07/10/12 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

You know, I always do my most muttering to myself when I'm reading Will Griggs' blog.
I sit here shaking my head as though somebody's listening to me, going, Are you kidding me?
Come on!
Is there no end to this?
What is this, Russia and assorted copied catchphrases?
Uh, I just, you know, what?
The local cops are treating the American people like, well, you call it showtime syndrome.
We're all Branch Davidians and they're all the ATF, and there's just no limit to who they will swat raid at any given time.
I guess, just like that famous clip out of Waco, The Rules of Engagement, where the cop, I think it's an ATF agent, or Treasury Department official says, Look, the days of cops in three-piece suits walking up to a door and knocking on it to serve a warrant, those days are over.
And that was back in 1993.
So here we are in the future, I guess, celebrating the 19th anniversary of the loss of those good old days, Sheriff Andy Taylor and all that.
Will, has America gone mad, or what is going on here?
What's happening, I think, is that the local police are living down to the measure of their initial creation.
They were distilled out of the British system created by Robert Peel that was designed consciously and explicitly on the model of the Irish military occupation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which is one of the reasons why conservatives and populists, such as they were at the time in the early 19th century in Great Britain, opposed the creation of the bluecoats.
They referred to it as the bluecoats.
The redcoats were used in the 19th and 18th centuries, the imperial power projection arm of the British Imperium.
The bluecoats were seen as carrying on that mission with respect to the administration of the domestic affairs of Great Britain.
And there were some really far-seeing people like Edmund Burke, who in the 1700s made this really important distinction between what he called natural society and policed society.
Natural society is based on contract and commerce and covenant and fellowship.
In other words, all these things that truly civilized people do that involve some idea of consent and mutual benefit.
A policed society is one where a government arrogates to itself the supposed right to regiment people according to the whims of a ruler.
And, of course, Edmund Burke is considered properly, I think, to be one of the leading lights of genuinely civilized conservatism.
And he understood that there was something really wrong in trying to organize a society based on what he called the mysteries of policy through which coercion supposedly magically is transmuted into morality.
And the police system in the United States is the offspring of that degenerate model.
There was not a local police, paramilitary, structured, organized army of occupation for domestic purposes.
There was not that type of a system in colonial America.
There wasn't that type of a system in the infant republic, such as it was, once again, until the later part of the 19th century when the British model took hold and started to flourish.
And the thread line, the thread, the common connector here that binds the American concept to the British concept.
The British concept, actually, for a long time was a lot less militaristic than the American version, interestingly enough.
That's changing, alas.
But the common idea is the idea that the police are employed by the state, not by the people.
That's what's said for public consumption.
They're the enforcement arm of the state.
Anytime you're dealing with a police officer, this is something we pointed out before, Scott, and you take offense at the way you're being treated by this person who's supposedly a servant, and you say, wait a second, you work for me.
I pay your salary.
Those two comments are non sequiturs.
They don't work for you, although you do pay their salary.
What happens is that they're employed by the people who steal your money in order to employ them.
They are their boss, not you.
They don't look upon you as the subject of your service.
They look upon you as somebody to be regimented, somebody to be controlled, and most importantly, a potential threat, because at some level, I suspect, every police officer knows that what he does most of the time, almost all of the time, for almost all of them, has nothing to do with protecting the public, but rather molting the public.
That is to say, collecting revenue at gunpoint or somehow impinging upon their private space, the private space of individual citizens, in order to make them do the bidding of the political class that employs the police.
So there's always that tension there.
With that tension comes a sense of potential threat, because after all, just on the grounds of being a human being like the person on the other end of the gun, every cop has this instinctive understanding that if he were being treated the way that he's treating that person, he'd resent it.
So I think there's an element of bad conscience that factors into these threat calculations that are being used to justify things like this SWAT raid in Evansville, Indiana last month that was the basis of trash talk in an online forum that was anonymous and completely implausible.
