07/30/12 – Stephan Salisbury – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org for the interview archives there.
And our next guest is Stefan Salisbury.
He's a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a regular over at tomdispatch.com.
His most recent book is Mohammed's Ghosts, an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
And this one is at tomdispatch.com.
And you know how it goes.
It's got a couple of different titles.
Stefan Salisbury, Life in the American Slaughterhouse.
Nice, Tom.
He's such a soft-spoken guy.
Not so much with the written work.
And Police Shootings Echo Nationwide.
Aurora gets the attention, but guns are going off everywhere.
Welcome back to the show.
Stefan, how are you doing?
I'm okay, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Well, it's always a pleasure.
Well, good.
Well, that makes it easy for both of us, then.
So, there's an epidemic of crime going on that's not getting reported at all in the media, or at least not in proportion to the quantity and quality of it, and that is police crime.
It really does seem like they're mad dogs off the leash all around the country these days, doesn't it?
Well, I don't know that I would go quite so far as to say...
Oh, come on.
You're the writer.
I'm just the...
Awesome.
But there are, I would say, on average, from every bit of information I've been able to glean, and it's not easy getting information about this, let me tell you, you're looking at at least one fatality, a shooting fatality, carried out by the police across the country every single day.
And this actually doesn't really represent, at least it's hard to tell, but I don't think it represents a huge uptick in police fatalities, police perpetrated fatalities.
But it definitely, there is an uptrend in certain places, largely in metropolitan areas, although it's hard to get information about that.
But there has been some tracking done in specific places that shows that there is definitely an uptrend in police fatalities.
And, of course, we're talking today, in part because of a couple of recent shootings, fatal shootings by police in Anaheim, California, that have caused a number of community protests over the last week since they took place.
About a week ago, this past weekend, when two people were shot and killed by police in Anaheim.
And they represent, it's hard to get numbers even in that town, but the Orange County District Attorney says there have been six shootings, five fatalities carried out by police this year.
Almost one a month in just that one locality.
But as I was quick to find out, even though those two shootings eventually produced community protests and a little bit of attention from the mainstream press, they were only two of, I don't know, half a dozen shootings, most of them fatal, around the country the day before and the day after.
So this is a very, very common occurrence in America.
And it is probably not so common in upper middle class or middle class white suburban communities, but it is extremely common in poorer, darker parts of the country, in inner cities.
And Anaheim is an interesting example, because we think of Anaheim as being the location for the Magic Kingdom.
It's where Disneyland is.
And it is in Orange County, which has got a very strong actually Republican tradition going way back.
A strong, very, very, very conservative community there.
Largely Anglo that lives in kind of hilly parts of Anaheim and Orange County.
But Anaheim City is over 50% Hispanic now.
It's a city of about 330,000, 340,000 people.
And about 52% of it is Hispanic.
And I believe all the shootings involve Hispanic people.
And they have no political representation on city council or in the mayor's office.
So I think there's a level of disconnect between that particular community and the power structure of the city.
But that's true around the country as well.
Even when there's no clearly defined racial disconnect or ethnic disconnect, there certainly is a class disconnect.
And so if you are a poor person, and particularly as I say, a person of color, you're far more at risk in America of having a violent encounter with the police.
Even if you yourself are unarmed, even if you yourself are unarmed and minding your own business, which seems to be the case at least in one of these shootings in Anaheim.
But even if you aren't minding your own business, even if you are doing something that is suspicious and that a police officer might want to inquire about or investigate, I don't believe that the police should be so quick to act as judge, jury and executioner.
That's not the way I think that the Constitution sort of foresees justice in America.
Well, all right.
So now when I was a kid on Sesame Street, they said these are the people in your neighborhood.
And they introduced me to the local sheriff.
It was government TV.
And so who's this guy?
Basically he's my security officer.
He's going to be around to make sure that nothing bad happens.
That's the role he plays.
And then Andy Griffith and all them, and really the rest of the TV shows, try to rub in the idea that, hey, these guys are just here for your own good, and they use the minimum amount of force necessary in order to take in the bad guy.
And if they do overstep that, the guy must really deserve it.
But that's few and far between anyway.
