feminist blogs

Fellow citizens, you can rest easier tonight knowing that the Miami-Dade County Consumer Services Department is out there protecting the people of their fair city from a grave and gathering danger — the danger of Miamians getting a lift from somebody other than a permanent, full-time, government-licensed taxi service:

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — A man who said he thought he was just helping a woman in need is accused of running an illegal taxi service.

Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Department has slapped Rosco O’Neil with $2,000 worth of fines, but O’Neil claims he is falsely accused.

I ain’t running nothing illegal, O’Neil said.

The 78-year-old said he was walking into a Winn-Dixie to get some groceries when he was approached by a woman who said she needed a ride.

She asked me, Do I do a service? O’Neil said. I told her no. She said, I need help getting home.

O’Neil told the woman if she was still there when he finished his shopping, he would give her a ride. She was, so he did.

—Local10 Miami (2008-05-09): Man Accused Of Providing Illegal Taxi Service

Here’s the reward O’Neil got for daring to commit this heinous act of human kindness:

As it turned out, the woman was an undercover employee with the consumer services department targeting people providing illegal taxi services.

She said the reason she targeted him (is because) she saw him sitting in his car for a few minutes, said Ellen Novodeletsky, O’Neil’s attorney.

After O’Neil dropped off the woman, police surrounded him, issued him two citations and impounded his minivan. On top of the fees, it cost O’Neil an additional $400 to retrieve his minivan from the impound lot.

There are no prior complaints that O’Neil was providing illegal transportation for a fee.

It’s not entrapment because she didn’t expect him to provide her transportation, said Sonya Perez, a spokeswoman for the consumer services department.

O’Neil claims he was just being kind and providing a ride to a lady in need.

There’s all kinds of possibilities, but the fact of this particular case, what our enforcement officers witnessed — because we had several on the scene, plus a Miami-Dade police officer — and all the information came back the same, that this was a business transaction, Perez said.

O’Neil said he never even discussed money until the woman insisted upon it.

She asked me, How much you charging? O’Neil said. I said, Anything you give me. She said, No, I need a price.

—Local10 Miami (2008-05-09): Man Accused Of Providing Illegal Taxi Service

Well, thank God, says I. The last thing that the dedicated public servants of the Miami-Dade County Consumer Services Department should permit is for consumers to actually get services. Some might say that they ought to let consenting adults alone, to make their own decisions about whether to get the transportation they need by calling a full-time professional taxi service, or by making arrangements with friends, or just by finding a nice old man who is willing to help you out that day on an informal basis, in return for a little bit of money for the gas and the time. That the county government has no business at all trying to force people into a particular business model of highly formalized, full-time professional transit businesses, if they would rather make other arrangements on their own time and on their own dime. But, really, since we already have a bipartisan caucus of legislators, regulators, and professional bureaucrats running behind us all, yelling You’ll put an eye out with that!, Don’t drink that; it’ll stunt your growth!, You’re not going out like that, are you?, and You keep your mouth clean, son, or I’ll wash it out for you with soap! — well, what could be more natural than for them to add a shout of Don’t you get in a car with that stranger! to the chorus?

See also:

• GT 2007-09-15: Free Riders
• GT 2008-01-16: Well, thank God #8: Civil Tongue edition
• GT 2007-09-19: Well, thank God #7: sagging and the new sumptuary laws
• GT 2006-08-31: Well, thank God #6: Raed Jarrar and ostensive definitions
• GT 2006-07-18: Well, thank God #5: the Director’s Guild triumphs over insurgent customers
• GT 2006-06-27: Well, thank God #4: Unauthorized Erections edition
• GT 2006-02-23: Well, thank God #3: National Caffeine Awareness Month
• GT 2005-12-05: Well, thank God #2: We Are The Champions edition
• GT 2005-10-27: Well, thank God: The Bluest Eye edition

You already knew that Chicago patrol cops are planning to carry M4 assault rifles in the inner city and Springfield, Massachusetts cops plan to switch to black, military-style uniforms in the inner city in order to restore a sense of fear.

But wait, there’s more.

In Tulare County, California, the county sheriff’s office has formed a new, dedicated Gang Unit to engage in saturation patrols of the south end of town, to pull over suspicious cars (any guess on what color suspicious drivers are likely to be), get in the faces of suspect young men (any guess on what the color of those faces will be?), and generally to make sure that certain members of the public are afraid to use public spaces. By putting more heavily-armed police officers on the streets, they claim to be taking weapons off the streets. Gang Unit mouthpiece Sergeant Harold Liles says that the purpose of all this letting them know we are here, and the streets belong to us.

In Wilmington, Delaware, a new charter school is in the planning stages. It will enroll as many as 600 inner-city high school students — or rather, Cadets — for training in jobs for the front lines in the Nation’s [sic] homeland security. The Academy will require its teenaged cadets to wear uniforms, give them extensive physical training during and after school, offer homeland security training as an after-school activity, and offer a choice of vocational curricula ranging from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator.

Meanwhile, in the great northwest, Montana Highway Patrol used to carry M14 rifles in the trunks of their patrol cars in case of an emergency. Soon they will all be carrying AR-15 assault rifles strapped to the front seat of the car. Montana Highway Patrol mouthpiece Jerril Ren says that For the most part, they’re trying to make them [high-powered assault rifles] more readily available to the officer and said that the higher-powered guns were necessary for now-common tactical situations.

The Palm Beach County, Florida sheriff’s office is now training and arming regular cops on the beat with AR-15 assault rifles.

Inner-city patrol cops in Miami have also been carrying assault rifles for the past few months, at the behest of city Police Chief John Timoney.

Johnson City, Tennessee patrol cops were already armed with handguns and shotguns. Now they have started a new weapons program to ensure that at least some patrol cops are carrying other, special weapons on every patrol shift. They won’t say in public what those weapons are or how many they are putting onto the streets.

