06/25/10 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm your host Scott Horton and I'm joined on the phone by my friend Will Grigg, he's the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse, boy is that right, he's basically I think our society's greatest chronicler of local police department abuse of the people they supposedly serve.
The web address is freedominourtime.blogspot.com, although to read the site it doesn't really feel that way, it's called Pro Libertate.
Welcome back to the show Will, how are you?
I'm doing great Scott, thanks so much for having me on again this morning.
And I should have mentioned too that if you look at Will's website, oh you're welcome and thank you for joining us and to the audience I should have also mentioned that Will hosts a radio show that you can find from his website again, freedominourtime.blogspot.com and I'm not sure where to start with you, I can start at your blog or I can start at Lou's blog today over at lourockwell.com slash blog, you got a story that I just can't believe except that I heard a million like this before, go ahead and tell this man, you're freaking me out.
It's almost incomprehensible but last December 22nd there was a man by the name of Lonnie Tinsley who lived in a place called El Reno, Oklahoma who was sent by his father to look in on this fellow's 86 year old grandmother who's bedridden, she has a therapeutic bed in her apartment, she's attached to an oxygen machine.
Okay, wait, wait, wait, stop right there, everybody remember this number, 86, okay I'm sorry keep going.
Exactly, 86 years old, she's tethered to an oxygen tank, she's in a therapeutic bed in her apartment, this took place, this visit took place when the city was snowed in because of a winter storm, so this man takes a look at his 86 year old grandmother who's on a whole suite of medications, he doesn't know whether or not she's taken her daily dose of prescribed medications, that becomes complicated, confusing, she couldn't help him and so he made what proved to be the almost fatal mistake of dialing 911, hoping to be connected to a med tech and instead what happened is that over a dozen police officers materialized at the apartment, about two thirds or more of the El Reno Police Department, they had nothing to do, I'm guessing there must have been a duck and donuts in the vicinity, they show up and within five minutes this poor guy is handcuffed, he's been cuffed and stuffed in the back of a police car and this 86 year old woman has been tasered, handcuffed and the part of the story that I find revealing in terms of the unrefined sadism involved, she had been rendered helpless through hypoxia because one of these heroes had cut off her air supply in order to pacify her before she was tased, before this happened, before this happened.
Now hang on Will, you must be just skipping a bunch of stuff like when the cops got there the old lady pulled out a 38 or something, right?
Yeah, she was actually a sleeper agent with a local Al-Qaeda cell and she was a sleeper agent in the literal sense, she was stretched out prone with an oxygen line in her nose on a therapeutic bed by way of a very clever disguise and of course the hero in charge of this delegation of armed tax feeders, a man by the name of Thomas Duran, saw right through this very clever attempt at concealment because he took alarm immediately when she sat up in her bed and ordered them to leave her room.
Well this was a form of aggression, this can't be countenanced, she'd taken an aggressive posture and so he turned to one of his subordinates and said, tase her.
At this point of course the young man, I don't know how old he was, it doesn't say in the complaints that I'm reading here, he said don't tase my grandmother and this can't be put up with obviously because he's a mere mundane, he has no standing to be giving orders to somebody in a government issued costume, so he was threatened with electroshock torture, thrown to the ground, dragged out, handcuffed and sent in the car and after this had happened according to once again this civil complaint that was filed in district court a few days ago, Lana, that's the grandmother, the 86 year old grandmother, was set upon by these heroes in uniform, one of whom stepped on her oxygen line in order to cut off her air, one of the officers shot her with a taser and it failed to make a connection, so she was shot by a second officer who was wielding a taser and after this had happened, after she was burned as a result of being tasered, her hands were rudely shoved behind her back with such force that her skin was torn and she bled, she was handcuffed and then both she and her grandson Lonnie Tinsley were taken to the local hospital where they underwent treatment and then she ended up being confined in psychiatric care for six days by the maniacs in uniform that had barged into her home and assaulted her and assaulted her grandson for no reason apart from the fact that he made what proves to be a reliably predictable mistake of calling 911 in search of help, he didn't call the police, you should never ever call the police for help, if you can avoid the police, by all means do so, if you're in the middle of an emergency, the last people you want to call are the police, but he didn't call the police, he was trying to get in touch with the med tech and unfortunately the police were listening of course, the dispatcher called the police and a dozen of them or more showed up at the home and as a result you end up with this grandmother almost helped to death by the very kind people in government issued costumes.
Alright, now here's the thing about this, and everybody you can go to LewRockwell.com slash blog to read all about this and links to the original sources and so forth, but look the reason that I have you tell that story is because as anyone can tell from looking at your blog for a moment, or much less you know actually spending some time going through these archives or looking at CopBlock or CopWatch or any of these groups or activists who keep track of local police abuse, with the advent of YouTube it has become absolutely apparent that either our system has always been so corrupt and now we have eyes to see it, that the media wouldn't show us before, or something has gone really really wrong, because this case of the assaulted grandmother is just one of a million cases like this, Will.
There is an epidemic of, well to be perfectly frank about it, as we've talked about on the show before, the cops now treat everybody like they've always treated blacks in America.
