03/10/15 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, how's it going?
Good.
Well, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott and it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
And I'm live here in case you didn't know.
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All right.
Now I got another one from Lou Rockwell.com today.
It's our good friend, William Norman Grigg, aka Will Grigg, aka my favorite writer on the internet.
Let me think about that for a second.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really think that's it.
It's the great Will Grigg.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm tremendously honored.
Thank you so much for the kind words and for having me on your program this morning.
You know what?
I've probably been reading you longer in a row than anybody else that I read either.
I've been reading you since The New American Magazine in high school.
So that's probably- I'm glad that I've not exhausted your patience or- Oh, yeah.
No, I love this stuff.
Or outrage.
Will Grigg, he's good on everything.
Check this out.
Underdogs and Overlords.
That's the article today at lourockwell.com and at the great blog ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And well, go ahead and make them feel bad, Will.
That seems to be my long suit.
This essay talks about one facet of the mindset of the occupation army that we call law enforcement.
And it seems as if the people who adhere to that institution perceive the rest of us as something of a mirror image of their own tendencies and preoccupations.
For instance, it shouldn't surprise us that the people who weaponize canines will look upon family-owned pets as weapons.
There's practically not a day that goes by in this country without an instant in which a police officer shoots and kills a police- or forgive me, a dog that threatens him.
Not a police dog, but a privately-owned family pet who supposedly threatens them.
And this is not the sort of thing you hear on the part of mail carriers or private couriers or service personnel of any other kind who routinely have interactions with unfamiliar canines.
Only police do this, as far as I can tell.
And yet, in Georgia, there is a measure right now being considered by the state legislature that in its original form would have made it an act of second-degree murder for a common citizen or a mundane, as I like to describe us, to kill a police dog, which would be used as a weapon in most instances.
Whether you're talking about a SWAT raid or a drug raid or another type of an interaction in which the police are present with dogs, they will often deploy dogs as weapons.
And if you're on the receiving end of an unanticipated and unjustified no-knock raid in the middle of the night, such as the one that occurred about a year ago, in which Boba Fesenova, this 19-month-old baby, had his chest blown open and his face mangled, if a dog's involved in a raid of that sort and you were to grab a firearm, for instance, and shoot the dog in order to protect your family, under the bill which is being considered by the Georgia state legislature in its original form, that would have been treated as an act of second-degree murder.
That has been modified, that legislation has been modified to refer to it as aggravated assault.
But it's still talking about a sentence enhancement that would lead up to 10 years in prison if you're found guilty of injuring a dog, a canine officer, who would, for the purposes of this law in whichever form, be considered a peace officer of a standing comparable that of a human who would be his dog handler, or her dog handler.
And as is the case with many mischievous acts of legislation of this kind, it's named after somebody or some creature.
This instance, Tanya, I believe that's how the name was pronounced, a police dog who was killed during a SWAT raid, I believe in July of last year, against a fellow who was really quite a loathsome specimen.
He was an Idaho native, as it turns out, who had gone to Georgia on parole, and he was accused of sexual assault and a number of other crimes.
There was a SWAT raid on his domicile, and during the SWAT raid, the dog was killed.
And the human perpetrator was injured as well.
He ended up accepting a plea bargain agreement that has the potential of a 50-year term.
It's, for all intents and life, sentenced, because I believe he's in his late 50s.
He's going to spend at least 20 years in prison.
But this was seen as a sentence of inadequate severity to the people who were attached to law enforcement, because that component of the plea agreement that involved killing a police dog was seen as inadequate.
The term that was the component of the sentence was, I think, a three- to five-year term for destroying this police dog.
And so they wanted, in the name of the memory of Tanya, who was buried with all the somber pomp and melodramatic pageantry that we would associate with the Soviet state funeral.
It was a standard-issue police funeral, in other words, for this dog who was killed.