And this is the sort of thing that reflects this SWAT raid in Evansville, that reflects this idea that the police are in a 360-degree battle zone, that every citizen they encounter is a potential threat, that they need to assert their dominance of a given piece of territory the same way that a soldier in an army of occupation would behave.
In other words, they're living down, once again, to the measure of their creation.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, too.
When you talk about that relationship between the cop on the beat and the person pulled over, basically, or stopped on the side of the road, people have to abandon the idea that the person they're dealing with is some guy named Mike, and, yeah, he's wearing that costume, but he's a person, and so maybe you can reason with him and get him to understand the thing so that he doesn't ruin the rest of your day, when, by that point, you ought to not be talking at all because, in fact, that's not a person named Mike.
That's just the uniform and the badge talking there.
That is the state there.
It's not a person that you can reason with or deal with at all.
It's like an automaton with its own set of rules that don't have necessarily anything to do with, as you say, public service of any kind.
At the risk of sounding like the incorrigible Trek dork that I am, you have to assume that everybody in the government-issued costume is a drone who's part of the board collective.
In his previous life, or her previous life, that individual was a fully realized human being with whom he could reason and negotiate.
But when you're on the receiving end of an act of government intervention in your life, you do not have the luxury of assuming that the individual wearing the habiliments of the state's punitive priesthood is going to be amenable to reason.
That means you cannot afford to talk to this person in any way that's going to incriminate yourself.
And given that practically everything we do is invested with this subtext of potential prosecution, you have to assume that anything you say, as the famous Miranda formula warns us, anything you say could be used as the grounds for prosecution, just as any gesture could be taken as a token of resistance, which supposedly in the name of that most sacred of all things, officer safety, can be seen as a threat.
Anything you do can be interpreted as an act of resistance, a criminal act that can be used as justification for severe summary punishment in the form of being beaten or tasered or even killed.
If you blade your body, blading your body means you put one...
No, actually, if you assume a fighting stance, that means you put one foot behind the other.
To blade your body means you bend slightly at your knees.
To do anything that the police officer interprets as anything other than unqualified submission, you know, canine submission, then you can be looked upon as resisting arrest.
If you withdraw your hand from contact, that can be considered aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer.
And on the other hand, practically anything that the law enforcement officer sees to inflict on you is to be considered harmonious with policy and hence legally justifiable in the name of qualified immunity.
And what happened, once again, with this Evansville raid, we had this SWAT raid on an address on the basis of anonymous comments posted online that were derogatory of the local police and hence a supposed threat to the officers, the safety of the officers and the police chief at Evansville.
What happened is that apparently somebody piggybacked on an open Wi-Fi connection and using this formula called a threat matrix, the Evansville Police Department decided that they had grounds for a full-force SWAT raid, and so they brought along an embedded reporter because it was so fraught with danger that they had involved a journalist, and what they told the public was this urgent attack, an urgent counterattack on somebody who threatened to take down the whole police department.
They ended up terrorizing an elderly lady and her teenage daughter.
The teenage daughter was watching cable television.
I think the elderly woman was cooking dinner, and neither of them posed any kind of a threat at all.
But this was all justified on the basis of trash talk in an online forum.
That's how acutely hypersensitive these people are to anything that is perceived as a threat, including harsh language.
And that really is amazing, right?
And no one in charge said, well, let's make sure who lives there before we kick down the door like the Waco raid.
All right, I'm sorry.
We have to hold it right there.
It's Will Gregg, freedominourtime.blogspot.com for his blog Pro Libertate.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Gregg, author of Liberty in Eclipse, and the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And two things here, Will.
First of all, internet trash talk is enough for a search warrant?
Holy crap, the entire world is going to change.
And then second, Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Maybury, was he the most successful and sophisticated police state propaganda in the history of the world or what?
The latter, unfortunately, appears to be the case in a rather ironic way because everybody tends to personify your local police department, your local sheriff, through the lens of Andy of Maybury.
Now, as it happens, Andy Griffith himself was not inclined to support the exercise of unaccountable force by police officers and sheriffs.