That's not a bad summation, and perhaps more to the point, the cops now are sort of swaddled in the same assumption of open ended impunity that you find being granted to people who are members of the occupying army, and I think that the model and the mindset being used by local police now, and local only in the geographic sense, they're all funded by the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to one extent or another, but they are reflecting the mannerisms and mindset of the military that has been typical of the military since, well let me think, let's say Manifest Destiny, I mean it's not just that they're treating people now the way that inner city blacks have been treated over the last several decades, but we're being treated the way that the Indians were being treated as General Sherman was evicting them from lands promised to them by treaty back in the mid-1800s.
I mean basically once the border was closed, I mean the Manifest Destiny ran out of room and you had the continent under the control of Washington, they turned their attention inwards, of course they turned their attention outwards too, I mean take a look at what happened to the Filipinos during the Spanish-American War, and many of the atrocities in the Spanish-American War where he had 100,000 or more people killed were carried out by military officials who'd been New York City police officials, I mean the use of water torture, whether you want to call it waterboarding or the water cure, which was very much in vogue during the Spanish-American War, that was something that was used under the direction of a military commander who in nominally civilian life had been a high-ranking official in the New York City Police Department, very good friends with Teddy Roosevelt, and he had actually been using those methods as a police officer before exporting them to the Philippines, and then they made a return circuit back to the United States and were being used as part of the third degree in police departments throughout the South, and they were being used once again on many of the nominally free blacks in the Jim Crow South until about the mid-1930s when the American Bar Association actually forced through some reforms to put an end to that, albeit temporarily, but we're dealing here literally with the same dynamics that confront people who are on the receiving end of the military occupation, the police are regarded as domestic troops, people who are not anointed agents of the state's punitive priesthood are being told that they have no choice but to submit instantly and unconditionally any time they're given a directive by somebody in uniform, those are symptoms of the martial law mindset, I think.
Yeah, well, it sure seems like we're headed toward the very bottom of a slippery slope, although I'm not really sure how deep this thing goes.
Yeah, all right, well, it's William Norman Grigg, he's the author of Liberty in Eclipse and Keeps the Block Pro-Libertate at freedominouratime.blogspot.com, and we'll be right back with some more after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm your host, Scott Horton, check out all the foreign policy and police state archives at antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm talking with William Grigg, he keeps the blog Pro-Libertate at freedominouratime.blogspot.com, and he wrote the book Liberty in Eclipse, and let's see here, well, here's what I want to ask you, you know I'm a wild-eyed radical and all that, I got a wild idea for you.
What if, somehow, we were to put together some kind of coalition with the minimal kind of demand for reform, retraining of local police across this country?
Because as we've discussed on this show before, it is quite apparent that at some point, these guys stopped being trained at all, I mean, look, it was always a bunch of thugs wanted to be cops anyway, right?
But they stopped even being trained as, listen, you guys are peace officers, you are the, you know, this is how the law works, this is what a constitution is, and these people are your masters, not the other way around.
Now go out there and protect them, or something, that's, they used to be told something along those lines.
That is no longer true, as you so aptly put it, all people must immediately submit to any whim of any cop, or risk death on the spot.
In the United States of America now, that is where we're at, something has got to be done, is there a way to make some kind of coalition to just say, hey look man, you guys are civilians too.
I think if that's going to happen, it's going to coalesce out of the social networks that have nothing to do with the dinosaur media, the state-aligned media, if you will.
And I think there is a fairly good prospect that we'd see a coalition of that sort emerge, and that's something I eagerly hope for.
Another alternative is something I write about in the most recent essay, Pro Libertate, which is about what's happened in Maywood, California, the city government is going out of business because their police department, which was nothing less than an undisguised band of thieves, operating with basically a concessionary relationship with the government, have put the city in a position where no insurance underwriter is willing to extend liability coverage.
That drove the city into bankruptcy, so the city government is going to dissolve except for a rump city council that will coordinate municipal services with a neighbor, and so the police are all going to go on the unemployment line.
And that's appropriate because Maywood basically was this island of misfit toys type of refuge for police officers who couldn't find employment anywhere else in California.
If you know anything about the utterly wretched law enforcement culture in California, you can imagine that this was the crim de la scum of law enforcement.
These are people who were leaving jurisdictions and leaving jobs one step ahead of prosecution.
They actually hired as a police chief a couple of years ago a guy who was convicted of theft and had a criminal record that included all kinds of domestic abuse and other misbehavior of that sort.
They appointed him to be the police chief.
I mean, he was cashiered by the LAPD because of his criminal background, but he was going to be put in charge of Maywood Police Department.
And so you've got a situation where literally they're going out of business and the county sheriff, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, is going to be providing law enforcement coverage.
That's happened in a couple of smaller communities as well over the last several years.
And quite frankly, I don't think that things could be worse if you were to do away with the police in circumstances like that.
And that goes back to what Edmund Burke was talking about a couple hundred years ago when he talked about the fact that police societies, as he put it, are unnatural.
And they put the law-abiding in a uniquely disadvantaged position because if you're dealing with a private sector predator who, through force or guile, threatens your property or your life, at least you can fight back without being punished for fighting back.
