Charles P. Pierce - Under Color Of The Law
One of the sad and curious consequences of the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut a couple of years back was the fact that, rather than being chastened by the savagery and encouraged by it to help seek solutions to the country's insane devotion to its firearms, the radical gun-rights community, abetted by the gun industry's front group and primary sales organization, the National Rifle Association, intensified its efforts to roll back even the weak regulations currently in place. It was an effective and brutal demonstration of the American right's political devotion to the orders Stalin gave the Red Army when the Germans attacked. "Ni shagu nazad." Not one step backwards. And by and large, especially at the federal level, it worked. The "teachable moment" was as evanescent as the morning dew. It's happening again, in a roughly similar context.
Obscured by events in the Levant, there has been a spate of police-on-citizen violence over the past few weeks. In South Carolina, a state trooper shot an unarmed man at a gas station who was simply going for his driver's license, which the officer himself had ordered him to do. In Ohio, the case of John Crawford III, the man gunned down in a WalMart because he was holding a BB gun, intensified with the release of a video of the shooting. (In Crawford's case, a woman who witnessed the events had a heart attack and died. Collateral damage.) In Utah, there are two shootings that have roiled two communities. In one, a 22-year old was shot and killed while in costume as a Japanese anime character and carrying a sword. (Like the Ohio WalMart shooting, this episode began when a nervous citizen called the cops.) In the other, an unarmed man was shot outside a 7-11. All of this, of course, comes in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by Officer Darren Wilson, and the subsequent protests. This was supposed to lead to a national conversation about the militarization and training of local police departments. To be fair, that conversation is going on. But unarmed citizens are still being shot. Ni shagu nazad. Not one step backwards.
(And things in Ferguson are heating up again. Somebody torched an improvised memorial to Brown, and local police officers have taken to wearing wristbands that say, "I Am Darren Wilson." If this keeps up, any trial of Wilson in connection with Brown's death is going to have to be held on Jupiter.)
Something has gone badly wrong in the relationship between local police and the citizens they are supposed to serve. It has taken a long time to get to this point. It probably began during the early days of the "war" on drugs, in which local police were encouraged to believe that almost anything was permissable because they were facing a well-armed and well-financed "enemy" in the streets. This introduced the "Powell Doctrine" of overwhelming force to local law-enforcement, with all that entailed, including arming local sheriff's departments as though they were heavy-weapon platoons advancing on Bastogne. This attitude, and the equipment available to act it out, naturally bled over from drug busts to local police work in general.
much more
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Police_And_The_Citizens