The Washington County, Tennessee sheriff’s office just got a grant from the federal government to arm their patrol cops with AR-15 assault rifles.

And if you’re wondering why all these stories have suddenly hit the news so close to each other, over just the last month, in so many different cities and counties, my suspicion is that you’ve got the answer right there: the United States federal government, which spent the past 30 years or so involving itself in state and local law enforcement agencies through the use of tax-funded training, grants, and equipment sales for paramilitary SWAT teams and anti-terrorism task forces, now seems to be making use of those same grants to more heavily arm and more thoroughly militarize ordinary patrol cops on the highway, in the inner city, and in rural sheriff’s offices.

Do you feel safer now?

See also:

• GT 2008-04-28: Is it just me or is the water in this pot getting a little hotter?
• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2008-02-18: Cops are here to protect you.
• GT 2008-04-25: We need government cops because private protection forces would be accountable to the powerful and well-connected instead of being accountable to the people.
• GT 2007-11-27: Law and Orders #3: John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol tasers Jared Massey in front of his family for questioning why he was pulled over

Cops are here to protect you by looking in on an upset young man who locked himself in a room with a small kitchen knife, then drilling a hole in the wall and spraying pepper spray to force him out from the room when he wouldn’t come out voluntarily, then shooting him to death when the pepper spraying forced him out of the room, because he brought out the small kitchen knife that he had taken in with him.

All for his own good, of course. It became necessary to destroy Scott Rockwell in order to save him.

Cops are here to protect you by using handcuffing and arrest to put an end any argument. Even if you’re a firefighter who’s busy trying to rescue an auto accident victim.

Cops are here to protect you by dumping you out of your wheelchair onto the jailhouse floor, and breaking two of your ribs. Just to make sure you weren’t lying, when you told them you can’t stand up because you’re paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Cops are here to protect you using pain compliance, for example hitting you with 50,000-volt electric shocks at least three different times to make you do what they tell you to do, even when you pose no threat of violence to anyone, when you already have your hands cuffed behind your back, and when you are already surrounded or even pinned down to the ground by three armed professionals.

Cops are here to protect you by pinning a 13 year old boy to the ground and choking him for the crime of skateboarding. Then grabbing a teenaged girl in a chokehold for trying to walk away from the scene. Then wrestling down another teenaged boy who tried to protect her from getting manhandled. Then arresting the lot of them on the grounds that failing to immediately obey a cop’s arbitrary orders is a violation of city ordinances against disorderly conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by threatening a 14 year old boy with juvi for backtalk, threatening to smack your mouth for attitude, wrestling him to the ground to steal his skateboards, screaming in the boy’s face for being addressed as dude, and then turning around to threaten another teenager who happens to be filming their professional conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by trashing your college art project and threatening to beat the hell out of you for using public space in ways that confuse and enrage them.

Please note that if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, the people around us would more or less universally conclude that we’re belligerent and dangerous lunatics. In fact, if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, and it was caught on camera, we would soon be in jail for on a charge of assault and battery. When someone with a badge and a gun acts like this, and it’s caught on camera, with a very few exceptions, the worst that ever happens is that they might get fired. The most common response from the powers that be is either to do nothing at all, or else to give the pig a paid vacation and a verbal reprimand. Meanwhile, state legislators propose laws to withhold records of the abuse as classified information for reasons of state security. Fellow cops and freelance sado-fascist blowhards can all be counted on to make up any excuse at all, even in defiance of the clear evidence of their senses, in order to get the pig off the hook, no matter how obviously out-of-control the cop may be and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless his victim.

The mainstream newsmedia writes stories with clauses like this:

The skateboarders, who were violating a city ordinance, are claiming police brutality and some say the pictures back up their claim.

The video shows a 13-year-old being held to the ground by his throat. It also shows a girl being held in what appears to be a chokehold.

—KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Other cops say things like this:

Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means says, If a subject becomes confrontational, the officer has a right to defend himself. There are certain steps: first of all a verbal command. Like I said, if that subject becomes combative, that officer needs to do all he can do to get that subject under control.

—KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Please note that Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means believes that police officers have a right to grab you and beat the hell out of you in order to defend themselves against a verbal confrontation.

And freelance police-enabling blowhards write in with letters like this:

In regard to the YouTube video in which the Baltimore police officer seems to go overboard in his actions regarding a teenage skateboarder, I’d point out that teenage boys typically resent authority, often continue to do the wrong thing even after repeated instructions to stop and are, in general, a minor menace to society until they grow out of their teenage years.

When they’re doing something wrong, you can ask them to stop over and over again, and they’ll often simply ignore you until you get loud or otherwise assert your authority.

As the uncle of two teenage boys, I have no doubt that the officer reacted in a normal manner and that he should not be subject to disciplinary action.

Jerry Fletcher
Waldorf

And:

When YouTube recently showed a video of a teenage skateboarder being manhandled by a Baltimore police officer, public reaction was swift and severe.

Mayor Sheila Dixon called him a bad apple and the officer was immediately suspended.

I find this rush to judgment without a complete investigation disturbing, especially as the alleged victim had little more than his feelings hurt.

Police officers put their lives on the line every day, and the lack of public support for these men and women, especially from the mayor’s office, is an embarrassment.

Might it be possible that these kids were just punks harassing a veteran officer? And if these upstanding skater dudes were so in the right, why didn’t they file a complaint against the officer?

Let’s hear the whole story before destroying the career of a dedicated public servant.

E. Mitchell Arion
Goldsboro

If E. Mitchell Arion hasn’t watched the video that he speaks so confidently about, then why keep talking about it when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? If, on the other hand, he has actually watched the video, he must believe that this hollering uniformed thug is in fact a dedicated public servant whose precious career needs to be handled with kid gloves, even though he watched Officer Salvatore Rivieri going up to one of the people he is supposedly serving, screaming in his face, ordering him around, insulting him, telling him to shut up, threatening him, grabbing him, wrestling him down, shoving him back down to the ground, robbing him of his private property, lecturing him, and getting up in his face about the proper titles to use when the kid addresses his putative servant.