Edmund Burke, this stick-in-the-mud conservative in the mid-18th century, actually understood that principle now.
And he's by no means the same kind of conservative as the people like Mark Levin who worship anybody in a government costume.
And I think that there's going to be enough outrage over what's being revealed through the informal media networks right now on all points of the political spectrum that there is a possibility that we'll see this sort of trans-ideological coalition come together to put the police back into some kind of an institutional and constitutional cage.
And it has to be done pretty quickly.
One very good, in my opinion, immediate reform would be to insist that nobody who has any background in the military have anything to do with civilian law enforcement.
I don't see that you can be a peace officer if your background is carrying a gun and threatening to kill people in order to make them submit to the demands of an occupying military power.
I just say, as a matter of a categorical imperative, somebody who has that background should not be considered suitable for work as a civilian peace officer.
Now, that would decimate the ranks.
It would more than decimate the ranks.
I think probably a plurality or a larger percentage of people in state, local police, highway patrols, sheriff's departments have some kind of a military background.
That would be a stern and unsettling step to take.
But I think that we've reached such a parlous state of affairs now where we have to start with that and then reconstitute some kind of a civilian law enforcement culture where, once again, we're focusing on training people to be peace officers, people with a specialized function in society in which, as a matter of occupation, they do something that common citizens can do on their own.
And Robert Peel, the British statesman, once again, he was a conservative, but he wasn't an imperialist, but he wasn't one of these borderline totalitarian, petty nationalists or quasi-fascists of the sort who are defining conservatism today.
Robert Peel pointed out, when he created London's Metropolitan Police, that the police are no different from any other British citizen.
It's just that they do this all the time, whereas a British citizen might have, in the course of a lifetime, a handful of occasions where he might actually have to do something about taking an assertive stand to defend life and property.
And he pointed out that, basically, his bobbies didn't have any exalted position in society, and what they did was dependent entirely on the support and consent of the people who employed them.
And that, by no means, reflects what's going on right now in the United States.
And in order to restore that ethic, I think you have to start by culling out, by way of just a thorough institutional lustration of law enforcement from top to bottom, anybody who has been indoctrinated in the military mindset that now is the most identifiable trait of American law enforcement.
Yeah, my favorite radio anecdote, and even my own show, is something called the Shannon Burt Show years ago.
I might have told you this one before.
And the guy called in and talked about how his job as a Williamson County Sheriff, because he was an older guy, was to drive around with the new guys for a week or so.
And he would always ask them, why did you become a cop?
And they would always say, oh, I want to help people, or whatever nonsense.
One of the guys, one of the Williamson County Sheriffs, I'm sure he's in charge now or something, this guy, answered, well, you know, the way I see it, things around here are getting more and more Gestapo, and I just want to make sure I'm wearing a brown shirt.
And so these are the kinds of decisions that are being made.
And as you say, you talk about the members of the military in the police departments.
If you know any soldiers who ever came home from a war recently, they had a, hey, please come down and join the police department thing waiting for them in their mailbox.
And they got back.
And now let me bring in one more thing here, and then I'll let you finish up this segment.
And that is the Northern Command.
America now has its own theater of operations, just like Central Command that Petraeus just got demoted from.
And there's a third infantry division.
Matthew Rothschild has done really great work about this in the Progressive Magazine.
And you talk about these, you know, small cities and counties going bankrupt.
Well, who's the final backstop when the whole thing falls apart and no government can afford to pay their local so-called civilian security forces?
And instead of having de facto troops quartered among us, as the police are now, we have outright army divisions patrolling our country.
Yeah, they've set up a default in such a way that the natural progression of events in the case of a bankruptcy by a city or a county is to send in the National Guard.
And as we've conversed before about what's going on in Alabama, which has been utterly ravaged by Goldman Sachs and the economic hitmen and their employees, there's a situation now where Jefferson County, the sheriff of Jefferson County, has actually said that because there's no money to pay him and his deputies, they're going to call in the National Guard to provide law enforcement.
And that's another way that this could break if people don't organize very quickly and demand exactly the opposite happen.
And as you see, the municipalities and counties start to collapse under the burden of, well, government pensions to begin with.
You're going to have a breakpoint here where it could go one way or the other.
You could have a situation where you're going to have, and most people would consider this to be an absolutely horrible outcome, but I think it would be delightful, a Somalia type of a state of affairs where there is no coercive government authority and people actually cooperate through commerce and contract and collaborative efforts of that sort.
Well, you mean Somalia before Dick Cheney's invasion in 2006, right?
After the Blackhawk Down episode and the occupying troops were chased out of that country, they had a five or six year economic boom that took place because these people were permitted to go out and pursue peaceful commerce.
And what happened, of course, is they decided to correct that by getting Ethiopia to invade and sending in another occupying power.
And that's the other way that this could break.
That's basically the set of alternatives of latest right now, and I certainly hope that we'll choose the former rather than the latter.
Yeah.
Well, I sure am thankful for you, Will.
We need anti-demagogues like you out here doing what you do.
And everybody, again, it's freedominourtime.blogspot.com for Will Griggs.
Thanks again.
God take care.
And read the book.
It's Liberty in Eclipse.