In the name and memory of Tanya, they wanted to enhance the status of a police dog to elevate that creature above human beings in terms of the criminal penalties that would attach to harming or destroying that police dog.
They wanted to recognize the police dog as a fully realized peace officer, in other words.
And that's just one faction, or forgive me, one demonstration, one element of what I call blue privilege, the idea that police are elevated above the common run of humanity in many ways, not the least of which, of course, is this fiction called qualified immunity.
But in terms of the sentence enhancements that attach to crimes of violence that are committed against police officers, and this would once again be, I think, the first instance in which a law in the Western world, let alone the United States, would have recognized the destruction of a non-human creature as a form of murder.
There are all kinds of criminal penalties that are implicated if you destroy somebody's living property in the form of livestock or a family pet or a companion animal.
But prior to this year, I don't think there had ever been a serious proposal anywhere in the United States to designate as murder the conscious destruction of a dog.
And it wasn't PETA who did this, it was the police unions acting through compliance of members of the Georgia state legislature, a body which is not really noted for its congeniality toward the animal rights perspective, but of course is broadly receptive to the claims of privilege made by the police and their servitors.
Yeah.
Now, so tell me this, Will, because I think I even said this on the radio before, and I was sure, but then later I did some reading and it was claimed that this was just an urban myth, but I could have swore that people had been prosecuted for murder before for a police officer, for killing a police officer, whether the statute actually already specifically allowed for that or not, but that they just said...
For killing a police dog?
Yeah, for killing a police dog in the name of, well, it was a police officer and that's against the law, pal.
I've not been able to find that.
I did some research on my own and I'd heard rumors as well as you had that this had been done.
I had thought I knew that one, but then, yeah, I read that, no, that's an urban myth though.
I've not been able to find a criminal homicide conviction for somebody who'd killed a police dog, but I found several cases, and you're probably familiar with them, where somebody has been sent to prison for an act such as growling at a police dog or otherwise taunting a police dog.
There was a case in Massachusetts where somebody allegedly taunted a police dog into injuring itself, and so he was charged with cruelty to an animal and also, I believe, some kind of an act involving abuse on a peace officer.
I have found instances where people have been prosecuted or indicted for abusing peace officers or assaulting peace officers because of things they've done to police animals, such as police dogs.
I've not seen a criminal homicide case yet, but that would be the logical progression from where we stand right now, certainly, in the absence of this law.
Well, and I know there are at least two cases, one of which I know specifically it was that imam that they set up and murdered in Detroit, where they let him sit there and bleed out and die on the cold concrete floor while they medevaced the dog out of there that had been shot in the exchange.
Yeah.
I had written about that case several years ago.
One illustration of what we're talking about, again, and the juxtaposition here in the case of Georgia is really quite stark, not quite as stark as letting somebody bleed out while taking the dog in for medical treatment, but I talk about the case of this 10-year-old boy, Dakota Corbett, who was shot by a police officer in- Actually, you know what?
We're not going to have time for this story on this side of the break here.
We got it coming right up.
So that just gives us a little bit of extra time to tell people about your website again.
It's ProLibertate is the name of the site.
It's freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The book is called Liberty in Eclipse, and you can also find at Will's website, you can find his weekly podcast, which is just great, as you can tell, because it's a lot like this.
It's like my show sounds when Will is on it.
It's great.
So check that out, and again, his article today is What's Your Status Before the Law at LouRockwell.com, and we'll be back in just a minute.
Hey, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Will Gregg.
Pro Libertate is the blog, freedominourtime.blogspot.com, also regularly writes for lourockwell.com.
His podcast is called The Freedom Zealot, and you can find that at the bottom of any entry at Pro Libertate.
It's a really small click here for The Freedom Zealot.
All right.
So we're talking about police dogs and how their lives are worth more than yours, of course, because, you know, they work for the state.
And how we really are getting that way.
They're even trying to pass this law in Georgia.
Now you said, Will, that at first they were going to make it a possible second-degree murder thing, but now they've had to back off of that.
