Tag Archives: civil liberties

On Being a PPB (Police Punching Bag)

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While enjoying a Mother’s Day brunch at my sister’s house, I learned that my older niece’s boyfriend has an interesting part-time job.   He has a theater background, and role-plays for training seminars to help police deal with unstable individuals and hostage situations.  He’s played drunks, people high on drugs, people having a psychotic episode, and people who for the moment are just very, very pissed off.

One of his recent gigs involved playing someone from the last category: a distraught father who’s holed himself up in a house with his kids and threatening to kill them.  While I didn’t learn a lot of details, he apparently played his role so well that a frustrated cop ended up giving him a black eye.

Police brutality cartoonI was struck by the irony of someone who volunteers to put himself in harm’s way by our Protectors and Servants (granted, he’s paid for it), when they will freely dish out the same punishment to any slob on the street unfortunate enough to find themselves in a cop’s crosshairs. It also disturbs me that whatever training the police take to deal with unstable individuals, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

I mean, if an actor can get clocked by the police during a simulated exercise, what does that bode for genuinely troubled people when the cops have access to their Tasers and sidearms? Unfortunately to ask is to answer.

(Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard)

Out of the rubble and into a cage

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When can you trust the state?  Never.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, made even more terrible by circumstances beyond anyone’s control.  Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina, I still remember how cops manhandling an elderly woman and confiscating her gun — her only means of self-defense in a city gone mad.  And then there was the murder of two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge, which the New Orleans police later tried to cover up.

You can’t trust the state, even when it appears no one else can save you.   And now survivors of the terrible earthquake in Haiti are learning the same, painful lesson:

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

These are not criminals — just people overwhelmed by the quake and subsequent aftershocks, looking for food, water and shelter.  When the Marines evacuated them, they were under the impression that they could join relatives already in the U. S., but instead they were immediately arrested and held for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — despite a current suspension of deportations to Haiti.  All of this, because they didn’t already have a piece of paper from the U. S. government granting them permission to come here.  And yet more immigrants have all but disappeared into ICE’s detention center network, with family unable to find them.  Some that were lucky enough to be freed were granted tourist visas, allowing them to stay for a short while, but not to work.

But even when their loved ones are put in cages for no reason by the government, people can’t seem to let go of their implicit trust of the state:

The government’s actions have been especially bewildering for the survivors’ relatives, like Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen who keeps an Obama poster on his kitchen wall in Norwalk, Conn.  Mr. Ulysse said he could not explain to his nephews, Jackson, 20, and Reagan, 25, why they were brought to the United States on a military plane only to be jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

The cognitive dissonance of that paragraph is almost dazzling: an Obama supporter who doesn’t understand why the Obama-led government jailed his nephews.  Even with the boot on their neck, people still look to the state to save them.  Will they ever learn?

Never trust the state.

[Cross-posted from The Libertarian Standard]

This blog is not backed by the United States government.

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158. A pistol-packin’ granny caps a would-be mugger in Manhattan and gets sued for her trouble.

159. Puppycide in Buffalo during a police raid that fails to turn up any drugs or make any arrests.

160. Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, no friend of fugitives, illegal immigrants or civil rights, spends an unknown amount of taxpayers’ money on production costs for a Fox reality show.  Then his boys arrest some people applauding a speech critical of Arpaio during a county supervisors meeting.  And Phoenix police raid the home of a blogger who’s been criticizing them.

161. I’m from the government, and I’m here to check out that funny noise under the hood: President Obama can’t save the banks or balance the budget, but he’s now backing your transmission.  More details about the warranty from those helpful folks at reason:

162. “One of liberty’s great benefactors”, Burt Blumert, chairman of the Mises Institute and a champion of many libertarian causes, passes away at the age of 80.

163. After a student is kicked in the groin, a Connecticut school bans all physical contact.  Because today’s hug could be tomorrow’s headlock.

164. Michigan woman charged for her son’s stay in juvie hall, then is sent to jail herself after she’s unable to pay.

165. More than half of California’s service stations face hefty fines or even closure for failing to install expensive vapor recovery nozzles on their pumps.  The CARB-mandated systems run about $11,000 per pump.

166. Congress seeks to give the FDA the power to regulate tobacco, while also limiting safer choices for people looking to cut back or quit.

167. Speaking of tobacco, remember Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000?  Well, he lied, unless you think only rich people smoke.  They don’t, at least not as much as the poor do, making the new cigarette tax increase highly regressive.

Abuse, harassment, and customer service (but I repeat myself)

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143. Homer, Louisiana police chief Russell Mills, after one of his officers shot and killed a 73-year-old mute black man:

“If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.

“We’re not out there trying to abuse and harass people — we’re trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear.”

Oh, but abusing and harassing black people—that’s just good police work.  I guess we should at least thank Mills for the tacit admission that cops engage in racial profiling.

144. Another drug raid gone wrong, this time resulting in an unarmed Michigan college student getting shot by a cop.  For what?  The police are tight-lipped so far.  But apparently the victim’s Facebook page is filled with drug references, so he must have been a dope-dealing punk, right?

145. President Barack Obama didn’t immediately make good on his campaign promise to end DEA raids on medical marijuana facilities, but eventually Attorney General Eric Holder directed Justice to call off the dogs.  At one point the U. S. Attorney for Los Angeles got the memo—then he didn’t.

146. Jacob Sullum on John Yoo’s disturbing post-9/11 Justice Department memos, which laid out justifications for wholesale curtailments of civil liberties, including suppression of the press:

Yet civil liberties do not mean much if they are abandoned whenever the government thinks it has a good reason to violate them. It is precisely in times of crisis, when politicians are most tempted to take legal shortcuts and the public is most inclined to go along, that constitutional protections are most needed. Although Attorney General Eric Holder claims to understand this, his embrace of Yoo-like rhetoric and reasoning suggests his differences with the former Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer may be a matter more of circumstance than of principle.

Read the whole thing here.

147. Comic relief: “Take a number, wait your fucking turn” (uh, NSFW).