[sparkscoffee] Re: Resistance is Futile
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Sblumen123@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 14:49:03 -0400
RR
What is your proposal to make big government small goverment?
Comrade B
In a message dated 9/10/2014 10:11:55 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The problem with a government that is given the power to rule over people
and murder and steal without punishment is that it attracts bad people who
enjoy doing those things. This why big government is inherently evil, as
Americans are beginning to find out.
-RR
By John W. Whitehead
September 09, 2014
If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled,
searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say,
do
or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance. This is the new “
thin blue line” over which you must not cross in interactions with police
if you want to walk away with your life and freedoms intact.
The following incidents and many more like them serve as chilling
reminders that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy
of
law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who
is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with
the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
For example, police arrested Chaumtoli Huq because she failed to promptly
comply when ordered to “move along” while waiting outside a Ruby Tuesday’s
restaurant for her children, who were inside with their father, using the
bathroom. NYPD officers grabbed Huq, a lawyer with the New York City Public
Advocate’s office, flipped her around, pressed her against a wall,
handcuffed her, searched her purse, arrested her, and told her to “shut up”
when
she cried out for help, before detaining her for nine hours. Huq was
charged with obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest and
disorderly conduct.
Oregon resident Fred Marlow was jailed and charged with interfering and
resisting arrest after he filmed a SWAT team raid that took place across the
street from his apartment and uploaded the footage to the internet. The
footage shows police officers threatening Marlow, who was awoken by the sounds
of “multiple bombs blasting and glass breaking” and ran outside to
investigate only to be threatened with arrest if he didn’t follow orders and
return inside.
Eric Garner, 43 years old, asthmatic and unarmed, died after being put in
a chokehold by NYPD police, allegedly for resisting arrest over his selling
untaxed, loose cigarettes, although video footage of the incident shows
little resistance on Garner’s part. Indeed, the man was screaming, begging
and insisting he couldn’t breathe. And what was New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’
s advice to citizens in order to avoid a similar fate? Don’t resist
arrest. (Mind you, the NYPD arrests more than 13,000 people every year on
charges
of resisting arrest, although only a small fraction of those charged ever
get prosecuted.)
Then there was Marine Brandon Raub, who was questioned at his home by a
swarm of DHS, FBI, Secret Service agents and local police, tackled to the
ground, handcuffed, and forcibly transported to a police station. Raub was
then detained against his will in a psychiatric ward, without being provided
any explanation, having any charges levied against him or being read his
rights—all allegedly because of controversial song lyrics and political views
posted on his Facebook page.
Incredibly, police insisted that Raub was not in fact under arrest. Of
course, Raub was under arrest. When your hands are handcuffed behind you, when
armed policemen are tackling you to the ground and transporting you across
town in the back of a police car, and then forcibly detaining you against
your will, you’re not free to walk away.
If you do attempt to walk away, be warned that the consequences will
likely be even worse, as Tremaine McMillian learned the hard way. Miami-Dade
police slammed the 14-year-old boy to the ground, putting him in a chokehold
and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and
walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable. According to
Miami-Dade Police Detective Alvaro Zabaleta, “His body language was that he
was stiffening up and pulling away… When you have somebody resistant to
them and pulling away and somebody clenching their fists and flailing their
arms, that’s a threat. Of course we have to neutralize the threat.”
As I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American
Police State, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat
that needs to be “neutralized” is a dangerous one that is part of a
greater nationwide trend that sets the police beyond the reach of the Fourth
Amendment. Moreover, when police officers are allowed to operate under the
assumption that their word is law and that there is no room for any form of
disagreement or even question, that serves to chill the First Amendment’s
assurances of free speech, free assembly and the right to petition the
government for a redress of grievances.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request
on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop
for speeding or just to check your insurance: if you feel like you can’t
walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than
not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to
the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all
intents and purposes, you’re under arrest from the moment a cop stops you.
That raises the question, what exactly constitutes resisting an arrest?
What about those other trumped up “contempt of cop” charges such as
interference, disorderly conduct, obstruction, and failure to obey a police
order
that get trotted out anytime a citizen engages in behavior the police
perceive as disrespectful or “insufficiently deferential to their authority”?
Do
Americans really have any recourse at all when it comes to obeying an
order from a police officer, even if it’s just to ask a question or assert one’
s rights, or should we just “surrender quietly”?
The short answer is that anything short of compliance will get you
arrested and jailed. The long answer is a little more complicated, convoluted
and
full of legal jargon and dissonance among the courts, but the conclusion is
still the same: anything short of compliance is being perceived as “
threatening” behavior or resistance to be met by police with extreme force
resulting in injury, arrest or death for the resistor.
The key word, of course, is comply meaning to obey, submit or conform.
This is what author Kristian Williams describes as the dual myths of heroism
and danger: “The overblown image of police heroism, and the ‘obsession’
with officer safety, do not only serve to justify police violence after the
fact; by providing such justification, they legitimize violence, and thus
make it more likely.”
How else can we explain why police shot a schizophrenic 30-year-old man
holding a pellet gun over 80 times before his corpse was handcuffed? Mind
you, witnesses reportedly informed the police that it was not a real gun, but
the officers nonetheless opened fire about five minutes after arriving on
the scene.
John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air
rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Oscar Grant, age
23, unarmed and lying face-down on the ground, was shot in the back by a
transit officer in Oakland, Calif., who mistakenly used a gun instead of a
taser to further restrain him. Ordered to show his hands after “anti-crime”
police officers noticed him adjusting “his waistband in a manner the officers
deemed suspicious,” 16-year old Kimani Grey was fired at 11 times, and
shot seven times, including three times in the back. Reportedly, the teenager
was unarmed and unthreatening.
Even dogs aren’t spared if they are perceived as “threatening.” Family
dogs are routinely shot and killed during SWAT team raids, even if the SWAT
team is at the wrong address or the dog is in the next yard over. One
six-year-old girl witnessed her dog Apollo shot dead by an Illinois police
officer.
Clearly, when police officers cease to look and act like civil servants or
peace officers but instead look and act like soldiers occupying a hostile
territory, it alters their perception of “we the people.” Those who
founded this country believed that we were the masters and that those whose
salaries we pay with our hard-earned tax dollars are our servants.
If daring to question, challenge or even hesitate when a cop issues an
order can get you charged with resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, you’re
not the master in a master-servant relationship. In fact, you’re not even
the servant—you’re the slave.
This is not freedom. This is not even a life.
This is a battlefield, a war zone—if you will—governed by martial law and
disguised as a democracy. No matter how many ways you fancy it up with
shopping malls, populist elections, and Monday night football, the fact
remains that “we the people” are little more than prisoners in the American
police state, and the police are our jailers and wardens.
-RR
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