The US Justice Department has completed a review of Seattle Police Department practices and concluded that there is systematic violation of civil rights in Seattle, especially targeting minorities, and that the violations are concentrated on relatively few officers.
I spent eight years assisting a retired Seattle Police detective in writing his memoirs and I came to the same conclusion.
A previous Seattle Chief of Police, Norm Stamper, claimed in his autobiography that all Police Departments need reform every twenty years or so. What other organization needs to be fixed so often? Municipal police departments have only been around about 150 years, before that there were many other mediating institutions to keep the peace.
Within weeks of this scathing report on Seattle Police, a citizen finds that while his life was in debate after being struck by a truck, “first responder” police officers were mocking him for stupidity and mimicking the foreign accent of the truck driver. Police officers have no concern regarding the Justice Department review.
One has to step way back to see why police departments cannot be reformed.
A society has an organizing principal, of some sort, which emerges out of an organic process of contending people and factions, strife and worry, and ultimately some kind of compromise. That is a précis of any history of any culture.
In the worldwide times of strife circa 500 BC there were many schools of thought as to how to order society. It is a recurring artifact of history that the philosophy that orders society in a manner consistent with oppression, complimenting both those infected with libido dominandi and those who clamor to be oppressed, a perfect match, is the philosophy that wins out. It is matter of time. It has always been thus.
History shows time and again how at critical junctures ideas of a good and just society are proffered by such philosophers as Mo Ti, but it is the ideas of rivals such as Confucius that win out. Inevitably, the philosophers who come down on the side of freedom are rejected, the ones who advise putting a halo on oppression are the ones who win out.
The lesser philosophies win out for the simple reason most people want to be oppressed, desire to trade a wee bit of freedom for a whole lot of avoidance of responsibility. This is well illustrated in 1 Samuel 8, where God Almighty Himself found his offer for peace, freedom and prosperity rejected by His people.
After a degenerative system gets established, there are times of respite, of sorts, for some, and a writer will observe the status quo, explain it, and be considered seminal, or at least celebrated. These writers are not authors, they are merely explicators, observers, messengers.
Max Weber was one such social observer. He noted the end of struggle regarding the divine rights of kings vs the divine right of the church, and the triumph of the divine right of the state. Where the church had its clerics, and the kings had their lawyers, the state has the bureaucrat. This was a burgeoning profession, one in which the new mega-state of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and their imitators in the democracies, offered plenty of opportunity. (China is fairly unusual inasmuch as a latecomer to modernization, it still has vestiges of the mediating institutions that allow it to be ruled by relatively few people. Mao tried to end that with his policies, but he did not have time for total destruction of Chinese society.)
And there are more than enough people who will take on the task of being Pharaoh, in ways small and large. Aquinas called this condition libido dominandi, or lust for power. We all went to school with people whose thrived on dominating others, both bullies and charismatics. And their followers.
In his advice to young people who seek power, called Politics as Profession, Weber defined the state as a territory with a monopoly on violence. Whatever the game of the state happens to be, it is to be protected by its monopoly on violence.
It is this very definition that attracts certain people to this kind of power, the violence, or as Mao put it, “"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Aquinas also noted the condition of superbia vitae, pride of life, that conceit that “my life is more important than yours.” Hillary Clinton touched on this ambition in her graduation address to students at Wellesley in which she noted: “We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.”
At 22 yeas old Hillary was signaling not so much that she wanted change, and her personal history since then bears this out, but merely that she wanted to be in charge. She and others went on to pursue careers in politics, and assemble like-minded followers behind themselves. You’ll find these people in any society, their motivation is clear enough.
But it is not enough to be motivated, one must have the means to concentrate and exercise power. In the capitalist countries, the game is capitalism. It is played by fractional reserve banking, and concentrates power in the hands of a few, while at the same time constricting the freedom of people who borrow money at interest.
The idea was so odious to the freedom loving founders of this country that the man who championed this method of oppression, Alexander Hamilton, was shot and killed by the Vice President of the US at the time, Aaron Burr. People took their freedom seriously back then. Hamilton is loved by the Capitalists, who pay for the History books, so American hero Aaron Burr gets a frown if he is mentioned at all.
