Monthly Archives: June 2018

Law and the Ordinary Person

In our lifetimes, at some point, most of us will experience contact with law enforcement. It could be for something that happened to us, such as a burglary or a motor vehicle crash, or it could be something we caused, like a burglary or a motor vehicle crash. There are so many ways a person can have contact with law enforcement, and it isn’t always clear what kind of attention you will get, or what kind of treatment you deserve. What happens at the upper socioeconomic levels is frequently different from what happens to the ordinary Joe or Jane, but not always.

When I was a teenager, I was one of those kids who didn’t follow the straight and narrow path to success. In retrospect, my life would have been so much easier if I had, but you know that hindsight is always 20/20. I grew up in the suburbs, where there were few racial minorities. The times were such that, during the early 1970s when I was a young teenager, I and my cohort of teenagers painted targets on our backs, in the form of boys growing out their hair, and everybody wearing faded jean bellbottoms and jean jackets, along with other types of fashion, like fake army jackets, peace symbol patches, American flag patches on the buttocks (although I can’t remember seeing any of those at my high school). So we, in effect, made ourselves into minorities and, essentially,  law enforcement targets. It doesn’t sound very strategic, but those were the times and the fashions of the times, and teenagers are nothing if not slaves to fashion. The cops in my town had a reputation of being tough, particularly on speeders and illegal drug users and dealers. I had a few run-ins with them, but nothing really serious. I made it out of high school without any majorly bad experiences with the cops. But I had a decidedly negative view of law enforcement, especially street-level drug enforcement.

Fast-forward to my middle-age years, when I got a job working at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. The RMV being a quasi-law enforcement agency, I met many police officers, encountering both state and local cops on a daily basis. I became friends with some of them, as well as with people trying to get jobs in law enforcement. I liked them. I could joke around with them, and I didn’t feel constrained by trying to be too politically correct. I could be myself. And I liked that. So I changed my views on police officers, going from decidedly negative to decidedly positive.

And then we started to get all these amateur videos of police officers laying a beat-down on black men, sometimes killing them. Let me say for the record: I don’t toe anybody’s line when it comes to views on law enforcement, especially on racially-charged red hot media stories. There was the one in North Carolina when a cop shot a black man in the back, then appeared to try to rig the evidence in his favor. Now that was pretty cut-and-dried. The man, Walter Scott, shouldn’t have bolted from the cop, Michael Slager. But the penalty for poor judgement shouldn’t be death. That case was not open to interpretation. Then there was the one where a man was shot by police while his girlfriend recorded the whole thing. She was providing a running narrative while begging the cops not to shoot her boyfriend, who was a black man named Philando Castile. He was shot in Minnesota by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez, a man of Hispanic descent. He was acquitted and fired from his job. I don’t understand why he felt he had to shoot that man. I don’t think he did it with malicious intent, but he should at least have been convicted of manslaughter, in my opinion.

But the mother of all of these stories was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. What I will say about that is that shooting served as a catalyst for a long-simmering rage about black people being profiled and fined and, if unable to pay the fine, jailed. It is understandable from that point of view, but it is regrettable that the good people of Ferguson chose such a miserable case to hang their outrage on. Michael Brown was found to have tried to grab the officer’s weapon. DNA evidence confirms the fact. This is the Department of Justice report. It says that the shooting was justified. Of course, nobody, at least no good person, wants to see a young man cut down in his prime. But he asked for it. The Washington Post, not known for its conservative views, believes that the report was fair.

What has happened to me now is that I have rebounded to the middle of the road. It is hard to be middle of the road on anything these days, and things are conflated together, as in, if you respect police officers, you must be a racist, right-wing Trump supporter. If you support black people in their protests against police shootings of their young men, you must be anti-cop. I’m not anti-cop at all, nor am I a Trump supporter (unless Trump supporters are allowed to hate Trump’s guts).

I started watching the Cops TV show in the early 1990s. For many years, I was a crime-show junkie. Both true-crime and fictional shows. I still like them, but not as much as I used to. But what seems to be the normal course of action, from just about everything I’ve seen on video showing real cops in action, is that they seem to use overwhelming force in almost every situation. I have no idea if it’s like that in other countries. I have seen, almost exclusively, American videos. What I would guess, and this is just an educated guess, is that, in dictatorships, police officers behave similarly to American cops, probably worse. Furthermore, I would guess that, in Western European democratic countries, they use as much force as necessary to do what they have to, no more. In some countries in Europe, cops don’t even carry guns. But, in defense of American cops, that ship sailed a long time ago. America is armed to the teeth. To expect police not to be also, would be crazy. But I just don’t really see why it takes four police officers to practically sit on an unarmed suspect while delivering punches to his supine body, in order to effect a lawful arrest. Admittedly I’m not a professional in the field, but I have watched many, many videos of real-life police arrests. It seems to me that they could, in many cases, do what they need to do without assaulting the person they are arresting. I get that they have to protect themselves, but they also have a duty to protect and serve the communities that employ them. I think that there needs to be a major overhaul of police officer training in America (once Trump is gone, of course). They need to be instructed on how to effect a lawful arrest without resorting to breaking the law themselves, and committing assault and battery on their suspect. Although this behavior is extreme, I think that lesser versions of what happened in that link to a crime by the Pennsylvania State Police, lesser versions of their crimes happen on a daily basis.

