04/03/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And right now, lucky you and me, we got Will Grigg on the line.
He's the author of Liberty in Eclipse, which you ought to buy.
And also, he's a great writer and keeper of the blog, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Pro Libertate is what it's called.
Pro Libertate, freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing well.
I really appreciate your kindness.
Well, you know what?
You sure get great work done, and I'm happy to highlight it.
And I think it's really important.
And I think that you're changing America for the better, actually, with the work that you do.
And it's very important.
And we can see this with Radley Balco's work, too.
It's very important that we...
And this is unfair, okay?
I'm not saying this is my way.
I'm just saying this is the world that we live in.
We have to have people attacking the police state, especially when we're talking about local police forces, from the right.
Because if government can simply dismiss all concern as civil rights for minorities concern or just the views of tie-dye hippie concerns or whatever, then they just think that they don't have to listen to that.
But when they're being written about in the Washington Post by somebody who comes from Cato and is a pretty right-wing libertarian, as far as libertarians go, like Radley Balco, or somebody like you, and I'm not calling you much of a right-winger.
You're pretty libertarian on the issues.
But personally, you're a very conservative guy and all that kind of thing.
You're not a cultural Marxist, as the right-wingers say, or anything like that.
And so you're constantly...
And you're good on civil rights.
I'm not saying you're not.
But I'm just saying, you know, the way that you cover this, I think it's really important for getting through to people that, you know what?
Even if you're an upper-middle-class, comfortable white person, this needs to be a concern of yours, okay?
And I'm not calling you white either, but still.
Yeah, well, you're touching on something that's very interesting, and that is the cultural divide, this artificial dichotomy, that was imposed on our country about a generation and a half ago by Nixon, when, for reasons of cynical political advantage, he decided to play to the so-called silent majority in his war on crime rhetoric.
He actually declared war on crime, drugs in particular, back in 1971.
And this was a deliberate move by him and his political image-makers to try to capitalize on this type of fracture point that exists in American society between the perceived youth-oriented radicals and then the conservative Democrats, the so-called ethnic Democrat conservatives, who were attracted to Reagan and, before that, Nixon's constituency.
The idea was that only people with a tie-dyed mind would be concerned about such things as civil liberties, people who are interested for reasons of fomenting social revolution in playing to the grievances of inner-city minorities and people of that kind.
That's a narrative that was imposed on us largely by Nixon, and that's where the so-called war on drugs comes from.
And the war on drugs, I contend, is pretty much the fountainhead of the militarization of American police culture since then.
And now it's gotten to the point, as you say, Scott, that people who had been living in supposedly privileged echelons of society that enjoyed a happy immunity to this pathology of privileged violence on the part of the police, they're starting to understand that they are not exempt and the people they care about are being caught in this evil undertow.
And they're being run through a criminal justice system that is oriented toward creating fodder for our expanding, metastasizing prison-industrial complex.
Or they're being beaten or tased or otherwise abused by the police or supposedly the centurions, the paladins of all that's good and decent in our society.
And so there is a cultural change, and it's very much for the better.
And my problem is that there is still, even now, despite the fact that we're approaching sort of the waning years of Barack Obama's presidency, there's still people in the Republican-aligned, law-and-order, conservative constituency who believe that the problem is that the wrong people are running this apparatus of repression.
They don't understand that the apparatus itself has to be dismantled.
I believe that if they end up with a sufficiently attractive standard-bearer for the Republican presidential campaign in 2016, many of these people will suddenly forget all the good things they're saying right now about civil liberties and the evil of wraparound surveillance and the vexations of a militarized law enforcement culture.
If suddenly they find the right person to put upon the white steed, they'll believe that we can somehow redeem this instrument and then turn it against the right people.
And of course, that's the reverse of what Obama-era so-called progressives have said.
You know, they have no problem at all with the idea of inheriting George W. Bush's internal security system, as long as people who are pro-gay marriage and have the right position on abortion and other cultural matters are running that instrument, then they have no problem with its existence.
