Americans Versus Anti-Americans Part 2: Officer Thuggly.

First, a highly significant video. Please watch it to the end:

Note all the following:

• The armed, uniformed, badge-wearing persons in the video claimed to be police;
• They refused to present identification that would confirm their claim;
• They demanded that the resident turn off his recording device, which he declined to do;
• At each request from the resident that they show him a warrant, they sidestepped the request and presented a nonsense rationale for their demand to search his home.
• It took nearly three minutes of that exchange to persuade the armed, uniformed, badge-wearing persons that:
  • The resident would not take them at their word that they were police on a legal search for a fugitive;
  • He would not consent to a warrantless search of his home;
  • He was recording the exchange "straight to YouTube," which would document any subsequent abuse of his rights.

Perhaps the words "No" and "warrant" are no longer taught to students at police academies. However, in this case the armed, uniformed, badge-wearing persons who claimed to be police were deterred from further Constitutionally prohibited intrusion on the resident's rights. Yet it's unclear that had they forced their way in, the resident would have been allowed legal redress against them, under the specious doctrine of "qualified immunity."

Qualified immunity shields thug-police from the legal consequences of their actions...which suggests that more emphatic means of deterrence are desirable.

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Have a gander at this surprising story from a very surprising locale:

|"How would things be different,” muses Dale Brown of the Detroit-based Threat Management Center, “if police officers were given financial rewards and commendations for resolving dangerous situations peacefully, rather than for using force in situations where it’s neither justified nor effective?”

Brown’s approach to public safety is “precisely the opposite of what police are trained and expected to do,” says the 44-year-old entrepreneur. The TMC eschews the “prosecutorial philosophy of applied violence” and the officer safety uber alles mindset that characterize government law enforcement agencies. This is because his very successful private security company has an entirely different mission – the protection of persons and property, rather than enforcing the will of the political class. Those contrasting approaches are displayed to great advantage in proto-dystopian Detroit.

“We’ve been hired by three of the most upscale neighborhoods in Detroit to provide 24/7 security services,” Brown proudly informed me during a telephone interview. “People who are well-off are very willing to pay for Lamborghini-quality security services, which means that our profit margin allows us to provide free services to people who are poor, threatened, and desperate for the kind of help the police won’t provide.”

“Unlike the police, we don’t respond after a crime has been committed to conduct an investigation and – some of the time, at least – arrest a suspect,” Brown elaborates. “Our approach is based on deterrence and prevention. Where prevention fails, our personnel are trained in a variety of skills – both psychological and physical – to dominate aggressors without killing them.”

Police typically define their role in terms of what they are permitted to do to people, rather than what they are required to do for them. Brown's organization does exactly the reverse, even when dealing with suspected criminals.

(Applause to Western Rifle Shooters for the link.)

Contrast that low-key, layman-respecting, innocence-presumed approach with that of Detroit's "official" police, who are shielded from the very laws they claim to enforce by "qualified immunity:"

Officer Joseph Weekley, who burst through the door carrying a ballistic shield and an MP5 submachine gun, shot and killed Aiyana, who had been sleeping on the living room couch. By the time she was killed terrified little girl had already been burned by a flash-bang grenade that had been hurled into the living room.

The home was surrounded with toys and other indicia that children resided therein, and neighbors had pleaded with the police not to carry out the blitzkrieg. The cops did arrest a suspect in a fatal shooting, but he resided in a different section of the same building. In any case, the suspect could have been taken into custody without a telegenic paramilitary assault – if the safety of those on the receiving end of police violence had been factored into the SWAT team’s calculations.

Owing in no small measure to public outrage, Weekly has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and careless discharge of a weapon resulting in death. A jury deadlocked on the charges in July 2013. Weekley now faces a second trial that will produce a conviction only if the prosecution can overcome the presumption that the officer’s use of deadly force was reasonable. This is a function of the entirely spurious, and endlessly destructive, doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which protects police officers from personal liability when their actions result in unjustified harm to the persons or property of innocent people.

Now imagine what would occur were Aiyana Jones's residence protected by Dale Brown's TMC organization...or better yet, by Kevin Conway's Integral Security Services.

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The lore of "Officer Friendly" has a long pedigree in these United States. With the ongoing militarization of local police forces, the rise of an "Us versus Them" attitude among the police that's inevitably mirrored by the private citizenry, and the increasing frequency of "Officer Shakedown" incidents such as described in this article, "Officer Friendly" is comatose and on life support, and will remain there regardless of any propaganda barrage, absent efforts that fail to correct the objective situation.

Since "qualified immunity" was pronounced by the Supreme Court in 1982, "Officer Thuggly" incidents, like the one that resulted in the death of Aiyana Jones, have multiplied at a terrifying rate. When heavily armed SWAT teams and military grade hardware are involved, such incidents have incredible life-reaping potential, to say nothing of the effect on citizens' civil liberties and our willingness to cooperate with law enforcement under other circumstances. Add the growing awareness that privacy in banking, commerce, travel, and general communications is a thing of the past, and you have a formula for a most unusual sort of civil unrest.

Given all the above, is it any wonder that the rate at which our countrymen are expatriating and renouncing their American citizenship is at an all-time high? Would you be at all surprised to learn that I've thought seriously about doing the same?

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Officer Thuggly could never get away with his deeds without all the following conditions concurrently in force:

• Qualified immunity;
• The "blue wall of silence;"
• A largely disarmed, fearful citizenry;
• A press reluctant to report on police misconduct;
• The multiplication of roaming outlaws, many of them here illegally;
• General social atomization, leading to a disinclination to assist others in distress;
• The de facto nullification of the Constitution by those in power at the federal level.

Political assaults on most of those conditions are in progress, but of course are being fiercely -- and so far, successfully -- resisted by those in power. As Frederick Douglass has told us:

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

Once the disease of power trampling roughshod upon the citizenry has progressed to a certain stage, a demand that it cease must be backed up by a willingness to kill and die: the ethos of the dedicated revolutionary. We don't have many such persons in the United States today, and those we do have are not always "on our side." It's possible that the point of no return is behind us now, leaving only the choices of submission or flight.

I'd dearly love to be wrong about this. If you have any arguments or evidence to that effect, Gentle Reader:

For the love of God, let me have them!