He was actually something of a civil libertarian, and it's interesting how the two roles for which he's most famous embody the civil libertarian ethos to a certain extent.
Sheriff Taylor was certainly somebody upon whom the mantle of delegated authority rested very lightly to the extent that it only assigned one bullet to his one deputy.
And he went out of his way to avoid the use of force in the protection of commerce and property, which is how he viewed the way that he should function as a sheriff.
Most people tend to look upon their sheriffs as Andy of Maybury as opposed to the sheriff of Nottingham when the latter is actually a more appropriate starting point.
Although your typical sheriff's office these days is equipped with military ordnance and hardware, the likes of which the sheriff of Nottingham couldn't have imagined, and his wildest flights of speculative fancy.
In terms of the first question, with respect to trash talk I lined against the police, this is something I'm finding to be a recent and recurring leitmotif in a lot of the accounts I've written about where police are treating themselves as if they're besieged.
I mean, the trope that we are hearing and reading a great deal is the idea that there's a war on the police, which of course is the most perfect nonsense.
We're living in a uniquely risk-free period where law enforcement is concerned.
The rate of death by firearms-related encounters is plummeting drastically since about 1973 or so.
It's down by several quantum measurements since 1973, but there are far fewer police officers than there are today.
And the other thing we're finding is that the leading, I think the leading if not, a leading if not the leading cause of job-related fatalities for police officers is self-inflicted death through vehicle mishaps because they like indulge themselves in the adolescent pastime of driving fast and kicking ass, and that's one of the leading causes of death.
Another is all the diseases, the chronic diseases attendant to a sedentary lifestyle involving high blood pressure and the like.
If you live to be 50 or 55 years old, actually you can retire probably 48 or 50 with a very large salary, but the rate of disability that we find in police departments is actually a function of union contracts where if you can claim some kind of a disability in your last year, then you get that much larger of a pension owing to the deal that's been negotiated with the police union.
So you hear all these things, and of course, every time a police officer dies, it's a staggeringly uncommon occurrence, but there is this Soviet-style ritual of public grief where police departments throughout a given area, sometimes binationally, as is the case where you live in Idaho or Washington or some other state that borders Canada, they'll actually send down this crimson-suited horde of Mounties to take part in one of these Brezhnevite state funerals for a law enforcement officer who dies in the line of duty, even if this doesn't involve catching a bullet or otherwise doing something that would be a familiar image from the television propaganda we get about law enforcement.
If he kills himself in a car accident, there's a state funeral.
If he's part of a motorcade for a public functionary and gets killed, there's a state funeral for a police officer.
And this is to impress upon the mundane, like you and me, Scott, that these people are made out of more refined stuff.
They're much more important than we will ever be, and we should prostrate ourselves before them in a gesture of supplication and gratitude for the mere fact that we're permitted to breathe the government's air and exercise the freedoms that the government grants to us.
It's perfectly sickening.
Yeah, it's amazing to me the way people really internalize these feelings, too.
If you listen to talk radio or something, people will just absolutely rally around the police and make arguments that amount to, but their lives are worth that much more than ours because they spend their day risking their life in order to protect us all.
And so, therefore, they ought to get a bunch of ribbons and medals, and we ought to salute them and treat them like our, uh, whatever, overlords.
Yeah, like our saviors in uniform.
And the other thing that I find interesting is that where you do have the random and uncharacteristic example of a genuine peace officer, that is to say, somebody who actually comes to the rescue of an innocent person on the receiving end of criminal violence by a state functionary, the police officer in question is going to get purged from the force.
I've written about a couple of cases like that, and they're two strikingly different people.
One of them is Ramon Perez from there in Austin, Texas, and he refused to taser an elderly man, a senior citizen, in circumstances that didn't involve the kind of a threat that would be compatible with the Blackletter policy of the Austin PD, which is a ghastly police force, one of the worst in the region, not in the country.
He was cashiered from his job after undergoing, uh, once again, Soviet-style psychological evaluation in order to find some reason to dismiss him.