So unfortunately, we're still, as a culture, bound up in these cynical cultural wars that were started by Nixon.
And I'm just hoping that the temper of the public mood has changed dramatically.
Events recently, for instance, the state of New Mexico indicate that people have had a surfeit at long last of the immunity and the impunity enjoyed by police when they're killing and otherwise inflicting criminal violence on harmless people.
And so I do think that we've reached a threshold in our country where we're going to be seeing some changes.
I'm still holding out hope that these changes will largely be peaceful.
They'll entail the repudiation of the idea of aggression.
But I don't know whether or not that preference is going to be respected by the people who right now wield the implements of state-consecrated violence.
Yeah, I mean, it is.
It's a matter of priorities.
And you know, these politicians will always, even on an issue like this, and maybe it's one of the more difficult ones, but still, if it's a big enough parade, they'll want to get out in front of it.
And so it seems to me, and maybe this would be a complete joke and it wouldn't work, but if you had an otherwise mainstream candidate for mayor in any town in America who had a good shot of winning anyway or whatever, if he wanted to make it an issue that, you know what, you elect me mayor, I'm going to fire the police chief because I'm sick of this crap, just like you are.
And in fact, that's why I want to be your mayor, because this guy's got to go and make an issue out of it like that.
That could be so powerful, even if that ended up in a losing campaign.
Just if people would try that occasionally.
The reason I'm running for Congress is because I want to stop the Pentagon from equipping our local police with M16s anymore.
That's why I want to run for Congress.
Borscht, never heard of it, don't care.
I just want to disarm the machine guns out of the hands of our sheriff's department.
That's all.
And see people put this as their first issue for why they ought to have power.
Because I think, like you're saying, people are catching on.
They're like, yeah, you know, why should a cop have an M16, man?
We're not the VC.
We're the Americans.
We're the guys that you killed all those VC in the name of protecting our freedom.
Exactly.
I, you make a very important point when you're talking about the transcendent importance in this issue of having a municipal government that is in some sense responsive to the needs and desires of the people they supposedly represent.
Because every municipal police department is the enforcement arm of the municipal corporation that pays the salaries of its members.
They're not locally accountable to the people.
And one of the greatest and most pernicious lies in the history of American dialogue is the truism, support your local police and keep them independent.
They're not your local police.
They are independent of you and therein lies the problem.
And one of the things that's happening in American Fork, Utah, which is a city about which I wrote a recent story in my blog that got a great deal of national attention.
Thanks to Radley Balko of the Washington Post who accepted a large section of my story and made it national.
American Fork is a town of about 21,000 people.
Oh, wait, you know what?
Make a different point.
Cause in a minute and a half, we're going to have to go out to break.
And I want to hear all about this.
So I'll tell you what, save the story.
But tell us quickly here for a minute or so, catch us up on what you mentioned there about Albuquerque, New Mexico and the people standing up for those of us who weren't caught up on this story.
Well, you had this huge, I wouldn't say that it's reaching Ukrainian proportions, but you had a sizable street protest over what has to be called the murder of this homeless man recently by Albuquerque police and by their allies and local law enforcement.
James Boyd was somebody who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, apparently.
He was surrendering after he'd been rousted from a plot of land where he was described as being an illegal camper.
In the course of surrendering, he was gunned down execution style by what you'd have to refer to as a death squad.
And that's just one of many shootings over the last year or several years in New Mexico that reflect a dangerous and deadly evolution of the mindset of the police.
Something that has been made a matter of doctrine in their training academy.
I think they said it was 37 in two years, something like that.
Yeah, it's astounding.
It's become a fair approximation in Southwestern United States terms of what you would call actually a killing field if you adjust that demographically for the size of the populations involved.
And so finally you had this, I'd have to call it a peaceful uprising that of course was turned into a violent confrontation by the introduction of anti-riot techniques by the militarized police in Albuquerque.
Even brought out the MRAP mine resistant Afghanistan war vehicle.
