Isaac Davis
Few things are more disturbing
than looking at the news each day to find yet another shocking case of American
police officers using excessive brutality and belligerence against the public.
There is no justification for this, and as the list of egregious rights
violations by the police grows, more Americans may finally be waking up to what
many of us have known for years: our nation is becoming a police state.
With the proliferation of
portable handheld and dashboard video cameras, and with the ability to upload
and share videos on the web, people can see for themselves what police
brutality really looks and feels like, and tension between police and American
citizens is visible. A simple Google or YouTube search quickly reveals hundreds
of unique cases of cops brutalizing people, often with insane cruelty and
hubris, and the list of abuses grows daily.
Many of the most shocking
incidents are against women, children, the elderly, the handicapped or the
mentally ill. In addition to excessive violence, police are also abusing their
powers and illegally stealing money and property from everyday people, while
admittedly using traffic and drug laws as revenue generating schemes for
government coiffeurs. Most shockingly, though, the police are up-arming
themselves with military weapons and equipment, seemingly preparing themselves
for something apocalyptic, and are increasingly assuming confrontational and
threatening postures when dealing with the public.
Is police brutality and
misconduct actually getting worse, or are portable video recorders allowing us
to just now see what’s been happening all along? More importantly, is this
situation going to improve any time soon?
Our society needs police, good
police, working on behalf of and in cooperation and trust with their
communities to solve crimes and face legitimate criminals, but, unfortunately,
there are many reasons to expect this trend to get worse before it gets better,
and here are 5 of them.
1. Rise of the Security State,
Decline of Law and Order
In the bigger picture, there is
a cultural shift underway in America from a free and prosperous nation to a
repressed, surveilled and tightly regulated shell of its former self. This has
been underway for generations, but has vastly accelerated since 9/11, which has
given the government a perceptual cart blanche check to create, rewrite and
bypass any laws it wishes to, including the evisceration of the Constitution and the Magna Carta. We now
have a thriving culture of public paranoia, suspicion, over-reaction,
acquiescence and zero-tolerance.
Much of this is the natural
result of the collapse of moral leadership at the highest levels of a government
that now condones torture and has for decades engaged in ongoing war,
geo-political manipulations, interventions and foreign occupations. The
breakdown of law and order at the top is being mirrored in every level of
society.
2. The Military Industrial Economy
is on Steroids
Along with insane public
expenditures on defense, we are seeing the intensified militarization of
American police, who are already stocked with military surplus equipment,
trained in military tactics, and who increasingly demonstrate a confrontational
attitude toward the American public. By 1961, when former five-star Army
General and 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered
his ominous presidential farewell address to Americans, warning of the dangers
of creating a permanent war economy, the stage had already been set for the
rise of the super military industrial complex we see today.
30 years before Eisenhower’s
uncomfortable declaration, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler,
once the most highly decorated and highest ranked member of the U.S. Marine
Corps, also warned us of the dangers of building a permanent economy out of war
with explanation of war-profiteering in his book War is a Racket. Now we have
the Defense Department’s Program 1033 which funnels billions of dollars of
military weaponry, armor and gear into the hands of undertrained police
departments.
Having gone unabated and
unchallenged since these warnings, what we see happening now in law enforcement
is the inevitable result of creating financial opportunities in violence,
surveillance and dehumanization.
3. The Fox is The Henhouse and
Silence is the Code
Accountability is lacking when
law enforcement officers abuse their power, and suspensions with pay, leaves of
absence and early retirement are not adequate deterrents to keep psychopathic
cops in line. The police investigate themselves, and are an integral part of
the same criminal justice system that would also prosecute any officers for
misconduct. An inherent and obvious conflict of interest. Policing is a
fraternity, and for one reason or another, good cops are mostly silent and are
hushed or pushed out for blowing the whistle on corruption.
If a case of obvious brutality
does make it to court, there are already alarming precedents that give the
police extreme forgiveness in their use of physical compliance techniques. An
example being the recent trial and acquittal of the Fullerton, CA police
officers who savagely beat and murdered a homeless and mentally ill man, Kelly
Thomas, which was caught on video by security cameras. The horrifying incident
is available for anyone to watch, but, a jury felt that the officers had a
right to use this level of force while taking him into custody, setting an ugly
precedent for future encounters like this.
4. This is What Social
Engineering & Mind Control Does to Societies
The use of television and mass
media as propaganda for the military industrial complex has become ubiquitous
in our society, and over the course of the last half-century or so, the
portrayal of the role of police, government and public ‘authority’ has changed
dramatically. Where once we had Gomer Pyle and The Andy Griffith Show, we now
have Cops, CSI, 24, and Lockdown. Dramatizing and presenting police work as
entertainment, while aggrandizing public service as always heroic, and giving
fictional characters the impunity to violate the law and basic human rights in
the name of ‘public safety,’ is a not-so-subtle form of psychological
conditioning, teaching us to perceive public employees as being in a dominant
position in society, operating under a different set of rules.
Together with non-stop
mainstream news coverage of crime, fatal accidents, war, terrorism and other
threats, homeland security theater and public military drills, the shock
doctrine of government control through overwhelmingly visible violence that is
publicized and parroted by mainstream media is the most effective means of
generating mass fear and psychological obedience.
5. Not Enough People Know Their
Rights and Have the Courage to Exercise Them… Yet
Knowing your rights and how to
conduct yourself in any encounter with police or government agents is an
essential civic responsibility, yet sadly, too many people don’t know or
understand their rights. This may be changing for the better, however, as
videos are also emerging of citizens effectively exercising their rights in
situations with law enforcement. Knowing your rights works wonders when dealing
with police, and it does appear that more people are finding the courage for
non-compliance.
What’s worse is that in many
cases, law enforcement officers don’t even know the laws themselves. If both
the population and the police are ignorant of the law, then we can expect, in
the future, more cops to take advantage of this, and more citizens to passively
tolerate this.
Conclusion
The natural cycle of the rise
and fall of any government includes a period of authoritarian repression and
control of the citizenry in order to retain inevitably declining power. Our
society is in severe decay in this regard, and police are increasingly being
trained to view their job as an ‘us against them’ endeavor, emboldened with an
arrogance backed up by huge federal grants, high-tech police equipment, plus an
affectionately pro-government, pro-violence mainstream media.
The Gold Standard for Good
Policing
As an example of what a proper
policing can and should look like, take a look at Sir Robert Peel’s 9
principles for ethical policing, which was written nearly 200 years ago, and
has since remained the gold standard for police conduct.
“The Peelian Principles”
These nine basic principles are
often referred to as “The Peelian Principles.” Upon close examination of each
of the Peelian principles, not only are direct connections to policing in
today’s world apparent, but often the nine principles are cited as the basic
foundation for current law enforcement organizations and community policing
throughout the world.Many law enforcement agencies currently quote the Peelian
Principles on their community websites as their own principles.
Peelian Principle 1 – “The
basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.”
Peelian Principle 2 - “The
ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval
of police actions.”
Peelian Principle 3 - “Police
must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of
the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.”
Peelian Principle 4 - “The
degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes
proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.”
Peelian Principle 5 - “Police
seek and preserve public favour not by catering to the public opinion but by
constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.”
Peelian Principle 6 - “Police
use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or
to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is
found to be insufficient.”
Peelian Principle 7 - “Police, at
all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to
the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the
police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give
full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the
interests of community welfare and existence.”
Peelian Principle 8 - “Police
should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never
appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.”Peelian Principle 9 - “The test of
police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible
evidence of police action in dealing with it.”