It takes an awfully special kind of dedicated servant to treat you like that.

(Hat tips to Lew, Balko, Anthony Gregory #1, Anthony Gregory #2, Bill Anderson, Anthony Gregory #3, Anthony Gregory #4.)

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
• GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling

(Thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2008-01-28 and Wendy McElroy 2008-01-22, which each have some excellent comments. Read the whole thing and all that.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely shove their way into situations where they aren’t wanted, aren’t invited, and have no business being; they deliberately escalate confrontations in order to stay in control through superior belligerence; they commonly use force to end an argument and then blame it on their victim; and they invariably pass off even the most egregious abuses of power as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. Cops carry a small armory of weapons and restraints that they can freely use to hurt or immobilize harmless or helpless people, and a small library of incredibly vague laws (disorderly conduct, resisting a police officer) that they can use as excuses for hurting, restraining, and arresting their victims, with virtually no danger of ever being called to account for their actions as long as other cops, who already have a professional interest in minimizing or dismissing complaints about abusive pigs, can figure out some way to fit the use of these incredibly vague offenses into the police department’s incredibly vague Official Procedures for arrests and for the use of force. The practical consequence of their training and the institutional culture of impunity within which they operate are squads of arrogant, unaccountable, irresponsible hired thugs with massive senses of entitlement, organized into a paramilitary chain of command, who contemptuously regard their neighbors as mere civilians, who treat anyone who dares to give them lip or who questions their bellowed commands as a presumptive criminal, who have no scruple against using pain or arrest in order to force you to comply with their arbitrary orders, and who excuse any sort of abuse by sanctimoniously informing you that it became necessary to stomp on you in order to protect you — whether or not you ever asked for the protection in the first place.

Thus, a couple weeks ago, in Clearwater, Florida, Jean Merola, a 75-year-old grandmother of eight, got served and protected at the drive-thru of her neighborhood McDonald’s by Officer Matthew Parco, who happened to be behind her in the line and who took it upon himself to do some policing of the McDonald’s parking lot — without ever having been asked to by anybody at McDonald’s, of course, and in fact hassling, escalating a confrontation with, and then finally handcuffing and arresting Jean Merola for parking her car exactly where the cashier at McDonald’s had told her to park:

About 4 p.m. Thursday, Merola pulled her gray Lincoln Town Car up to the drive-through window of a Clearwater McDonald’s minutes from her home. She ordered the coffee and medium fries, no salt.

No salt on fries being a special request, the teller told Merola to pull forward to an area of striped asphalt where customers are typically asked to wait if their orders will take some minute.

Suddenly, Merola heard a car horn blasting behind her. In his cruiser sat Officer Matthew Parco, 30, a member of the force since December 2006. He kept honking and waving his arms, Merola said.

She did nothing.

Then he stepped out of his cruiser, walked up to Merola’s driver side door and asked for her license and registration. Merola bristled. Not until you tell me what I’ve done wrong, she told him.

He told me something about being parked in this particular place, Merola said Friday. I told him this is where the people from McDonald’s told me to park.

—Will Van Sant, St. Petersburg Times (2008-01-19): Her wait for french fries ends with a taste of jail

Little did she know that the McDonald’s parking lot, just like everywhere else in the city, happens to be Officer Matthew Parco’s proprietary domain, and if he tells her to move her car away from where the business occupying the lot told her to move it, she’d better ask How fast, damnit. If she doesn’t recognize her civic duty, it’s probably because she’s old and crazy:

In his report, Parco says he asked Merola to move the Town Car forward a foot to allow cars in line to go around. If he did, Merola said she doesn’t remember it. And it was actually his cruiser blocking people, she said.

But Merola said she was really offended when Parco called a supervisor to say he had a possibly demented woman on his hands who might need to be held under the state’s Baker Act.

—Will Van Sant, St. Petersburg Times (2008-01-19): Her wait for french fries ends with a taste of jail

The Baker Act is a Florida state law which allows any government cop, more or less at his pleasure, to legally declare that you must be crazy and arrest you so that he can force you to undergo a psychiatric exam, possibly to be followed by involuntary commitment to a government-approved psychoprison hospital ward. This unchecked and almost completely discretionary power to ruin your life on a cop’s whim is all For Your Own Good, of course.

He was aggravating me by saying that, Merola said. I said, I don’t have dementia, tell your supervisor.

By then, Merola had called Parco a brat, but the dementia comment stirred anger. Merola upped the ante and called him a smart a— and a dumb s—-.

She’s never been easily pushed around, her daughter said Friday.

She’s not a meek and mild little old lady, said Deborah Burge of Palm Harbor. She’s going to say, Hey, what did I do wrong?

Parco handcuffed Merola behind her back and put her in his cruiser. Another officer arrived and drove her to the Pinellas County Jail, where the widow of 10 years was booked for disorderly conduct. She had no previous criminal record.

—Will Van Sant, St. Petersburg Times (2008-01-19): Her wait for french fries ends with a taste of jail

The cops kept her handcuffed for an hour, to protect themselves from the obvious danger posed by a crying 75-year-old woman. For the terrible and dangerous crime of demanding to know what she did to deserve a cop getting in her face, for not flashing her papers on demand, and for offending against the grave dignity of a petulant, pushy, and insulting Officer Of The Law, Officer Matthew Parco had Jean Merola locked in a cage for the afternoon, and meanwhile impounded her car (which it cost her $160 to recover once she was free).

Trying to account for her own behavior, Merola said she was taught to respect the police because they are there to protect and help you. It’s a message she said she had passed on to her three children.

