05/30/14 – Ed Krayewski – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show today is Ed Krieske.
He's from Reason Magazine, Reason.com.
Welcome to the show, Ed.
How are you doing?
Good.
Great.
Very happy to be here.
And was I close on your last name there?
Yeah, you got it.
Krieske.
Krieske.
You got it more right than most people do the first time.
Well, I learned from Karen Kotowski that just drop a lot of those letters in the middle and say it fast and it'll come out right.
So, yeah, that's actually, that's a pretty good, pretty good, uh, tip.
There you go.
All right.
Love polls.
All right.
Um, so, uh, unbelievable.
I don't know.
I better let you say cause I've been going on and on for two hours now, hour and a half already about this SWAT team reportedly throws flash bang grenade, burns toddler during no knock raid.
What do you know about this story?
Yeah, I know it's insane because the sheriff would make them think, first of all, these kinds of things unfortunately happen way too often in America.
Um, and a lot of times it's not children this young that get hurt and injured, but a lot of times it is youth that get injured by the police would make this one especially incredible was that the sheriff basically said there was nothing they could do to prevent it as if the idea that maybe, you know, your sheriff's department in some town or County with 10, 20,000 people in North Georgia needs to be doing no knock raids for simple hand to hand drug, uh, interactions because as far as I can tell from different reporting on it, they didn't find any drugs there.
So this really sounds like they had an informant, the informant said, Hey, this house, I can buy drugs at it.
He went, he bought drugs at that house.
The cops talk and do, and they came back a couple of days later with a warrant and a military unit.
And that's ridiculous, you know, because you think about, uh, marijuana possession, marijuana use, even other drugs.
These are nonviolent behaviors and the police are the ones introduced, introducing violence into the situation.
And in cases like this, when they say there's nothing we can do about it, it really just shows how they're so staked.
These law enforcement, district attorneys, prosecutors, government employees, they're so staked in the drug war because it makes them so much money.
You know, where would the sheriff be?
Where would the SWAT team be without a drug war?
They'd be out of a job.
You know, a lot of these police officers, I can't imagine doing anything else other than ordering Americans around.
Um, and so the drug war gives them all these laws and all these, uh, prohibitions that they can go and they can make war on people.
And it's a literal war far too often.
Um, and I think the sheriff, uh, attitude in this specific case just shows how far gone these people are.
Uh, the only way we're going to end the drug war is if people start caring about it and stop caring about things like Donald Sterling or the latest hashtag on Twitter and actually start looking at the systemic violence that the American population is subject to.
Right.
Well, you know, I think the way you state that it's so important just to state it so honestly that, you know, forget all the mythology and all the terminology.
These people are not our security force if they're not acting as our security force.
If they are acting as predators, they are predators.
It's just like Diane Feinstein talking about, well, who's a journalist?
A journalist is anyone who has ever or is in the act of doing journalism right now.
Shut up.
That's the answer, right?
Well, these guys, if they're going around attacking tiny little children, then maybe they are the criminals.
Maybe all their, you know, as Will Griggs says, all their costume jewelry, notwithstanding, they're just another gang of criminal predators in our society.
And you don't have to be a communist and you don't have to be a libertarian.
You don't have to be any kind of political, anything to see it that way.
This is just a normal way for normal humans to perceive their predators as predators.
That's what they are.
They're out to get us under the name of being our protectors.
But as you said, we see this kind of thing all the time and there's no way that that's hyperbole.
I mean, literally all the time we see this so-called collateral damage in the war on the drug trade and drug possession in America.
Absolutely.
And you know what?
And it just, it targets marginalized populations.
So it's easier for the media not to cover.
It's easier for the people in charge to ignore and to pretend it doesn't happen.
I think you're right.
And I think with the costumes they wear and the shield that they have, it's just such a powerful psychic tool on people, you know?
So they give them so much of a benefit of the doubt because you've got a uniform on.
And, you know, I actually got an email about this story earlier this morning from a military guy.
So he's a major in the army now.
They have stricter rules of engagement than police officers in the United States do.
You know, if, if this happened in Afghanistan, there's a good chance that the guy who threw the flashbang grenade into a home with a child in it would be facing charges.
And I think too often they try to, police officers try to connect themselves as if, Oh yeah, we're just like the military.