But it seems like we've come so far from that where now the common understood norm and conventional just understanding of the way it works is, if they're coming for you, SWAT's coming for you.
And they might break your entire house down.
And it's going to be the special weapons assault team that comes, not guys in suits knocking on your door.
And that now they're going to use the Powell Doctrine, overwhelming force.
They're going to crash in on you with a blitzkrieg so fast with flashbang grenades and screaming and machine guns in your face and your wife thrown on the ground that you don't dare even try to resist because that would risk officer safety.
And it seems to me like that's a change that has occurred in my lifetime.
Maybe it was always like that, but at least now I don't even think the story is anymore that it's Andy Griffith.
Everything changed.
I don't know if it was 9-11 or Waco or when was the line where they decided they can treat us all well like the Branch Davidians.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, Rich.
I did a lot of research and a piece for Time Dispatch a while ago about 9-11 funds that were distributed by the federal government annually since the Trade Center attacks in 2001.
You know, it's a massive amount of money we're talking about here.
I don't think people quite realize just how much money is going into so-called homeland security.
But, you know, just take Orange County as a teeny little example.
Since 9-11, Orange County has received probably over at least $100 million from the federal government that goes into bringing the police force, not just Anaheim but all the police forces within the county, up to the speed in the age of terror.
All right, I'm sorry.
Stefan, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
We've got to hold it right here and go out to this break, but you'll have the floor right back after this.
This is the Scott Horton Show here on Liberty Radio Network.
ScottHorton.org.
Check out Stefan Salisbury today at timedispatch.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, ScottHorton.org.
I'm talking with Stefan Salisbury.
He's a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a regular over at timedispatch.com where this piece is published, Life in the American Slaughterhouse.
And I'm sorry.
Well, we were talking, of course, about Anaheim is in the news, the big protests there.
And then I went on and on, but I think you were addressing my point about how it seems like the idea behind the common police tactics and strategies has really changed from minimum force to overwhelming force and the idea that their job is really protecting innocent people, not just running roughshod over people.
It seems to be waning terribly.
Well, I was going to make a couple of points.
One was you drew this alarming picture of a police officer decked out in SWAT gear and goggles and flashbangs and all that stuff.
And Anaheim, since 9-11 Orange County where the city is located, has received over $100 million from the federal government to upgrade its communications, its equipment, its training, and so forth.
And one of the things that they have spent a lot of money on is upgrading every bit of equipment and communications capability that their SWAT teams have.
So now they've got seven armored vehicles available for use in the county.
Their SWAT teams, each member of a team goes out and, you know, like 30, 40 pounds of gear with ballistic helmets and goggles and radio headsets and bulletproof vests and your flashbangs and your smoke canisters and God knows how much ammunition.
Now they've got uplinks to surveillance helicopters so they can follow in real time what those helicopters are showing in any kind of target area.
They are linked countywide with Wi-Fi.
They have their own surveillance collection center, database center for all kinds of suspicious activity reports and any kind of intelligence communications that come into the police departments throughout the county.
So this is what 9-11 has done.
And so when they go out, you know, they're not messing around.
Now at the same time, you know, they would, I'm sure, say, and I mean we've heard them say over and over again, not just in Anaheim but all over the country, that, you know, it's a different world out there.
And it's true.
There is a difference from when, you know, you and I were growing up and today, I mean, there's far more sophisticated weaponry available on the streets.
So the cops say, well, it's a much more dangerous environment out there.
We don't have time to make these, you know, we have to make snap decisions here.
But the fact is that, I mean, take this case in Anaheim.
There's no snap decision there.
There was a guy who was completely unarmed.
He wasn't doing anything.
He was running, actually trying to get away from the police when they shot him.
And then they, you know, they got him down and then they shot him in the head, in the back of the head, and killed him and then left him lying there.
Now, this was all documented.
This was on video, which was up on the local CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, KCAL.
And since my piece went up, and since the protests there have gotten larger KCAL has taken that video down, which showed, you know, the police, not the actual shooting, but the aftermath, in which people were very upset.
And police fired directly into crowds of children and women with rubber bullets and bean bags.
There was a police dog that, you know, they say accidentally got loose and attacked a child in a stroller and his mother and father.