Exactly.
To tame the citizens of Albuquerque protesting their excess.
How do you like that America?
All right, we'll be right back with the heroic Will Grigg.
Freedom in our time.blogspot.com right after this.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
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All right, all right.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.scotthorton.org is where I keep all my stuff.
I'm looking right now at Freedom in Our Time.
.blogspot.com.
That's Will Griggs' blog, Pro Libertate.
And the last couple are both very interesting here.
He cooperated with the cops and is paying the price.
The ordeal of Mark Burge.
And then Tales of the Happy Valley Gestapo.
And I think that was the one you started, tell us there before I interrupted you before the break, Will, right?
It's the Mark Burge story that I was referring to.
I spent some time in central Utah recently and I've done two stories, fairly lengthy stories, about horrible incidents of abuse.
I'm working on the third one right now that's the sort of thing that really should be the plot of a made-for-television movie.
But the case of Mark Burge is the one that went viral in large measure because Radley Balko, The Washington Post, picked up on the story.
Here's a guy who was involved in a no-injury traffic accident on the streets of American Fork, Utah, which is a little town of about 21,000 people.
Very wealthy.
One of the wealthier enclaves there in Utah, really shouldn't have a police department, but it has a 33-member police force.
These are people who, one year after their probationary term, are making in the neighborhood of $65,000 to $70,000 a year to patrol a town that has no violent crime.
And since 2007, every member of the American Fork police department who's on patrol is assigned a vid cam, which is a camera embedded into the portable walkie-talkie units as part of their standard gear.
And they have been very conspicuous and boasting about the fact that they were the first police agency, perhaps the entire world, where every one of the patrol officers are constantly wired and that all interactions with the public are recorded and made available in order to bring about accountability.
They've used this on many occasions to vindicate officers who've been accused of misconduct.
In the case of Mark Burge, you had three officers involved in this encounter that resulted in him undergoing crippling injuries completely unnecessarily.
Not a single one of them provided vid cam footage of any of the relevant episodes in this protracted ordeal that lasted about 35 or 40 minutes and resulted in this man once again enduring an injury that may eventually kill him.
Mark Burge had suffered severe back trauma in an automobile accident several years ago.
He underwent a $50,000 procedure to install a spinal cord stimulator, which sends electronic impulses up and down his spine in order to fool the pain receptors so that he doesn't have to be completely doped out on narcotic pain medications.
And he was running a courier business at the time of this incident.
This was a couple of years ago in American Fork, Utah.
He collided his box truck into a branch that was overhanging the street in American Fork.
And so he called the police because he had to fill out an accident report for insurance.
He knew that he had an outstanding traffic ticket.
He suspected that trouble might be in the offing.
So he wasn't surprised when the police officer said he was going to have to arrest him because he had this outstanding traffic ticket.
He called his wife, Mr. Burge did, and said, honey, I'm going to be at the jail.
You'll need to come pick me up.
And he left the line open.
That's a very important part of this story.
Mark turned to the police and very carefully lifted up his shirt to display this iPod-sized device in his lower right back and said, I've got this expensive piece of hardware that makes it possible for me to walk and have a normal life.
Please don't cuff me behind my back because I can't reach back there and I'm worried about disturbing this piece of machinery.
And the cop ignored him and said, just stick your hands behind your back and shut up or words to that effect.
So Mark did what he was told and he was put in the back of the car and he was leaning forward to avoid contact between the handcuffs and this lower back section where this very expensive piece of hardware was embedded.
And the officer saw that and shoved it back against the seat.
And as this happened, Mark actually felt the device breaking.
And he made a comment to the effect of, you stupid son of a bitch, you've just wrecked my back.
Now on the way to the hospital, after the cop had relented and cuffed him in the front tardily, by this time the damage had been done, Mark pointed out, forgive me, I don't know if I said that there on the way to the hospital, on the way to the jail, he said, you're gonna have to take me to the hospital because right now my back is completely wrecked and I'm beginning to feel my legs start to malfunction.