And we're just saying, it's like, you're not, you know, you have rules of engagement that are a lot more liberal and the things police officers get away with on the streets of the United States, an occupying force would not get away with in most of the world.
And just think about that.
When by definition, the army's job is to destroy, to kill enemies.
And the cop's job is to protect the rights of the most violent and dangerous predator suspects that they arrest.
That's their mandate is a, even if you kill your whole family and they show up and you got an ax, they're supposed to try to take you down with the minimal amount of force.
And then keep you safe in jail where the mob can't get to you until you get your fair trial.
And that's supposedly the premise of their job.
And you're saying, and I don't know exactly how true that is, but at least the fact that their rules of engagement are in any way comparable to the Delta force waxing Afghans who, you know, apparently have no right.
Any American is bound to respect.
And that's exact same way that they're treating families in our own neighborhoods is completely ludicrous.
It's absolutely out of control.
Um, and I think a part of it is because we think that the job of a police officer should be to protect the community.
But I think for too many police officers and police apologists, a police officer's job is to get home safe at night.
And honestly, if a police officer wants a job where his job is to get home safe at night, he can go work at McDonald's.
I'm tired of public, uh, government officials, government, uh, employees talking about how their public servants and how they're doing a service to the community.
If you're afraid of being a cop, there's a hundred cops in Seattle.
I don't know if you read the story earlier this week, they're suing because they say that the new use of force rules that the department of justice is mandating in Seattle are too strict for them to do their job.
And so they're afraid to go on the streets.
You know what?
Get another job.
These people, they didn't get a lawyer.
So they actually filed this lawsuit themselves.
A hundred cops.
They're arguing that they have a fourth amendment right to reasonably search and seize you.
That's how twisted the official understanding of the constitution is in communities like police force.
Like when Sarah Palin said that, um, the, uh, you know, she had a first amendment right when she was running for vice president, she had a first amendment right from being criticized by the media.
And why weren't they respecting it?
It didn't yet.
And you know, and they live in this bubble, people like her, people like the police officers that live in this bubble where they really think that the constitution, they said it somewhere in the constitution, does not give judges the right to review what they did on the street.
That's exactly what the constitution permits.
You commit a crime and you get judged and you get reviewed.
And just because you're a cop, just because you have that costume jewelry, doesn't mean that you don't, you're not supposed to follow the same rules.
Now the fact that they've used public unions and they've used the democratic process to really carve out some incredibly strong protections for their jobs doesn't change the fact that at its basis, our constitutional Republic does not permit for certain people to be treated as a better class of citizens than other people just because those people work for the government or serve for the government or whatever word they want to use for it.
Right.
They're authorized to use defensive force, simple as that.
You know, when I was a little bitty kid and first learned about James Bond and the license to kill, I learned that no government has the authority to license anyone to kill because they don't have the authority to kill.
There's no one to license that because no one has that authority.
Not till judgment day.
Absolutely.
And I think that that's the problem.
You know, the government says it does and it thinks that it does.
And that's where ultimately, you know, the fact that everyone's okay with the government having an exclusive monopoly on the use of violence is what makes all a lot of this violence persistent.
You know, and even if you look at the gun control debate and I say, well, you know, somebody shoots a bunch of people, so it's time to take away guns.
The government kills people every day.
You know, I'll give away my gun when Barack Obama gives away his drone.
The government does drugs every day, too.
I've had people, the weak, the marginalized.
I've seen judges do cocaine right in front of me before.
So, well, there was a story about what I was a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, maybe I covered, and it was like a drug court judge whose buddy had just begun, just been selected as a judge.
And so they went to party at his like shore house or something.
And the guy ended up overdosing on cocaine.
I used to be a cab driver, man.
It's nice to see government employees, the highest learning types, the most honorable ones, abusing drugs and drug laws on a regular basis.
I'm sorry we got to take this stupid break.
We'll be right back with Ed Krayeski right after this.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ed Krayeski.
He's an associate editor at Reason Magazine.
That's reason.com online there.
And we're talking about this story.
SWAT team reportedly throws flash bang grenade, burns toddler, just barely toddler baby to me during no knock raid.
I guess you couldn't fit Nelson Rockefeller invented no knock raid there.
Anyway, I always like to smear his legacy any chance I get with honesty and factual information.
So here, everybody listen to this for a second here.
The cop says and what happened was they threw the flash bang in right into the crib, through the window or it broke the window, threw it in, right into the crib, exploded in this tiny baby's face.