There is still up, because it's not on the KCAL site, images or video of that dog attack and police attack.
You have to search for it on YouTube.
There's also video of the immediate aftermath of the shooting of this man in question, Manuel Diaz.
He's just been shot in the head.
He's lying on the ground.
And there's nobody to do it.
There are maybe half a dozen cops, maybe more than that, just sort of milling around.
They're doing absolutely nothing.
They seem to be far more concerned with moving people away from the scene.
People are already very far away from the scene.
And they're asking, they're shouting out to the police, why, you know, he's still alive.
Why don't you call an ambulance?
Or, you know, why did you have to shoot him in the head?
There's blood all over the ground.
Why don't you do something?
And all the cops are saying is get back, get back, get back.
They're absolutely showing no interest whatsoever in trying to provide any kind of emergency treatment for this guy they just shot who was unarmed.
So anyway, the point is, I guess, that it's when you put this kind of hardware into the arms of a police force, they're going to use it.
I mean, that's just as simple as that.
I mean, why else give it to them?
Of course.
Well, and I don't think you need the Stanford prison experiment to show either that.
You dress somebody up in a costume, they start feeling like that for a minute.
You know what I mean?
That's why you dress them in uniforms in the first place, is it's supposed to make them feel like a professional, and that they have to stay cool and dispassionate and do their job according to the law, not according to what they want.
That's supposedly the whole point of the costume in the first place.
So yes, you dress them up like a storm trooper of death and watch them kill people.
Well, Scott, a lot of the money that flowed into police departments around the country after 9-11 was supposedly for training purposes.
Yet for all the tens of millions of dollars that went for training, they still respond in the classic fashion.
I mean, how many times have we seen this same scenario enacted over and over again?
I mean, in the piece that I wrote, I just happened to compare it to the Diallo case in 1999.
It's exactly the same.
That was the infamous case in which a man was shot 41 times as he tried to show police his identification as he stood on his apartment steps back in the Bronx.
And they said, well, you reached for his wallet, we thought it was a gun, which is always the response.
And these guys, this is how deeply ingrained the notion of the police are under such pressure to make snap judgments, how deeply ingrained that idea is.
There were four officers who were charged with, I can't remember now, some variation of manslaughter or second-degree murder or something like that.
Anyway, it wasn't first-degree murder, it was just lesser charge.
But serious nonetheless, very serious.
And they changed the venue.
The defense successfully had the venue changed from the city to Albany, and where these four cops were acquitted of charges.
And the jury said after the trial that, well, it was a reasonable response to shoot this guy 40 times for reaching for his wallet because the police thought he may be armed.
And in that one, it turned out that somehow they couldn't just put a drop gun on him like a GI in Iraq would give a guy a shovel and an AK and pretend he was a bad guy after you wax him for no reason.
In this case, I guess there were too many witnesses, so they had to admit it was a wallet in the first place.
Otherwise, they would have just framed him.
And we all know it, too.
That's what's funny.
They just happened to get caught that it was a wallet this time.
Yeah.
I mean, here you have exactly the same situation, except this wasn't 41 shots.
But it was an unarmed guy who wasn't doing anything and was trying to actually, you know, he's really running for his life.
Well, and they're doing this to somebody right now somewhere.
I mean, this one here says, A 12-year-old tased inside Victoria's Secret.
The cops were hunting down the mom over traffic tickets.
They'd followed her into a store, mistook the daughter, the 12-year-old daughter, for the mom and tased her.
And the police spokesman says, well, of course, the officer's actions were justified.
The little girl must have swung at him or something, or else why would he?
Well, electroshock tortured her.
This is America on an hourly basis, you know, going on right now.
Yeah, I think this is true.
I think this is true.
All right.
Well, at least they won't electroshock torture you just for writing about it or talking about it yet.
But we're headed that way.
So I guess I'll see you in the concentration camp there, Steph.
Well, we'll have some good conversations.
Yeah, the NDAA, you know, it's legal now.
Why not do it?
You know, that's the real question.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Well, thanks, Scott.
It's always a pleasure, as I say.
Everybody, that's Stephan Salisbury writing at TomDispatch.com and also writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
We're over time.
Thanks very much for listening.