Despite the uniform, she suggested, Parco just didn’t seem like the real thing.

I guess I felt he wasn’t a police officer, Merola said. He wasn’t there to help me, he was there to be mean to me.

—Will Van Sant, St. Petersburg Times (2008-01-19): Her wait for french fries ends with a taste of jail

Jean Merola no doubt meant that in a metaphorical sense. But I think there’s a very literal sense in which she is right. Professional police are, and ought to be regarded as, ordinary mortals, just like you and me. They are not a special or superior class, and they neither require special privileges nor deserve special immunities from what we normally expect from ordinary decent and honest people. If I got up in an old lady’s face face, implicitly called her crazy, threatened to have her committed, and then responded to the insults that my unhinged behavior so clearly merited by pulling her out of her car, cuffing her behind her back, and locking her in a cage, you’d consider me an asshole, at least. If I did all that based on a complete mistake, in which I barged onto somebody else’s property, ignorantly ordered around people in their parking lot, and then, when corrected about the owner’s policy for use of the parking lot, insisted that I was entitled to tell them how they should run their own damn parking lot and to yell at or arrest anybody who didn’t pay attention to my ideas about how it should be used, you would consider me not only an asshole, but a dangerous lunatic and a menace to public safety. Respect and courtesy are for those who earn it, not for any two-bit punk who figured out how to put on a uniform and swing a night-stick. Those who are actually protecting identifiable innocent people from harm—and I mean in their actions, not in their mission statements—have every right to do what they are doing, and every right to use force to defend others against aggression. Those who think their dress-up games entitle them to shove around old ladies, tell McDonald’s how to do their own job, and lock away anyone who dares question or insult them have no right to exercise force and no entitlement to be treated with anything other than the contempt that any violent bully deserves.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
• GT 2005-05-05: Peace Officers, redux
• GT 2005-04-26: Peace Officers

If you're a certain kind of Republican, I guess it sucks to be you today:

I think the Republican establishment needs to know just how many of us voters will never vote for McCain. I certainly won’t. I’ll just pass if he’s the nominee. I like the country’s chances with 4 years of Hillary better than 8 years of McCain (as much as it pains me to say that about a Republican)…

The electorate needs to know that McCain cannot win in November… and if I’m wrong about that and he does win in November, I think American voters will get the wrong impression of what it means to be a conservative. I have issues with all the Republican candidates and feel that no true conservative is still in the race… but if McCain becomes the nominee, I won’t vote for him.

Remember how I told you back in November that this was coming?

In Florida, another man has died after being tasered by cops:

A man in his 20s died after a Coral Gables police officer used a Taser stun gun to subdue him Friday morning.

He was identified Friday afternoon as Xavier Jones, 29.

Jones had been disruptive at a party and resisted arrest, according to Miami-Dade police, whose homicide bureau is investigating the death.

About 2 a.m., police officers responded to a call about a scuffle at University Inn Condominium, 1280 S. Alahambra Cir., near the University of Miami. The building is across the street from the university and borders on U.S. 1.

After the man became disruptive inside the apartment, a security guard attempted to remove him from the property. The confrontation spilled outside.

Miami-Dade police said Jones displayed aggressive and combative behavior so a police officer used a Taser stun gun to restrain him.

After the discharge, Jones became unresponsive, and paramedics took him to Doctor’s Hospital in Coral Gables, where he was pronounced dead.

—David Ovalle, Miami Herald (2008-01-11): Man who died in Gables Tasing identified

Although I write a lot about police brutality involving tasers, I should make it clear that I don’t have any essential problem with the use of tasers, either by police or in individual self-defense. My issue has to do with the brutality, not with the equipment used, and I think that these incidents have a lot more to do with an arrogant, violent, and completely unaccountable institutional culture within police forces than they have to do with the specifics of painful electric shocks. When tasers weren’t available, cops happily used guns and truncheons; I wouldn’t regard a return to that status quo ante as any kind of progress.

That said, there are a couple of things about the use of tasers which may be some reason for special concern. One of them is the capacity to use painful electric shocks as a form of torture which doesn’t leave embarrassing bruises or other visible signs of the brutality. The second is the persistent and institutionalized dogma that tasers shocks are always a non-lethal use of force. This belief—which naturally makes individual cops and policy-setters much less cautious about the use of tasers than they might otherwise be, is endlessly repeated by cops, PR flacks, and by Taser Inc., which has gone so far as to misrepresent the findings of studies and sending PR flacks to personally lean on coroners to alter their findings in order to insulate their claims from inconvenient empirical evidence. The belief persists, in spite of hundreds of documented cases of people dying soon after being tasered, and in spite of an almost complete lack of controlled research on the health effects of taser shocks (particularly repeated shocks), because the cops’ basic interest is to be able to use as wide a variety of pain compliance techniques as possible without any danger of being held accountable for the consequences; the politicos’ basic interest is to curry favor with the Fraternal Order of Pigs and to come across as tough-on-crime; and Taser Inc.’s basic interest is in making a bloody buck through ongoing political patronage. Given the arrogance of power that they have all cultivated, and the political privileges that they all enjoy, none of them have much reason to be particularly interested in empirical reality, or for that matter in the lives of their victims.

(Story thanks to Strike the Root Blog 2008-01-11.)

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-17: Taser first, ask questions at the autopsy

Attention, holiday shoppers: here’s some Christmas cheer, brought to you courtesy of officer Claudia Wright and the Daytona Beach police department. But first, let’s review.