First, we need to excise the cancer of Donald Trump and his corrupt administration from our body politic. Then, we need to set up a commission on American human rights and police policies, and throw some serious money into it. The rewards would far exceed the cost.

 

John McCain, Trump Supporters, Joe Scarborough

Three names. Two are individuals, one is a group. Not all of Trump’s fans hate John McCain. But I think it’s a safe bet that most of them don’t think much of Senator McCain. If they did, they would not be supporting the obscenity named Donald John Trump. The third name in my title, Joe Scarborough, is a former state representative from Florida, and also a former Republican. He didn’t give up his conservative values, just the party that no longer represents them. Although I am not conservative, I have great respect for Joe Scarborough, as well as conservative Republican Senator John McCain. I disagree with conservatives on policy matters, but I still respect them if they have integrity. Both of these American patriots have integrity. Now, as for you Trump lackeys, chew on this:

The Law Is Not Subjective

Okay, we are living in Alice in Wonderland times. Up is down, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East, the Earth is flat, and saying something many, many times makes it true. Which is what our current president must think, because he keeps repeating the same nonsense over and over again. “There is no collusion” he bellows. Any news that casts him in a negative light is “Fake News”, a cry that has been taken up by various strongmen throughout the world. Our president Trump is giving

full-fledged (not wannabe) dictators the imprimatur of the president of the largest democracy in the world. Donald has shown no respect for the rule of law nor for the Constitution of the United States, yet he considers himself a law-and-order president.

Trump has shown no respect to the country he was sworn to represent. He consistently behaves as though he was a Manchurian president, installed by Russia and working for the Russian government. He is dragging our country’s reputation down by treating our allies like dirt, while cozying up to murderous dictators such as Duterte and Putin. They are “strong” and they command his respect, while our democratic allies who we need as much as they need us are treated like weak rulers.

Trump and his family, as well as his Cabinet, are making a joke of the emoluments clause in the Constitution. He and his family have profited to the tune of many millions of dollars from his presidency. His Republican party in Congress has thus far refused to even try to rein him in. And yet, the Republican party has traditionally considered itself the law-and-order party, as opposed to the “soft on crime” Democratic party. Which is an old canard without any factual basis.

The law of the land in America is not dependent on who you are, what you are, how much you have, or anything that makes us different from each other. We are all the same under the law. Trump and the Republican party want to selectively enforce our laws. The president can be elected with the help of a foreign power. No problem, say his enablers. He can profit wildly from his office. No comment. He can destroy our alliances that have kept the world in one piece since 1945. Change the subject. He can lie like a rug, throw our intelligence agencies under the bus while cozying up to dictatorships. He can openly advocate prison for a political opponent. He can openly ask a foreign power for help finding “30,000 emails” of Hillary Clinton’s. It’s funny how, a year and a half after the election, Trump is still talking about her. It’s because he needs a scapegoat to work his con.

Donald Trump and his attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions are viciously enforcing a law at our southern border in a way reminiscent of dictatorship policies. Taking children away from their mothers. Hey, that’s the law. If you don’t want to suffer, don’t break the law. That is what they say. But here is the truth: These men are bandits and traitors. Using racism and tribalism, Trump and his crooked administration have convinced a large number of extremely dense people that they have their best interests at heart, and that they are doing right by them and helping them. I don’t see it. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, doesn’t see it either. Joe is a former Republican and he is still a conservative, but the Republican party no longer represents his values. He really has a way of showing the truth.

Check it out. Also check this out:

Joe Scarborough is a well-known conservative with a real gift for oratory. He knows what a traitor looks like. He also knows what a fool looks like. He calls them out. And I am with him every single solitary step of the way. He is an American man, not a weak traitor kissing up to dictatorships or supporting those who fit that description. Trump’s base is a bunch of people who fit the categories of sucker, racist, feeble-minded, tribal, and I ain’t done yet. I could continue, but you get the picture. I am sharing the country with a whole bunch of deplorables. The people who still support Trump after all that has happened, those people, they can’t be reasoned with. They are too far gone. They can only be defeated at the voting booth. They need to have their leaders removed from power, so they can no longer damage America, so they can no longer try to pollute rivers and American skies, so they can no longer take health care away from the sick, so they can no longer remove consumer protections from predatory banking practices, so they can no longer enact tax policies that favor the wealthy and cause injury and sickness and death to the poor.

Trump, Majority Leader Sen. McConnell, and House Speaker Ryan are partners in crime. They are not working for the good of America. They are working for the wealthy and white Republicans. They need to be removed from their jobs. This article from The Atlantic has some advice on the subject. I intend to follow that advice for the rest of my life.