Colin Kaepernick, Cliven Bundy and The Man who Refused to Salute

by Nomad

The Colin Kaepernick controversy has highlighted America's divide over paying respect to symbols and the right to dissent, as a form of free speech.
In this post, we look at the historical reasons why our views changed following the rise of fascism and perhaps why they are presently called into question again. 

"False Rogues, Boring from Within"

Back in March 1944, The California Law Review published an interesting article called "Conscience v. The State" by Chester Charlton McCown.

Despatches from Switzerland a few months ago told of the execution of some and the arrest of many more of these sectaries. They were accused of teaching children to pray for peace and for the return of their fathers and brothers from the battle front; of putting Germans in the dilemma of choosing between the Fuehrer and a heavenly leader; of interpreting their visions as warnings of impending doom upon the German people.

These "false rogues, boring from within," who were chiefly working people, exhibited admirable courage and tenacity of faith. When, recently, seven were executed, their wives begged them not to sign a recantation in order to obtain a possible pardon. Repression seems to have had no deterrent effect upon the spread of the movement.

McCown, as a Professor of New Testament Literature, inevitably saw parallels between this act of defiance in the face of a fascist state and the early Christian martyrs who refused to pay their not only their taxes but their absolute submission to Caesar. 

That ethic has remained a long part of the faith. The writer cited the formal protestant attitude to nationalistic symbolism:

They believe that they "must obey God rather than man." If a national majority should decide upon policies which they thought wrong and they should be ordered to take part in the resulting actions, many would refuse to comply, accepting without resistance whatever punishment resulted.

This is, incidentally, the basis for Kim Davis' and her position on religious liberty. 

Generally speaking, religious convictions (and, in more secularist form, the moral conscience of the citizen) have found safe haven in any nation that dares to call itself free.  

Elderly Blind Man Wins Lawsuit in Police Brutality Case

by Nomad

(Reprinted from Copblock.org.)

On Friday, a federal jury ruled in favor of an elderly blind man who had been assaulted by a Denver police officer. Philip White was awarded  $400,000, which consisted of $100,000 in compensatory damages and $300,000 in punitive damages.

The full story makes pretty grim reading.

Blind Man Wins Lawsuit After Cop Slams Head Into Counter

An elderly blind man that had his head slammed into a counter by a Denver Police officer after asking him to allow him to feel his badge to prove he was a cop, won an excessive force lawsuit against the department on Friday.

80-year-old Philip White, who is a retired school administrator with a Master Degree in Education, was at a downtown Greyhound Bus Terminal in Denver on May 22, 2012.

He was attempting to board a bus in order to go to Vail where he was to take a van to his home in Eagle – but was told the bus was full.

How We Came to Accept Police Brutality as the Norm 2/2

by Nomad

In Part One of this two part series we discussed the origins of the present problem between the black community and law enforcement. Reagan's get-tough on crime was based on a theory that came with some direct warnings about the potential for discrimination. The president chose to ignore them.

Reagan's anti-crime crusade led to giving law enforcement more freedom to do their job. At least that was how it was portrayed in conservative circles at the time. That policy was called "pro-active policing." 

Problems with Pro-Active Policing
An  ultra-conservative American libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute, paints a very different picture of the policy today. A site run by that organization, which attempts to highlight police misconduct, describes pro-active policing as..

the use of nearly autonomous elite police units that are trained to be more aggressive than regular officers as a response to gang and drug related violence by targeting people they suspect of being criminals before they commit crimes. These units are encouraged to use whatever tactics they can get away with in order to get results, those results being a high arrest rate.

Like the later preemptive strike doctrine of the Bush era, it is easy to see in retrospect how easily pro-active policing could be abused. The danger of this practice was that notion that police should be responsible for preventing crime before it happens. How is that even possible? 

Well, one description might remind you of the sci-fi film "Minority Report"

In proactive policing, law enforcement uses data and analyzes patterns to understand the nature of a problem. Officers devise strategies and tactics to prevent or mitigate future harm. They evaluate results and revise practices to improve policing. Departments may combine an array of data with street intelligence and crime analysis to produce better assessments about what might happen next if they take various actions.

This high tech description however tends to gloss over the more controversial aspect, a highly visible street presence which is intended to intimidate criminals before they commit crimes.  The more intimidating, the better.

Ironically, what developed over time was a gang mentality of thugs within the police force.

These teams tend to be close-knit and insular, trained to use highly aggressive tactics with very little oversight, and taught to think and act like the gang members and drug dealers they investigate while under cover.

In other words, the balance between the lawless and the lawful was so blurred that it was difficult to see which element was the greater threat to the community. The police force- especially when made up of white officers- took all of the appearances (as well as the mentality) of an occupying military.  

How We Came to Accept Police Brutality as the Norm 1/2

by Nomad

With all the protests around the country against abusive law enforcement, it is a good time to ask how we as a country got into this situation. Is it simply a matter of racism permeating police departments or does it go deeper?

With all of the safeguards hard-wired into the Constitution, how could we have allowed it to happen?

A Simple Question of Trust

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.    Frederick Douglas

There's been a lot of superficial analysis about the reasons for the nationwide protests in the wake of the Brown and Garner cases. The fact that US law enforcement can literally get away with murdering unarmed citizens in front of witnesses has shocked the nation. 

(In fact this phenomenon has been going on for decades and if anything, the patience of the black community is the truly surprising aspect.) 

Racism in the country's police departments has been blamed. A broken-down justice system has also been pointed to. In fact, it's all of those things but there's a deeper problem as well:  A lack of trust in the law enforcement agencies by the black and minority communities. 