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. In order to get control of situations that they forced their way into, they routinely hurt people, use force first and ask questions later, and pass off even the most egregious violence against harmless or helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to to coerce compliance with their arbitrary commands, they have no trouble electrifying small children, 82 year old women on a care check, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to end an argument by pepper spraying lawyers who ask inconvenient questions or by beating up teenaged girls who don’t clean up enough spilled birthday cake or walk home too late at night. They are willing to shock you and leave you lying on the side of the highway in order to make sure they can serve you with a dubious traffic ticket. It hardly matters if you cannot obey their commands because you are sound asleep in your own home. It hardly matters if you can’t move due to a medical condition, or can’t hear their bellowed orders because you’re deaf. What a cop can always count on is that, no matter how aggressively he escalates the use of violence and no matter how obviously innocent or helpless his victims are, he can count on his bosses to repeat any lie and make any excuse in order to find that Official Procedures were followed. As long as Official Procedures were followed, of course, any form of brutality or violence is therefore passed off as OK by the boss cops, and the judgment will be dutifully repeated by cop enablers in the newsmedia and the legal system.

One increasingly popular means for domineering cops to force you to follow their bellowed orders is by using high-voltage electric shocks in order to inflict pain. Tasers were originally introduced for police use as an alternative to using lethal force; the hope was that, in many situations where cops might otherwise feel forced to go for their guns, they might be able to use the taser instead, to immobilize a person who posed a threat to them or to others, without killing anybody in the process. But in practice, police culture being what it is, any notion of limiting tasers to those situations very quickly went out the window. Cops armed with tasers now freely use them to end arguments by intimidation or actual violence, to coerce people who pose no real threat to anyone into complying with their instructions, and to hurt uppity civilians who dare to give them lip. Among civilized people, deliberately inflicting severe pain in order to extort compliance from your victim is called torture; among cops it is called pain compliance and is considered business as usual. So shock-happy Peace Officers can now go around using their tasers as high-voltage human prods in just about any situation, with more or less complete impunity. In those rare cases where media criticism, mass riots, or a lawsuit does force some minimal accountability on the police force, the handful of low-level cops who face punishment are portrayed as bad seeds by the same high-level officials who, until then, had been covering up or excusing their actions, any systematic criticism of the procedures or legal privileges or internal culture of the whole police force is promptly dismissed, and the whole thing is written off as yet another isolated incident.

In Daytona Beach, Florida, Elizabeth Beeland, a young mother trying to buy a CD player at a local Best Buy, got an upsetting call about her child while she was checking out. She stepped outside to take the call, and she was upset enough that she left her credit card behind at the counter. Perplexed by the sudden exit, the clerk thought that Beeland might have left suddenly because the card was stolen, and called over Claudia Wright, a cop who was in the store. Here’s how this Peace Officer took control of an uncertain and emotionally-charged situation from there:

When police officer Claudia Wright approached, she said Beeland became verbally profane and abusive.

Wright said she warned Beeland to calm down or face arrest. The officer hit Beeland in the stomach with the Taser darts and arrested her on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

In a video, the customer is seen backing away, then crumpling to the ground after being tasered.

—MSNBC (2007-12-21): Officer uses Taser to tame [sic! —R.G.] Best Buy customer

So a distraught mother is blasted with a 50,000-volt electric shock because she dared to yell at a trained professional police officer, and failed to calm down quickly enough to satisfy the store’s pig-in-residence. Of course, she was backing away from the cop at the time, had her hands raised and visible, did nothing that could even remotely be construed as threatening, and provided no reasonable basis for the cop to presumptively treat her as in any way criminal. (The credit card was, as it happens, not stolen, and at the time Claudia Wright had only the clerk’s unsubstantiated suspicions on which to act as if it were.) But pursuant to the Daytona Beach cops’ policy, she was noncompliant, and therefore could be subdued, i.e., tortured into submission for failing to obey a cop’s bellowed order, even if she posed no credible threat to anyone else’s safety.

Of course, there will be an Official Investigation of the Incident, right? Sure:

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A police officer used a stun gun to subdue a woman who yelled at her in a crowded electronics store, and prosecutors are reviewing whether to pursue charges against the customer.

—Associated Press (2007-12-22): Fla. Officer Shocks Woman Yelling at Her

Let’s review.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A police officer used a stun gun to subdue a woman who yelled at her in a crowded electronics store, and prosecutors are reviewing whether to pursue charges against the customer.

—Associated Press (2007-12-22): Fla. Officer Shocks Woman Yelling at Her

Charges for what? Ah, yes:

Police later verified that Beeland was using her own credit card, but she was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting a police officer without violence. She has since pleaded not guilty.

—MSNBC (2007-12-21): Officer uses Taser to tame [sic] Best Buy customer

In other words, one incredibly vague and immeasurably trivial crime directly produced by the cop’s incompetent and insensitive handling of the situation, and another crime which consists in absolutely nothing other than non-violently defying a cop’s arrogant sense of entitlement to shove other people around. Of course, in real life, outside of statist power-trip la-la land, yelling at a police officer is not a crime, much less one that it would be appropriate to respond to by deliberately inflicting extreme and immobilizing pain.

But, hey, let’s make sure we hear both sides of this story, which the news media will insist on noncommittally presenting, as if the two were obviously equivalent in accuracy and honesty:

Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood defended the officer’s actions, which he said avoided use of other weapons.

Even if you look at the video, when the officer stepped toward her after announcing she’s under arrest, she’s flailing her arms and retreating from the officer, Chitwood said. Police work isn’t pretty. It doesn’t look pretty, but from where we sit, interviewing civilian witnesses and people may or may not agree, but she followed our policy, she followed FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) guidelines.

—MSNBC (2007-12-21): Officer uses Taser to tame [sic] Best Buy customer

As long as she followed Official Procedures, of course, any level of aggression and violence against an unarmed and retreating civilian (!) is perfectly O.K. for the paramilitary cadres occupying Florida cities. Hell, she’s lucky she didn’t get bludgeoned or shot by other weapons! For the record, here’s what those Official Guidelines say:

Police department policy states an officer can deploy his or her TASER for the purpose of subduing a violent, noncompliant or combative subject.

