OFF THE WIRE
agingrebel.com
A couple of years ago I found myself – as all of us in the new and improved
America, even old housecats like me, must inevitably and repeatedly find
ourselves – on my knees as when I pray, in my driveway, shivering in a winter
night’s rain. My hands were cuffed behind my back and three policemen wearing
visible body armor were pointing guns at me. Two of them held black, automatic
handguns with the sort of high capacity magazines I must never be allowed to
possess and they both were doing that cop trick – you know that thing where you
hold both your pistol and a flashlight in both hands at once. So when I looked
right I was blinded by the light.
Thirty feet straight in front of me my neighbor, call him Bob, had emerged
grinning and fascinated by my humiliation. Bob is a lawyer who specializes in
the lucrative practice of screwing injured men out of their workman’s
compensation claims and we were never friends. But after years of reading the
half-hidden glances of his ripe and voluptuous wife, I got the idea that some
days Bob liked to live through me and some days his wife liked it when he did.
“Get back in your house now, sir! It’s dangerous here,” a voice hidden in the
blinding glow commanded and of course Bob obeyed. He scurried back inside where,
mostly hidden by a curtain, he continued to peek at me through his front window
unconcerned by the potential danger my exploding head might present. Maybe Bob
had Kevlar curtains. Maybe he was just being brave.
On my left, well out of my reach but well illuminated, was an aging police
sergeant with some sort of a gee-whiz gun. I belong to a generation of men who
still call the M-16 rifle and all its variants the gee-whiz gun.
And that particular gee-whiz gun was a real beauty. It had a collapsible
stock with the usual pistol grip. Some sort of miniaturized astronomical
telescope occupied the top of the receiver group where the carrying handle
should be. It had a sling, a front grip like a Tommy Gun, some sort of
electronic device under the front sight and a banana clip. I’ve always thought
simple systems work best and this particular weapon struck me as complicated and
theatrical. And since my curse, from about the time I turned three, has always
been my smart mouth I asked the trig sergeant, in that annoying way I have, “Is
that a real, fucking gun?”
My question made him frown and without missing a beat he snapped back, “Of
course it’s a real gun!” He took himself very seriously. He was very proud of
his rifle and I’m sure he thought I was way out of line for a man on his knees.
I suppose I should have just been glad they didn’t run over my motorcycle with a
Bearcat.
At Last The Point
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I am not the only person to
notice the police-stating of Thomas Jefferson’s aging ideals. And, at the same
time I am probably more willing than most people to care about Radley Balko’s
new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police
Forces.
Balko is currently a senior writer and investigative reporter for the
Huffington Post, where he covers civil liberties and the criminal
justice system. He is a former senior editor for the libertarian monthly
Reason. His politics may explain why Warrior Cop has been
mostly ignored. Although The Wall Street Journal did give Balko almost
two full broadsheet pages last Saturday, July 20th, to talk about postmodern
policing he hasn’t yet become one of Bill Maher’s special guests.
Balko is hardly an ideologue. He is a lucid and considerate writer. His prose
is muscular and his work is information dense so it is curious that his latest
book hasn’t yet been reviewed by the New York Times Book Review,
The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker or any of the
other national periodicals that define America’s reading list. The problem is
probably that most of America’s Mandarin class more readily identifies with a
Trayvon Martin who was stalked and killed by a nut with a gun than with the
likes of me on my knees in the rain cracking wise about some fool’s precious
machine gun. As Balko puts it, “Most Americans still believe we live in a free
society and revere its core values.”
Balko wrote this book to answer the question: “How did we get here? How did
we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers
of armed, standing government forces – a country that enshrined the Fourth
Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and revered and protected the
age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary – to a country
where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dress in battle garb
to storm private homes in the middle of the night – not to apprehend violent
fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent,
consensual activities.” Whether he succeeded or not depends on your cynicism.
The more cynical you are the more likely you are to think that Balko might be
soft-selling the situation. But it is a meticulously researched book about a
problem that should be at the top of the nation’s agenda yet is not.
We Also Have Noticed
This page has taken several looks at Swat in America, for example in “Swat Murdered Russell
Doza”, and with all due respect for this book and without intending to
offend the man, one gets the impression that Balko has never heard of an
indicia search – a pervasive form of extra-judicial punishment aimed
specifically at known members of motorcycle clubs in which a Swat team invades a
home in the darkest hour before dawn, kills the pets and sometimes the residents
and terrorizes and humiliates those residents who survive on the pretext of
searching for tangible proof, in the forms of mementos and insignia, that a
known member of a motorcycle club is in fact a member of a motorcycle club.
It is a shame Balko never stumbled over the tragedy of James Hicks, whose
home was invaded and who was killed during an indicia search in late
2009. The search found a “shotgun, a bank statement, assorted photos, (2)
motorcycle helmets, MC Club patches, 2 Pagan walking sticks, camera, Samsung
video camera” and “assorted ammunition.” And, it lasted for hours while the new
widow Hicks was compelled by the police to grieve, not in her home and not over
her husband’s body, but in the restroom of a nearby gas station.
Most readers here will also remember the murder of a Pagan named Derek J.
Hale in Wilmington, Delaware in 2006.
Buy A Copy
But these little complaints are really only quibbles that Balko doesn’t cite
my most memorable Swat atrocities. The fact is that there is a Swat atrocity
somewhere in America every single day. And, Balko did manage to find a lady cop
named Betty Taylor. Taylor had her own satori when she opened a door
during a Swat raid and found an eight-year-old girl in “a defensive posture,
putting herself between Taylor and her little brother. She looked at Taylor and
said, half tearful, half angry, “What are you going to do to us.”
Balko spends about 40 pages on the history of cops and then concentrates on
the evolution of police since the invention of Swat in the 1960s. He spends
almost 70 pages on the incorporation of domestic policing into the war on terror
in the last decade. And he does not spare politicians of either party. He calls
both George W. Bush and Barack Obama to account.
If you like the things you read here you will also like reading almost
anything by Radley Balko. If you are hungry to know more about how America is
becoming a police state, you should read this book. And, if you want to do
something about it you should encourage anyone who will listen to you to read
Rise of the Warrior Cop.