The doctors have induced a coma.
I guess I'm hypothesizing that to prevent him from dying of the shock, if he had to live through the trauma of the pain that he's in right now.
So they've induced a coma and you know, to try to save his life.
And the cop's attitude is suck it.
I've talked to the DA, I've talked to the GBI, I've given them the whole information and they say, there's nothing else we can do.
There's nothing to investigate.
There's nothing to look at.
Given the information, given GBI SWAT team, which GBI is, I guess, just the, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Oh, there you go.
The, the, the state police, uh, their SWAT team would have done the exact same thing.
They'd have used the exact same scenario to enter the house.
And you know, I think actually the GRU would have done the same thing too, which also makes it okay.
And so that's it.
The state police are satisfied, the DA satisfied, the entire sheriff's department satisfied, and there's no one else to check the balance other than, you know, maybe Eric Holder will do a civil rights investigation.
But again, they went by the book when they maimed this little baby.
So what really is the problem?
Don't they have, Ed, sovereign immunity from prosecution for this crime?
Yeah, they do.
Unfortunately, uh, it's a very high bar to be able to, um, convince a grand jury or DA to prosecute a cop for anything.
You know, they did that one cop in North Carolina who shot a guy who had been in a car accident.
Um, but for example, there was another cop in Arkansas who shot a 15 year old and he was tried three times before they finally threw it out because you just can't find 12 jurors who are not so enamored by the culture of the police and by the idea that these are protectors.
And it's like that line from RoboCop, you know, it's like if the police strike the whole country will be in chaos.
And that's obviously not true.
I think we'd be fine if the police striked.
Um, but a lot of people don't think that a lot of people live their lives in fear and they're afraid of everything.
They're afraid of guns.
They're afraid of black people.
They're afraid of bad neighborhoods.
They're afraid of the, uh, Muslims.
They're afraid of terrorists.
They're afraid of, uh, bouncy balls.
They're afraid of four loco.
Uh, you know, they're just afraid of everything.
And they're the people who drive American politics and honestly would drive politics in every country.
And why our governments are just so particularly vicious because these are the people who motivate government and the people who are afraid of everything.
And if it was up to them, they would, they would love for the government to just put them in a camp where they can be safe and they can get paid $15 an hour to flip a burger or whatever and have all their cares taken care of all their needs taken care of by the government and never have to worry about the big scary world out there.
You know, and that's just so backwards because who are we, you know, as human beings, we're there to explore the unknown.
You know, that's how we got as far as we did.
Capitalism was able to free as many people as it did because we kept pushing the boundaries.
We kept pushing the limits.
We kept saying, what else can we do as human beings?
And look at us now.
Now we're so afraid of our neighbor that we want to turn our cop into a soldier.
Man, I like this guy.
You know, this is good stuff, Ed.
And I'm with you a hundred percent.
And you know, it's a damn tragedy, especially in this country with, you know, I mean, really, you look at who populates this country.
It's mostly the people who are brave enough to abandon their old homeland to come here.
You know, my wife, her father did everything he could.
He bet their lives to try to get her out of the Soviet union.
That's not messing around, right?
That's like, that makes him the baddest ass man on this planet to, to do everything he possibly could to get her to America.
Not for him, for her, you know?
And that's our whole country is populated with the sons and daughters of people like that.
And yet everything that you just said is exactly true about whatever significant enough plurality of our population that allows things like this to just continue on indefinitely.
Yeah.
You know, I guess it's Nixon sound majority strikes again, you know, to people you never expect because they're just normal people, but then they get home and they're just afraid of everything.
And it's sad, you know, and it's like when tragedies like the one in Santa Barbara happens, when you really see just how afraid people are, you know, here's a state that has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country.
And people are still blaming the NRA because that was just another thing to be afraid of.
What is the NRA?
The NRA is just a lobby group.
Lobby groups don't really have, aside from a couple of them, they don't really have that much power.
You know, at the end of the day, there's not more gun control in this country because frankly, there's not enough people, not enough of those really scared people to take our guns away.
You know, there's still that kind of respect for that.
Yeah, there's the ones who, a lot of them that are scared to death, they have guns too.
So that accidentally puts them on the right side of that particular issue.
Although probably a lot of them would have everybody else's guns banned if you asked them.