—Central Florida News 13: Woman TASED At Best Buy

Please note that since Beeland was not in any way violent, the claim must be that either she was (1) noncompliant or (2) combative (without being violent), or both. If you happen to be in Florida, please note that, even if you in no way threaten the rights or the physical safety of anybody, a professional Peace Officer will still feel professionally entitled to hit you with an excruciatingly painful 50,000-volt electric shock if you (1) don’t ask how high? when they shout jump, or (2) dare to give them lip.

Civil liberties and human rights groups may see the incident in a different way:

Cop Watch’s George Crosley sees the incident in a different way. His group polices police actions. He said he is stunned by the store surveillance video.

This is wrong, this shouldn’t have happened that way, Crosley said. When the officer starts toward her, you don’t see her threatening the officer, you see her backing off with her hands up, he said. If she couldn’t figure out how to handle it, she should have called for back up. The truth of the matter is, people have died as a result of being tased.

—MSNBC (2007-12-21): Officer uses Taser to tame [sic] Best Buy customer

Not that it would matter much even if she died, as far as the Authorities are concerned, so long as those guidelines got followed.

The ACLU and Amnesty International also have Beeland’s back. Her own lawyer is reviewing the incident. I would like to hope that she sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they’ve got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the city government will settle the case out of court, have the police department send Beeland an Oops, our bad along with some petty cash, and then—public servants that they are—send the bill to a bunch of innocent taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, precisely nothing will happen to authoritarian shock-happy thug Claudia Wright, who will go right on serving and protecting the hell out of civilians in Daytona Beach, whether they want anything to do with it or not.

If you’re baffled that cops could feel free to indulge in this kind of outrage, and that numerous fellow cops, prosecutors, and other government officials would rush to defend it, well, that’s just about why, right there. The State will never police itself; the government will never make a serious effort to protect you from your supposed protectors.

Support your local CopWatch.

So, I have an essay coming up in next month’s Freeman (thanks to the encouragement and editorial efforts of the indefatigable Sheldon Richman). It’s called Scratching By, and the theme is to explain how it’s not the free market, but rather the State, in its role as the invisible fist of corporate capitalism, that creates the material predicament faced by poor folks in American cities. One of the topics that I touched on there, and which I mentioned before in my comments on the South Central Farmers, is government control and planning of inner-city land use. Government regimentation of land squeezes poor people economically; perhaps more importantly, it also keeps them permanently in hock to, and at the mercy of, a select handful of politically-connected developers and slumlords. Last week, Women of Color Blog (2007-11-09) alerted me to the latest example: HUD’s continuing refusal to let New Orleans public housing residents return to their old homes, even two years after the fact. All for their own good, of course, whether or not they happen to think that they are best off living as permanent refugees. The plan is to begin demolishing the homes, now forcibly kept vacant, in order to make room for government redistribution of the land to connected developers for the usual urban renewal projects.

A major human rights crisis exists in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It is a crisis that denies the basic rights to life, equality under the law, and social equity to Black, Indigenous, migrant, and working class communities in the region. While this crisis was in existence long before Hurricane Katrina, the policies and actions of the US government and finance capital (i.e. banking, credit, insurance, and development industries) following the Hurricane have seriously exacerbated the crisis.

One of the clearest examples of this crisis is the denial of the right to housing in New Orleans, particularly in the public housing sector. Since the Hurricane, the US government through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has denied the vast majority of the residents of public housing the right to return to their homes. Unlike the vast majority of the housing stock in New Orleans, the majority of the public housing units received little to no flood or wind damage from the Hurricane. Yet, as of October 2007 only ¼ of the public housing units have been reopened and reoccupied. The Bush government refuses to reopen the public housing units in New Orleans because it appears intent on destroying the public housing system, demolishing the existing structures, and turning over the properties to private real-estate developers to make profits.

Based on the discriminatory Federal Court ruling issued on Monday, September 10th, all of the major public housing units in New Orleans are now subject to immediate demolition (the latest report from Monday, November 5th is that HUD will attempt to start the demolition on Monday, November 19th. However, this is being challenged by various legal advocates and will be delayed until at least Wednesday, November 28th pending a Federal court hearing). The first site on the schedule for demolition is the Lafitte housing project.

—My Private Casbah 2007-11-09: All Public Housing Units In New Orleans Set To Be Demolished

Now, I’m an anarchist. As such, I’m also intent — far more intent than George W. Bush could ever dream to be — on destroying the so-called public housing system. I hope to destroy it right along with the rest of the statist system of regimentation, rationing, command and control. But, the Department of Bulldozers’ opinions notwithstanding, destroying the system of control is not the same thing as knocking over the homes that the government controls. The hope is to liberate them and allow people to reclaim their lives from the domination of the State and the exploitation of state capitalism.

As far as these particular public housing units are concerned, the proper question to ask is, who rightfully owns the homes that are set to be demolished? In the eyes of the State legal system, that’s the Housing Authority of New Orleans, a quasi-governmental non-profit corporation substantially under the control of its patron, the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. But neither HANO nor any other creature of the State can be the rightful owner of this or any other property. States are nothing more than massive criminal enterprises; they have no land and no money except what they expropriate from others by force. Their claim to the Lafitte housing project, like all their other claims, is fraudulent, because piracy is not a legitimate means for acquiring title to anything.

So if not HANO, who are the rightful owners? Well, when property has been lost or abandoned, it rightfully belongs to those who find it and put it to use. In the case of New Orleans and its government housing projects, that means that the people who should rightfully be regarded as the owners are not HUD or HANO bureaucrats, but rather the current tenants. Each resident has gained a legitimate ownership interest in her home, and in the land that it is built on, in virtue of occupying and homesteading it. Radical libertarians should recognize, on free market principles, that the federal government’s interventionist efforts to lock poor people out of their own homes and pass the land along to the nearest professional slumlord for development should be regarded as nothing more or less than State-sponsored theft. Specifically, State-sponsored theft in the name of propping up the political-economic class system of landlordism.