I wonder why they've had to even back off.
Are people pushing back against this in Georgia?
There was a modest groundswell of indignation over this, all together too modest.
I think that most people are criminally indifferent to what's going on in the laboratories of mischief called state legislatures, and so this is the sort of thing that probably would have been able to pass in its unfiltered form if it hadn't been for the fact that a few local media outlets picked up on the story and generated a little bit of pushback.
But it's an abiding testament, I think, to the formidable power of the police unions in Georgia and elsewhere that any version of this measure, Tanya's Law, as it's called, is likely to be passed, especially in light of the fact that there's a contending piece of legislation, actually several, that have been grouped under the heading of Boo Boo's Law.
Boo Boo, once again, is the, or Bow Bow, I can't remember which variant of that pronunciation is correct, but the 19-month-old child of, I believe, Vietnamese or perhaps Hmong ancestry who was almost killed during a 2 a.m.
SWAT raid about a year ago when a flash bang grenade was hurled into the crib where he was sleeping.
The family were refugees from a house fire in Wisconsin.
They ended up living with a relative in Georgia, and a paid informant looking for a downward departure on a criminal sentence, no doubt, offered unsupported testimony that a $50 drug transaction had taken place at that address on the evening prior to the raid, and they got a no-knock raid, which as it happens is illegal under Georgia laws, as the defense attorney I quote points out.
And so they kicked in the door and threw in a flash bang grenade, blew up into the hole in this 19-month-old child's chest, blew his face almost to the, almost completely, permanently disfigured his face.
His nose was blown off.
He's had to undergo surgeries and medical care that have left the family more than a million dollars in debt.
No consequences at all for that.
There are a couple of measures that have been proposed that would enact some modest restrictions on the practice of no-knock raids, but it seems that they would actually legalize something that is not legally permissible in the state of Georgia right now.
But the Boo-Boo's Law, whatever configuration, is not finding traction, but Tanya's Law is.
Now Boo-Boo's Law is a bad idea, I want to underscore that fact.
I don't think that they should be putting restrictions on a practice that's impermissible.
But the point is that it's not finding traction, because as one police union flunky pointed out, no-knock raids are considered to be already sufficiently or perhaps exceptionally or extraordinarily impermissibly difficult to obtain.
What she said, Carrie Mills, she's a representative of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, I don't think any change is needed because it's not easy now to get a no-knock warrant.
And then she said, you have to draw the line between your right as a citizen to privacy and a community's right to live in a crime-free environment.
You can't have both.
Yeah, hilarious.
Obviously, they're not going to create a crime-free environment by conducting post-midnight no-knock raids.
That, of course, is a fiction of the sort that we routinely hear from people who are acting on behalf of the putative apparatus.
But the point is, as far as she's concerned, you have to live in a community where police are perfectly free to kick down doors at two in the morning and burn infants in their cribs.
That's simply a trade-off you have to make for living in a community.
And another trade-off you have to make here is to recognize that while the police have the right to kill your dog on sight, and in the case of this young man, Dakota Corbett, I mentioned before the break, actually they have the right to shoot a child while they're trying to shoot your dog, and no consequences will attach to the police officer.
On the other hand, if you happen to harm a canine peace officer in whatever circumstance, then perhaps rather than being prosecuted for second-degree murder, you'll be prosecuted for aggravated assault on a peace officer, and you'll spend 10 years in prison rather than 20.
I mean, that's the concession they're willing to make to your interests as they define them.
A canine peace officer.
I just love that.
By the way, of course, the point of this, you know, that lady's argument, the police union representative there's argument, is self-refuting.
I mean, the entire controversy was over a case where they didn't have to prove to the judge that the guy they were after was even there.
Did the judge even ask, are you sure the guy's there?
Do you know if there are other people there who could be armed?
What level of surveillance have you been carrying out in the lead-up to this?
In other words, her argument is that it's really hard to get a warrant, but we see no evidence of that at all.
