It remains to be seen whether Americans survive their police. In the meantime the sheeple will continue to pay the salaries of those who pose the greatest threat to them.