Well, that's, that's the Mike Bloomberg, Piers Morgan thing, right?
They want to ban guns, but they're rich enough to be able to afford private armed security.
Right.
And in California was that guy, Leland East, state Senator, big gun control advocate.
What was he, what was he caught doing by the FBI trying to traffic guns?
And meanwhile, you know, anybody who doesn't have that gun control agenda, takes one look at what happened in California the other day and immediately blame the kid's father.
Where was his father who should have been whooping his ass and making him into a decent person and not raising this little scumbag.
That's who's responsible other than the actual scumbag with the trigger finger is the father.
Come on.
And look at his attitude.
You know, they called the cops on him and that's it.
It's as if that was the only responsibility he had.
And the kid bragged, he was like, Oh, the cops have searched my bedroom.
They would have found the gun.
Obviously the cops couldn't search your bedroom because they didn't have probable cause.
And that's a good thing.
It's a good thing we live in a country with those kinds of protections.
But at the end of the day, if you're a 21, 22 year old grown ass man, living with your parents, your parents should probably be searching your bedroom.
And if they think you're going to go crazy as a parent, you're right.
I think the nail on the head, the parent's responsibility is to make sure their child doesn't do something like this.
A parent's responsibility is not to just call the police and say it's out of our hands.
And as long as we continue to think that the government is the solution to all our problems.
And I think you really hit the nail on the head with this Santa Barbara thing, because that's exactly what it is.
This father, and they called the police.
And that's as if that was their only responsibility.
You know, it's a typical liberal attitude.
It's I don't have to help poor people.
I don't have to go to the food bank and the soup kitchen to help out.
I can just vote for higher taxes and someone else to take care of it.
That's not community.
That's not the way we build communities.
That's not what you organize.
You don't organize a community by demanding more from other people.
You organize the community by demanding more from ourselves.
All right.
Now back to this particular atrocity here again, it's at the recent hit and run blog.
You can read all about it.
SWAT team throws flash bang grenade, burns toddler in the face, uh, really bad.
Right now.
That's very interesting.
I'm sorry for you.
The Jacob's phone just put a post up about the same.
Oh, okay.
Great.
Great.
And now listen, um, now here's the thing about it.
I believe I, I heard you write that you're being a bit sarcastic about everybody obsessed with their damn hashtags.
And you said, Oh, you know, if only you get the right hashtag, maybe we could end the drug war.
But that got me thinking that actually, man, I think that you're right about that.
And I think everything is about, well, it's about impressions.
This is what my friend Jonathan told me a long time ago says, Scott Worden you're obsessed with all these facts and names and dates and all this stuff.
But the basic idea is everybody else, they don't care about this stuff like you, they go with their impression.
So if their impression is that the consensus is that we have to have a war on drugs, I mean, come on, then that's what they're going to be for.
And if, but if their impression is that the consensus is that, yeah, that's what we used to think.
But now we don't think that anymore, not the libertarians, not this particular brand of right winger or this particular brand of left winger, but just we, the Americans, we don't believe in that anymore.
We used to believe in that.
Yeah, it's true.
But anyway, it's all right.
Because now the new consensus is that we just don't want to have a drug war anymore.
And it seems like, I don't know, man, why can't this poor baby be the last one?
Why can't we do a yes all women or, uh, bring back our girls or one of these like really global headline attention grabbing hashtag campaigns that enough of this war against each other and ourselves here, it's national suicide.
It's madness at the expense of this most innocent little baby enough, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I just, I guess I just, I'm unfortunately a little more pessimistic.
And so I just feel sometimes like people just tune out these stories, you know, because seeing the way the mob can just jump on an isolated incident, but then here you have a pattern of police abuse around the country and nobody cares, you know?
So, but I think you're right.
I think I think the progressives are successful when they're able to appeal to emotion.
And I think what libertarian and classical liberal ideas and anarchist ideas even have is that not only are they emotionally resonant, they also have logic and rationality that would make sense among our group.
And that's what we have to use more.
And I think sometimes we forget that the emotions do matter that indeed making policies based on emotion is bad.
And that's how you come up with bad laws.
And parallel is libertarian still between the war on guns, the nonsensical nature of the idea of a war on guns and war on drugs at the same time appeals to both sides and hopefully helps educate both sides as well.
But we got to go.
Thank you so much.
It's Ed Krayeski from the hit and run blog over there at reason.com.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.