And the other is the case of Regina Tasca from Bogota, I believe that's how it's pronounced, New Jersey, who actually pulled a cop off of a 22-year-old kid who was the subject of a safety check.
He'd had some kind of a breakdown, and his mother, who was a member of the town council, had called the police, that's never a good idea, for help in getting him to the hospital.
And she showed up and had very recently undergone training on how to deal with people with mental and psychological handicaps.
She de-escalated the situation and tried to talk him down.
He was perfectly calm and reasonably rational, although somewhat unbalanced.
I mean, he was a kid with problems.
When a couple of police officers from another jurisdiction had overheard the call, came by and one of them blindsided the kid, threw him to the ground, started to beat him.
So Regina Tasca interposed herself.
God bless her for it.
She reached down and pulled the cop off the kid, saying that's not necessary.
Now she's facing expulsion, termination, because she's considered to be a risk to her fellow officers on account of that incident and an earlier one in which she had refused to help beat up a 110-pound drunken woman whom they'd taken to the hospital.
And she ended up wanting to leave the hospital her own accord.
And Tasca's partner had tried to bull rush her back into the hospital emergency room.
This 110-pound girl simply pulled her hand away.
And in doing so, scratched, literally scratched this police officer.
This was considered to be a felonious assault.
And because Regina Tasca didn't help wrestle this woman to the ground and inflict God only knows what misery on her, this was considered to be a derogation from her status as one of the suitable protectors of this so-called Brotherhood in Blue.
So on the basis of these two incidents, she is facing termination and expulsion from her job as a police officer.
And this is somebody who was acting like a peace officer.
She was trying to protect individuals, protect their rights, protect their property, help to bring about a public order conducive to the exercise of our rights.
And she's incompatible with the role that's played by most police officers today, which is to force the mundane to submit at all times for whatever reason and to be part of an unbending blue wall defending those who are part of this Brotherhood of Coercion.
It's like the mob rules on The Sopranos, right?
Ralphie crying, You're not allowed to hit me, man!
You have to have a sit down and get permission from everybody because I've got a high enough rank that that's against the rules.
That's a very good parallel, but I think it's somewhat unfair because the mafia actually has a far more exacting standard for the use of force, not only within their own fraternity, but in dealing with others in the larger world.
I'm being unfair to Ralphie You're being unfair to Ralphie, you're saying.
I think you are, because there's a far greater sense of proportionality and discretion in the use of force by the mafia.
One of the things I've written about is the case of Whitey Bolger and all the people that are surrounded him, the federally protected mobsters in the Winter Hill Gang and some of the other elements of organized crime there in Boston.
Back in the 1960s, Raymond Patriarch had taken out a contract on an informant and a fellow by the name of Barbosa, who's a knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, living caricature of a hitman, had this elaborate plan where he was going to wait until this informant was in his home, and then he was going to light a fire in the guy's basement and then call every fire department office surrounding this block and send in false alarms that go off to other places so that they wouldn't be able to respond to the fire.
And then he was going to post four snipers at the four cardinal points surrounding the home and shoot the guy after he came out of the burning building.
And Patriarch, who's a mob boss, not a nice guy, said, wait a second, does anybody else live in this home?
And Barbosa said, well, as a matter of fact, he lives there with his mother and his grandmother.
And Patriarch said, well, are we going to kill them too?
And Barbosa said, well hey, it's not my fault that he chose to live there.
Now Patriarch had canceled the contract.
Now contrast that with what happened in Waco where they used exactly the same plan to kill the Branch Davidians of Mount Carmel.
They interdicted the fire department.
There were emergency vehicles headed to the scene.
They started a fire and then they shot the people who fled the building.
Honestly, there are many orders of magnitude worse than the mob.
Sounds like a great argument for free market security to me.
Amen.
Everybody, that's the great Will Gregg.
Liberty and Eclipse is the book.
FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com is the blog.
Thanks, Will.
Thank you.
Take care, Scott.