This lack of trust has been further reinforced by a lack of credibility of the oversight process after possible violations have occurred.

It's not something that should be under-estimated. Trust is the glue that holds the entire justice system together. Without trust, the entire structure of law and order collapses pretty quickly. Now America has begun to question whether we might not have bestowed too much trust in law enforcement.  

Every time a case of police brutality goes unpunished, it becomes a double failure for the entire justice system. Firstly, from the offense itself and secondly, by the damage it does to public trust.

Here's Why Rudy Giuliani Would Rather Talk about Black-on-Black Crime than Ferguson

by Nomad

Remarks on the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri by Rudy Giuliani have caused a bit of a stir in the media. Some have charged him with showing his racist side. For those who know Giuliani's record as mayor of New York, nothing he has said is much of a surprise.

Rudy's Rude Remarks

As the former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani  earned a reputation as a hard-as-nails tough guy who cleaned up the city of crime. It's an image he likes to promote and it plays well with his conservative base. So when he was asked to comment on the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, his remarks were bound to be blunt and to hit a nerve with some people. If that was his intention, then he certainly succeeded. 

On a TV news show, he told a black reporter that white police officers wouldn't be in black communities if "you weren't killing each other" and that "there is virtually no homicide in the white community." The word "you" is presumably short for "you black people."

The fact is that I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks.

The Atlantic Monthly thoroughly decimated Giuliani's contention that police officers are the saviors of the black community. Journalist Ta-nehısı Coates wrote with a full helping of sarcasm:

It's almost as if killers tend to murder people who live near them. Moreover, it seems that people actually hold officers operating under the color of law to a different standard. This is an incredible set of insights, which taken together offer a revelation so profound, so far-reaching, that it must not be wasted on our shiftless minority populations.  

Unable to stop himself, Giuliani made other thoughtless statements. Following the decision not indict the police officer Darren Wilson, Giuliani said that he'd prosecute witnesses whose stories contradict Wilson's account. As if the police officer's account of the event - the defendant, in this case- was a standard by which all other eye-witness accounts should be judged. 

To be sure these were offensive remarks and they came at the wrong time. Yet, as any New Yorker will tell you, statements like this are pure Giuliani. 

Actually, as they would also tell you, the remarks hide an ugly truth about Giuliani.

Fastening The Shackles: How the Militarization of the Police was Prophesied a Century Ago

by Nomad

Progressive reformers and anti-imperialists from a century ago warned us about what happens when a nation uses its military to establish an empire. Today, with the militarization of the police force around the country we are watching their warnings playing out right before our eyes.

Some effects are more predictable than others. If you do that, this will happen. That is also true for nations and societies. Take the militarization of the American police force.

Over a hundred years ago, high-minded progressives were warning that the nation which relies on military for its empire-building would suffer some drastic unintended consequences. It would, without any doubt, lead to the kind of police force that was counter to anybody's concept of liberty. Those chickens, as they say, would inevitably come home to roost.

In 1900, for instance, William Jennings Bryan espoused that view. In a speech on American imperialism, he said that when a nation freely violates the human rights of other nations it would be no time at all when it turns its lawlessness on its own people. 

Bryan said:

If there is poison in the blood of the hand it will ultimately reach the heart.

Scouring the archives, I found this stunning quote by the long-forgotten American reformer and author, Ernest Howard Crosby. Though his career as a reformer was short- only the last ten years of his life- he earned a fine reputation for his anti-militarist and anti-imperialist writings. 

(You can find Crosby's complete biography here.)

When he died of pneumonia in 1907, there was hardly a mention of his passing. That fact prompted the feminist, anarchist, atheist Emma Goldman to write:

Oh, if he had been a puller of strings in the murky business of politics, an unscrupulous bare-faced parvenu, a successful thief of the toil and sweat of the poor, the columns of the major newspapers of the lying money press would have been unanimous in their sing splendid paeans to his virtues..

They said nothing: no one seemed to have noticed that a great intellect and noble heart had been still forever.

Police Brutality: Is This The Price of Empire?

by Nomad

Recent cases of police overreaction have led to public outrage. But the question is: Is this the inevitable consequence of imperial war? If so, it shouldn't surprise anybody. One politician from an earlier age warned us that this would happen.

A few recent news stories about the  police caught my attention. Here's one from the Chicago area:

A suburban police officer has been charged with reckless conduct, in the death of a 95-year-old World War II veteran who was shocked with a stun gun and shot with beanbag rounds at a Park Forest nursing home last year.

Park Forest Police Officer Craig Taylor was charged with one count of reckless conduct in the death of John Wrana. at the Victory Centre nursing home on July 26, 2013.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office said Wrana died from internal bleeding from blunt force trauma caused by the bean bag rounds. Cook County prosecutors said Wrana was struck five times with beanbag rounds fired from a shotgun.

According to one source, police misconduct has cost the City of Chicago over $500 million in legal settlement, fees and other costs. People are quite rightly starting to ask questions about the training and oversight of the force. 

In 2013 alone, the city shelled out $84.6 million — the largest annual payout in the decade analyzed by the Better Government Association (BGA), and more than triple the $27.3 million the city had initially projected to spend last year.

That's a lot of taxpayers' money being needlessly shelled out. Moreover, events like this seem to be happening more and more. Or maybe they are just getting reported more.  

The Shocking and Unnecessary Death of Kenneth Chamberlain

The Trayvon Martin case has deservedly attracted a great deal of attention. One incident that has received far less attention is this November 2011 event in White Plains, New York. 

First things first. My condolences to the Chamberlain family and friends. I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like but I do wish them well. From all that we know, they have every right to be angry and to ask for justice.