And it took him about 15 minutes to get there.
By the time they got there, his right leg wasn't functioning because the injury was asserting itself and his receptors were misfiring and he started to undergo convulsions.
When they got out of the car, either because the police officer thought that he was being uncooperative and resisting, which of course would be stupid.
Why would you resist being taken to the hospital?
Or for whatever reason, they ended up in a situation where Mark was face down in the dirt and this cop's knee was on the middle of his back directly above this piece of machinery.
Right, where he already knows the guy has this symptom.
Exactly.
And so Mark gets dragged into the hospital covered with dirt and sweating and in agony.
And he gasped out to the nurse, I want you to call a third party investigator from a different police department because this officer just assaulted me.
And the officer responded by shoving Mark and telling him to shut up.
And that provoked Mark, who'd been long suffering and cooperative up to this point, into unleashing an expletive.
And that offended the nurse.
The nurse was indifferent until he'd said something that offended her pious Central Utah sensibilities.
And it was on the basis of this episode that Mark was actually, that one little exchange, he was actually prosecuted for disorderly conduct.
In the course of preparing for his trial, Mark went out and obtained sworn statements from several eyewitnesses and earwitnesses.
Remember that the cell phone was still on.
The line was open and two people overheard everything that happened during this protracted encounter with Officer Andres John Felice of the American Fork Police Department.
He got sworn statements from several people.
He obtained all the relevant medical records showing that the moment that he was taken into police custody, just shortly thereafter in any case, that the device malfunctioned and is now irreparably damaged.
He was able to get medical records showing that he now suffers from Kripp syndrome, which is a compartmentalized regional pain syndrome.
That's something that's causing his foot to atrophy and his leg to atrophy.
It's a very, very good chance that he's going to lose his foot or perhaps even suffer major organ failure.
When I talked to him, he was perpetually clenched in visible pain in spite of the fact that he had to ramp up his prescription meds to just a shocking extent, three or 400% of what he had been using before he had the FCS damage.
And his right leg is permanently contorted.
His foot is constantly clenched and misfiring.
He has no control over it.
He ended up losing his job.
He lost his business.
He lost his home.
And then he lost his case because the prosecutor who had conducted the investigation, the supposedly independent investigation of this incident, refused to put any of the officers under oath when they were making their statements.
And the statements, of course, were contradictory.
Police are trained to lie.
They're given social permission to lie.
You have to assume that everything they say is a lie unless it's validated independently.
None of their statements were sworn because prosecutors said that these are oath-bound peace officers, so everything they say is effectively under oath anyway.
And none of the footage was made available in spite of the fact that American Fork Police Department made a fetish out of having these vid cams.
And so when he got to the trial, he was told that he couldn't use any of these earlier statements to impeach what had been said in subsequent investigations of the various police officers involved in this because their subsequent statements were not sworn and hence were inadmissible.
It's the same prosecutor who said that he was going to swear them when he was conducting the supposedly independent inquiry.
So he lost the case and he's found guilty of disorderly conduct because he had unleashed a somewhat malodorous epithet in the direction of a man who just wrecked his back and ruined his life who's a privileged member of the government's enforcement cast.
That's an American Fork Utah.
This story had been completely ignored before I reported it a couple of weeks ago.
The day after I published this blog essay, and I think this is the day before Mr. Balko picked up on it at the Washington Post, the CBS affiliate in Salt Lake City, KUTV, actually went out and interviewed Mark.
And there've been a couple of other local radio and television journalists, and there've actually been some radio journalists here in the state of Idaho as well who've covered this story.
Mark is actually running for the state legislature.
What the heck?
He can't make an honest living anymore, so might as well go into politics.
But he's doing this as a voice of people who've suffered abuse at the hands of people who are supposedly public servants.
But more importantly, there's a move underway right now to put pressure on the mayor of American Fork.