The radical implications of the homesteading principle for urban housing extend far beyond New Orleans. In pretty much every major American city, there is a more or less permanent supply of vacant lots, burned-out plants, condemned buildings, and other land which has been held out of use for years, and will continue to be held out of use for years to come. Part of the reason that so much land remains idle is that formal title has often been seized by the city government or by quasi-governmental development corporations, through the use of eminent domain, and the lots are simply abandoned while they await government public works projects or developers willing to buy up the land for large-scale building. In a free market, vacant lots and abandoned buildings should be available for homesteading by anyone willing to do the work of occupying and using them — which emphatically includes poor people in search of housing, a place to set up shop, land to cultivate for food, or for whatever other use they can put it to. It is only government intervention on behalf of state capitalism that keeps these lots shuttered and keeps them locked up in the hands of government bureaucrats and real estate developers; without statism there would be no political process of expropriation, demolition, redistribution, and redevelopment. Free people would be able to establish property rights in abandoned land, and thus provide their own housing, free of landlords and bulldozers, through their own sweat equity.

It’s because of this that I’ve been following the Take Back the Land movement in Miami with a lot of interest and a lot of sympathy. Their first project, the Umoja Village shanty-town (1, 2), was as good an example as you could like of socializing the land through direct action. And now, Max Rameau writes that their new project is to Take Back the Housing:

October 23, 2007 marks one year since the rise of the Umoja Village Shantytown in the Liberty City section of Miami in response to the crisis of gentrification and low income housing. In the year since this “people power” action, much has changed and much more remains the same. Black and other poor communities are ravaged by the crisis of gentrification and low-income housing while the same government which extracts taxes from us, does nothing to alleviate the crisis. One year later, the issue of community control over land remains fundamental in solving the crisis.

As the real estate bubble explodes around us, vacant foreclosed homes litter our communities and speculators choose to hold onto vacant houses and apartments, waiting for the next market swing in order to make their millions. For it’s part, in spite of all the scandal and crisis, Miami-Dade County doggedly maintains an unconscionable and immoral stockpile of vacant public housing units, units which otherwise would shelter some of the 41,000 families languishing on the housing assistance waiting list.

All the while, the homeless population grows, particularly among the under-housed, those not living on the street, but doubling and tripling up in single family homes, including public housing, where the extra families live illegally, endangering the housing security of the entire extended family, sometimes right next door to a boarded up, vacant unit.

We are forced to conclude that Miami-Dade County intentionally leaves units vacant, or tears down public housing all together—exemplified by the HOPE VI funded Scott-Carver public housing project demolition—as a means of fueling the real estate boom. When governments take units of low-income housing off of the market, the value of the remaining privately held units increases, as families scramble to find new living arrangements. This is nothing short of tax financed market manipulation, designed to decrease supply at a time when demand is sky high, resulting in a government sponsored—not market driven—real estate boom.

… In spite of the crisis, scandal and controversy, the reality is that local governments continue to enrich wealthy developers and have intentionally failed to address this crisis in any meaningful way. Neither Miami-Dade County nor the federal government operates based on the interests of poor Black people. As such, we are left with no other option than to provide for the people for whom the government is not providing.

Take Back the Land, again, asserts the right of the Black community to control land in the Black community. In order to provide housing for people, not for profit, this community control over land must now take the form of direct community control over housing.

Consequently, Take Back the Land has initiated the process of moving families and individuals into vacant housing, whether public, foreclosed upon or privately owned and intentionally vacated.

As of this writing, several families have already been moved into housing and several more are desperately awaiting their turn. We will move families and individuals into vacant housing units all across Miami-Dade County.

—Take Back the Land 2007-10-24: Take Back the Housing

A true free market requires an end to what Benjamin Tucker rightly condemned as the land monopoly, and a radical application of the homestead principle, which means that an awful lot of squatter’s rights can and should be recognized as the basis of a just claim to the land. While I disagree with Tucker on some of the specifics of rightful land ownership — for example, I don’t think that rental contracts necessarily constitute abandonment of land — I do agree that absentee landlordism is artificially propped up by a pervasive and unjust system of government intervention on behalf of the rentier class. Abandoned land rightfully belongs to those who can reclaim it through occupancy and use. So three cheers from this libertarian to Take Back the Land, and here’s hoping that counter-economic urban homesteading will spread — throughout Miami, onward to New Orleans, and throughout every housing market currently clutched in the talons of land monopoly and state capitalism.

Further reading:

• Charles Johnson, Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It. Forthcoming in The Freeman (December 2007).
• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2006-06-14: Enclosure comes to Los Angeles
• Murray Rothbard (1969), Confiscation and the Homestead Principle. Originally from Libertarian Forum; reprinted by William Gillis.

In Florida, a white prison gang brutally beat a Black 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson to death last year. Anderson had been sentenced to a juvenile boot camp prison in rural Florida as punishment for taking his grandmother’s car for a joyride and then violating the terms of his probation. Within hours of his arrival, gang members surrounded him, held him down, punched him, kicked him, and, while restraining him, held hands over his mouth for up to five minutes at a stretch. They went on beating him for half an hour. They kept on beating him even as he lay limp and unable to move. The attack was captured on tape in a surveillance video, and the autopsy report concluded that Anderson died of suffocation. But just a couple weeks ago, in spite of the video, in spite of the report, the thugs who murdered Martin Lee Anderson were acquitted by an all-white jury in Panama City, Florida. Why? Because when they battered Martin Lee Anderson to death, the gang colors they were wearing looked like this:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy’s death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). It’s wrong! Anderson’s mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read.

—Tim Padgett, TIME 2007-10-17: What’s Wrong With Florida’s Prisons?