Thomas Jefferson noted in the declaration of independence
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Jefferson’s adversary, indeed, the enemy of all freedom loving people, Alexander Hamilton noted:
“Safety from external danger, is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war; the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.” The Federalist No. 8, p. 33.
This was not warning from Hamilton, but a game plan. He was offering an explanation of why his policies would win out in time, and they did. His most ardent proponents today are the followers of Lyndon Larouche, the fringe group eager to take over the system we have in place. The warfare/welfare state. Oppression through usury.
But is is an unholy construct, that works for some by necessarily harming others. In time, people begin to resist, and their political betters must push back. For a polity with a monopoly on violence, resistance is to be met with violence, especially resistance to political initiatives. As Mao said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
The first line of defense of this system is the police officers. Under no circumstances is a police officer to be discredited, not even for murder. The police officers know this, and all of the reform in the world will not address the underlying problem, and that is a system that is grounded in violence, and the people who are attracted to that kind of work.
Now people will complain that most police officers are law-abiding, decent individuals. This may be the case. But as I learned from assisting a retired police detective in writing his memoirs, there is an active program to recruit and corrupt officers who will do the dirty work necessary to keep the powers that be free of resistance. A small group of officers who are ready willing and able to lie, cheat, steal and even murder to protect the powers that be. All other police officers, decent or not, do the indecent thing and support these officers when they do evil. The fact is, a police officer’s life depends on it, because when there is a situation an officer cannot handle, he can count on back-up to come in and make it a win for the police, whatever it takes. if you do not utterly submit to the friendly smiling cop, there is a cruel and stupid cop to whom you will submit. They are on every shift.
A favorite line is “you may beat the rap, but not the ride.” This means although you may be found innocent in a trial, between the arrest and trial is a dreadful process you cannot escape.
Let me give one example, and not even the worst. There was a fellow the police did not care for, and the police get a warrant to search his home for drugs. Judges hand out warrants like confetti, so no problem there. A search is conducted, and no drugs are found. And then again. Finally, a sergeant will pass on the word this fellow must be busted. Among the officers hearing this is one of those who “gets things done.” As the officers make their dynamic entry serving the warrant, an older officer tosses a kilo of cocaine into a closet as he passes the closet on his way to another part of the house. Eventually a young officer, on his first dynamic entry search, very exciting times, finds a kilo of coke in the closet. Attaboy! The young officer is very pleased with himself, he is good at this police work. He found dope where previous, more experienced officers found none.
Now, the subject of the warrant will truthfully tell his lawyer the cocaine was not his, it was planted. The defense lawyer will demand and have his own polygraph test performed on the young police officer who found the cocaine. That young police officer will answer truthfully he did not plant the cocaine. The defendant is convicted. Another innocent person is off to jail in the war on drugs.
In a system that is inherently unfair, where winner and losers are arbitrarily picked by the powers that be, most people keep their head down. Over time things get worse. More and more people are disaffected, and what goes around comes around. Violence erupts and there is an overthrow of the system. But the new people in charge are worse than the old. The American Revolution saw the victory of Alexander Hamilton’s vision over Franklin and Jefferson. Jefferson went on to be president, as as such was as arbitrary as any despot. He reformed himself after serving as president, again demonstrating power corrupts, even if only temporarily.
There is an alternative to all of this, and it is freedom. USA was designed to be a collection of small and independent states, but has become a monstrous, terrible place. The solution is to get back to where we went wrong. Small independent states, where people are jealous of their rights, and refuse to turn them over to others. Like Hong Kong, where 500,000 people hit the streets in 2003 when their government debated some constrictions on the Hong Kong people. For a comporable protest in USA, there would have to be 33 million people hitting the streets. Saturday night the president signed into a law a program where the military can arrest and indefinitely detain USA citizens, without due process. Exactly no one took to the streets to protest this heinous act.
Why would police bother to reform for people like this? I wouldn't. But I am in a constant state of reform for my customers. The trick is to have free markets, like in Hong Kong.
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