And that underscores something I've said before the break, Scott, which is that if you want to know where the problem is going to be solved, you have to start focusing on your local, which is to say your municipal government, the city council and the mayor.
You're going to have to make it pretty clear that because you cannot hold police accountable, you can't hold police chiefs accountable, you're going to hold them accountable.
And there's another story I've written about, actually several stories, in the city of Idaho Falls involving an extravagantly corrupt police chief.
And then the former mayor of Idaho Falls was another former police chief.
And right now in the city of Idaho Falls, I'm happy to say there are people who are starting to put pressure not only on the police chief there, his name is Mark McBride, but also on the newly elected mayor who's inherited a great big mess, including a $300,000 lawsuit by a family that got beaten up in their own home because of a noise complaint last Labor Day weekend.
So that's one of the things that I find encouraging is that Alaska people are starting to demand accountability of anybody who happens to be electorally accountable for the actions of the police that they hire.
And then what's going on in Albuquerque and elsewhere in New Mexico is healthy because that illustrates the people of Alaska on the surface of what has to be considered perhaps the, on a statewide basis, the most lawless law enforcement culture in the entire American Soyuz.
The head of the Albuquerque Police Academy, a fellow by the name of Jack Jones, this is something that was reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican last February.
He's created a curriculum now where he overtly instructs law enforcement officers in Albuquerque to see the public as their enemy.
This is from the Santa Fe, New Mexico, quoting Jack Jones, evil has come to the state of New Mexico, evil has come to the Southwest, evil has come to the United States.
And then he goes on to explain how they must assume that in every encounter between the police and the public that the police are a terrible risk.
And then when people started to inquire after all these shootings you described, Scott, people started to inquire about what they were training people at the New Mexico Police Academy.
That's what I was gonna ask you was this sounds like these guys are going through a different bootcamp even than the rest of these marauders.
Yeah, and we're seeing the results.
That's one of the reasons why you're seeing this tangible impact of this indoctrination to believe that the police are on a 360 degree battlefront.
They have to engage the public as the enemy and subdue them.
But what he has said- Well, and it just goes to show what idiots they all are, that they can possibly be trained to think that the people of the neighborhood that they grew up in are all a bunch of terrorists or whatever crap.
Yeah.
Well, in September, continue with the story, the state's eight member Law Enforcement Academy Board, which is appointed by the governor and chaired by the attorney general, voted unanimously to change the New Mexico Administrative Code to give complete control over the curriculum to Jones.
He's the one who says that the public is evil and he's refusing to release any of the training materials to the public for reasons of officer safety and for security.
What he says essentially is if there is something happening that is new technology that the bad guys are using that evil is using, we need to be able to make that change and be able to make those changes in our academy.
And then, of course, to maintain security over what they teach their troops because if they were to reveal to the public that they supposedly serve how these people are being trained, well, that might compromise the all-important officer safety consideration here that is the highest and holiest of all public policy matters.
So you have this ideological or doctrinal change the way that police are trained in New Mexico.
And the result is that you have dozens or scores of dubious or frankly unjustified shootings, including this horrible spectacle of a poor mentally ill man who's surrounded by police officers being gunned down for no defensible reason because he just happened to be squatting on an abandoned piece of supposedly public property.
So I think that in New Mexico, I'm hoping that at long last we've reached peak jackboot, which is to say the threshold at which the public is no longer willing to countenance the impunity and the self-indulgent lawlessness of people in government costumes, at least in the state of New Mexico.
But think about just how horrible it has gotten and how horrible it had to get in order for people to reach that threshold.
I know it.
All right, I'm sorry.
You know what?
That's the perfect place to leave it, but we got to leave it.
We're over time and I got to go to the next guest, but thanks so much, Will.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
Everett, that's a rogue, Will Grigg.
Go look at his website.
It's so good.
He's such a great writer.
You can tell by the way he talks.
He's that good of a writer, too.
ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldine McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. natsummit.org.
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I am standing here.
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Hey guys, I got his laptop.
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My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.