We see a post-midnight SWAT raid on an innocent little child, and the suspect, who was wanted for the non-crime of selling meth to someone who wanted to buy some meth from him, or a cop who was pretending to want to, wasn't even on the premises, wasn't even on the property at the time.
No, he wasn't even in the neighborhood.
So completely, her argument completely falls flat up against the controversy, which she was called to comment on in the first place.
But anyway, so I just wanted to tie that up before I let you talk more about the story of the cop that shot a child while trying to kill the dog.
That was his excuse.
Well, I was just trying to kill the dog.
Sure.
Yeah, Michael Vickers is the name of the police officer, and he was pursuing somebody who was accused of shooting a fellow officer after an armed robbery.
And that, of course, is a significant crime.
If you're committing an act of violence in order to escape, rather than being apprehended for committing a previous act of violence, you're a criminal.
So they were looking for an actual criminal.
But rather than actually pursuing the criminal, who apparently was in the neighborhood, and at the time he wasn't armed, he was, as I understand it, sitting behind this family's pathetic, tattered-a-million little dwelling.
It was a double-wide trailer, I think, basically trying to blend in with his surroundings.
He was in the backyard.
The dog didn't alert to the suspect.
I find that really interesting.
But the dog did alert to the presence of a guy who was approaching the property with a drawn gun, emitting an odor of incipient violence.
The dog alerted to that, and then bounded out into the front yard of the living area.
The 10-year-old was standing next to the dog, and Mr. Vickers, displaying what I call a good-enough-for-government-work marksmanship, fired a single round at the dog and hit the kid in the leg, and then the kid was taken to the hospital, tardily, as it happens.
I saw an interview with the boy's sister, and she was talking about how they did what they could through direct pressure and just grabbing bedding and towels and suchlike to prevent the kid from bleeding to death.
Eventually, he got to the hospital, but from what I understand, there have been complications, and he'll never have the full function of that leg again, and there's neither criminal or civil liability that attaches to this, because at the very least, you'd have to consider this to be an act of negligent assault.
So they delayed calling the ambulance, or they delayed allowing the EMTs to treat the boy, or what?
I didn't get the details about how the scene was locked down, but the point is, the family, because of their lack of resources in the remote area they lived in, weren't able to get immediate medical attention.
They had to be the first responders there until they were able to get the kid to the hospital.
From what I understand, they didn't get an ambulance out there, they had to drive the kid to the hospital.
So you're dealing here, most likely, with the sort of thing that happens, first of all, because of the remoteness of the location and the impecunious nature of the family, but also, this was a crime scene, an active crime scene, and he wasn't their first priority.
So they weren't allowed to go until the cops said, you're allowed to go, and by then, some amount of time had passed in this emergency.
More importantly, I think, it wasn't the police officer who rendered aid.
You know, you shoot a kid, it seems to me that your first priority is to make sure the kid's okay.
No, because that is an admission that you did something wrong right there.
And they never admit this.
This is something else I've written about regarding the case of Bobo Posenova.
They've since relocated, the family's relocated back to Wisconsin, they're living in the Madison area now, that's the capital of the state of Wisconsin.
And they were promised by the county where this took place that the county would absorb at least some of the medical expenses, and of course the county commissioners reneged on this, saying it would be illegal to do so.
What they meant by that is that they'd exposed themselves to liability.
The grand jury that examined this case actually cut the family in for a share of the blame here on the assumption that there was criminal activity going on at the home.
No such activity was ever proven, of course, but the fact that the police raided the home at two in the morning must mean that there was something wrong going on there, so they have to be at least partially to blame.
There's a police officer from the state of Wisconsin, his name eludes me right now, who a couple of months ago put out a self-pitying essay talking about how his feelings are hurt because the public is ungrateful for the service that he provides, and it's just too bad that they see all the horrible things that happen and none of the good things.
He is a neighbor, for all intents and purposes, of the Posenova family.