(Story thanks to Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25 and The Bias Committee 2007-10-18.)

There’s more. Because there is always fucking more. For example, there are the repeated efforts by state and local officials to cover up the murder. Or there are the other cases.

The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards’ boot prints were found all over his back.

… The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner “warehousing” culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as malicious and sadistic use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates’ skin, according to the suit. Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct, says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state’s current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

… In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled 135% beyond capacity, died when nurses ignored his pleas for help after his appendix burst. The nurses were later charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, to which they have pleaded not guilty, and their trials are pending. Prosecutors at the trial of Valdes — who was awaiting execution for murdering a Palm Beach County corrections officer in 1987 — contended that one of the reasons he was beaten was the letters he’d begun writing to the media about abuses at Florida State Prison under its then warden, James Crosby. That made it all the more surprising when Bush appointed Crosby secretary of the state’s Corrections Department in 2003. Then last year Crosby was convicted after a sweeping federal probe of corruption inside the state’s prisons — and he’s now serving eight years in prison himself.

Whenever these kind of atrocities happen, mainstream media sources routinely decry and marginalize them in the same breath, by describing the sadism and the violence as abuses within the prison system, rot within the corrections culture, etc. This admits the problem while not really taking it seriously. In fact, intimidation and violence are the currency of control in prisons as we know them, and these practices bear no meaningful relationship whatsoever to any defense against imminent threats: convicts are imprisoned and coerced whether or not their crimes were violent, whether or not their crimes were even particularly serious, and whether or not there is any realistic chance that they will pose an ongoing threat to anybody in the future, because the hangman State exercises its power in the name of after-the-fact deterrence of unrelated parties, in the name of rehabilitation, and sometimes in the name of punishment and vengeance. This is not a matter of some fundamentally humane institution being perverted, under the influence of corrupt individuals or a corrupt internal culture, into an abuse of power. The thing itself is the abuse.

Related:

• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2006-04-07: Over My Shoulder #18: Barbara Deming’s A World Without Prisons (1970), from We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

(Via Women of Color Blog 2007-10-07 and Anthony Gregory @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-10-10.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who are not posing any serious threat to anyone, in order to make sure that they stay in control of the situation. They have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women possibly guilty of a minor traffic violation, or students who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers—while they are already lying helpless on the ground. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up 15 year old girls for daring to give them lip over whether to clean up spilled cake. They routinely use intimidation, threats, and violence whenever they get tired enough of being talked back to and if their bellowed orders are no longer sufficient to end an argument—even without any plausible reason whatsoever for fearing any physical threat to themselves or others. When they are caught in the act police administrators will wring their hands, make up some lies to try to excuse the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all; meanwhile a chorus of sado-fascists can be counted on to cheer the pigs and smear the victim in print media, talk shows, and the Internet. Both administrators and freelance sycophants freely employ the most tortured sorts of necessity excuses, in what seems to be a deliberate effort to obliterate any notion of restraints on the use of force in securing police objectives.

In Fort Pierce, Florida, a white male cop named Dan Gilroy recently stopped a 15 year old black girl named Shelwanda Riley, and then placed her under arrest, for walking outside at 1:50 in the morning. (City ordinances forbid anyone under 18 from being on city streets without an adult minder between 11:00pm and 6:00am.) Here is the police video of Gilroy twisting her arm, telling her that he is going to hurt her to make her comply, wrenching her arm behind her back, punching her in the face, and then pepper-spraying her right after that, just for good measure.

Note that after he shoved her into the car, this grown man later proceeded to charge the 15 year old girl that he forced down, beat up, and pepper-sprayed, with felony battery. The Authorities at the police department are Investigating, but Gilroy is still on active duty, and the local police chief, Sean Baldwin, says that Initial review of the incident concluded that the police officer acted legally and within bounds.

For the time being, I want to set aside the obvious, stupid tyranny of the law that Dan Gilroy was so diligently trying to enforce. City governments have no business at all keeping tabs on where or when teenagers happen to be out, and cops have no business enforcing laws that city governments have no business making. But even if they did, this kind of thuggery from the police would still be inexcusable.

The sado-fascist police enablers will, no doubt, mutter something about The Law and about keeping public order. They will no doubt point out the fact that the girl was resisting arrest by not submitting to the cop’s bellowed orders to let him handcuff her. They will no doubt point out the fact that, after he told her he was going to hurt her and then wrenched her arm behind her back, she bit at his wrist. They will no doubt claim that a grown man punching a 15-year-old girl in the face and then pepper-spraying her after he had punched her, in spite of the fact that she had done nothing else at that point to indicate that she posed any further threat, was necessary for the officer to successfully complete the arrest. But suppose that this were all true. Then so what?

Even supposing that this cop had any kind of business arresting Shelwanda Riley, so what if he could not complete the arrest without doing these things? So what if he would otherwise have had to stand around waiting until she was willing to submit to arrest, or if he would otherwise have had to give up and let her get away when it became clear that beating her up was the only way to get her cuffed, or if he would have had to let go and back off in order to avoid getting hit by her or bit by her or whatever the hell it is he was so worked up about? So what if she even—perish the thought!—happened to get away from him?

Even if you have a right to do something, that does not mean that you have the right to do it by any means necessary; sometimes there’s no way that you can get it done without using a levels of force that are disproportionate to the case, and in that case you simply have to give up on it; even if you were in the right, using force beyond what’s proportional to the situation turns you into a criminal and turns your enforcement into nothing more than an assault. If the cops cruising around our city streets think that the violence Dan Gilroy used here is worthwhile and within bounds of the proportional use of force — beating up teenaged girls and hurting them with pepper-spray just to make sure they don’t get away with the dreadful crime of wandering around outside too late at night, then that may tell you all that you need to know about the institutional culture of policing in America today.