They live within 10 or 12 miles of where he lives there in Wisconsin.
Why doesn't he organize with his fellow public-spirited police officers a charitable foundation or a charitable outreach program to raise money for the Posenova family to help defray the expenses that were imposed upon them?
He doesn't do this because that would admit that there's something wrong institutionally with the profession that he has chosen, that they're to some extent responsible for this type of horrible thing happening to an innocent child.
They can't make that admission.
Right.
All right, now, so let me ask you this, though, because this is important.
I like to try to end on a happy note, and since we're a minute over time anyway here, a few seconds now.
What about the pushback kind of nationwide?
People really are getting sick and tired of this.
Different versions of cop watch and different things like this seem to be cropping up all over the place.
As we've talked about before, you have the confluence of everyone having a high-quality video camera in their pocket.
Hold your phone sideways, people, on video, please, thank you, and Facebook and Twitter that make it possible to share these things immediately.
I'm seeing, even in mainstream news now, they can't help but cover it, LA Times covering a local police shooting in some county nobody ever heard of in Kentucky somewhere or whatever, that it's just local police shootings, more and more national news stories.
There's just no way around it.
People are getting sick and tired of it.
People I know who don't know about or care about politics say to me, Scott Ward, what is going on with the cops lately, man?
It's like they're just out of control.
I wonder whether you think that a difference can be made here, is being made in any real way.
The fact that people are discussing this is progress.
The fact that people who are within, if you will, the guardian class of the media, the gatekeepers, are at least willing to acknowledge the problem is progress, because you and I have been butting our heads against this wall for how many years now, and finally, at least, we're finding at least some traction on the subject.
I do think, I can't remember who it was who said this in responding to my concept of peak jackboot, was asked if we've reached the point of peak jackboot where people are at least willing to acknowledge that there's an institutional problem with law enforcement, it's not just a handful of rogues, it's something institutionally that's gone wrong.
He said, I don't know if we've reached peak jackboot, but we may have reached peak obedience or peak submission.
I think that happened last year, and this year, of course, the dialectic, we're seeing the pushback on the part of the voices and the interests that represent the state's coercive apparatus, and I think this year, we're going to see them escalating and counter-escalation on their part, and it's going to get nastier.
I've long said that what will happen after the public finally realizes the problem is that the snapback from the embedded institutional interest is going to be that much more violent, and I think that's where we are this year.
I think this year, we're going to see some additional, perhaps even more lurid examples of really ugly, violent efforts to suppress what's going on, but in the long term, I think that they've lost their legitimacy, and they're not going to recover it, and I think within maybe the next 10, 12 years or so, that we're actually going to see some efforts to decentralize, to break up the mass, and to challenge the assumptions that are behind this really strange enterprise that we call law enforcement.
I don't know if you've discussed this with the other guests, but when people ask me what should be done about law enforcement, I said law enforcement should be abolished.
We should break up the state's security monopoly, because law enforcement is in no way devoted to the protection of persons and property, and any protection we derive from that is entirely tangential to its purpose, which as we've seen in Ferguson and elsewhere, is to extract revenue at gunpoint and to monetize trivial misconduct for the benefit of the political class.
I think we're going to start having that conversation that's badly overdue, and I think that in the intermediate term, there's cause for optimism, and the immediate term, however, I think things are going to get uglier.
Yeah, I think that's probably right, but again, in that Rahm Emanuel, Condoleezza Rice way, in the long term, will benefit from it, because as the gloves are off, so is the mask.
Exactly.
So, anyway, but thanks very much, Will.
I sure appreciate you having me on the show again.
Okay, you take care, Scott.
It's always great to talk.
You too, man.
All right, y'all, that's the great William Norman Grigg.
Will Grigg at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The Freedom Zealot podcast as well, just page down, and you'll find the link at the bottom of the page there, and find them today at lourockwell.com as well.
The article is, What's Your Status Before the Law?
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