RE John MC:
That fits the reports I’ve seen over the last few years. Many rounds fired, but few hits. The cops have failed to understand the difference between firepower and effective firepower. The big difference is that in the case of the latter, it’s how many rounds you need to get on target to have the effect that you want, not how many you can send downrange.
And I don’t like the militarization of the police either. It feeds the problem of their being estranged from the citizenry that they’re supposed to be serving.
It’s inescapable that whenever you create an in-group, you will, perforce, also create an out-group and as Eric Hoffer once noted, all you need to do in order to do horrible things to people is to convert them from being a thou to an it. And that whole cop defined polarization between police vs little people, sets the stage for some real atrocities to happen, and like that situation in New Orleans with the drug raid on an innocent person where the homeowner was killed and the Narcs planted evidence to justify the raid, or those fifty rounds poured into that poor guy in NYC, you can see the writing on the wall. A lot of those accusations of police acting like occupation troops are true.
A real core problem is that we have police defining the dividing line between themselves and the rest of us, when that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. I keep hearing cops calling us civilians and it just galls me, because they are civilians too. They’re civilian police, not military nor are they the members of say, a resurrected Roman Equestrian Class. (A petty nobility from the days of the Roman Republic.) When we tolerate their attempts to define themselves as something other than civlians– citizens, we lay the foundation for the rise of arrogance on their part and victimization on our own.
I’ll be honest. I think that this is a dangerous enough trend that any cop calling us civilians and referring to the police as a member of a class of petty nobility should be suspended without pay the first time and fired the second– no exceptions.
Why? Because what people believe to be true about themselves and their relationship to other people, determines how they’ll treat those other people. Or as an old Hindu philosopher once put it, “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” And the cops attempt to reinvent themselves as a special class of petty nobility within what’s left of the Republic, is a direct threat to the citizens in the general public and to the Republic itself.
A lot of us worry, post Ruby Ridge and Waco about where law enforcement is going. And what the Feds do today, the local cops do tomorrow, and if they’re allowed to behave like they’re members of a special class, it will be easier for them to do things which are not only a violation of the Bill of Rights, but an affront to human dignity as well, simply because, borrowing Hoffer’s definition for a moment, they’ve converted us from a thou to an it.
So it becomes not just a matter of changing how we select for those who become policemen, but also of a need to indoctrinate early about just who they actually are, and enforcing a change in how cops are to present themselves, not only to us but to the guys they see in the mirror every morning. A cop who calls any of us a Civilian with respect towards dividing and classifying everybody else should be warned once and fired the second time.
And if this sounds extreme, let us remember that they’re carrying guns and engaging in the offensive use of force as an agent of the electorate. That makes them useful servants, but terrifying masters, and for that reason, we must be adamant in insisting on a change of this “cop vs little” people culture. And a cop calling anybody “little” anything should discover that his next stop’s going to be some sercurity company where he can punch a clock and read comic books because he’s far too dangerous to allow to run around carrying both weapons and the full force of the law.
I’ve known cops, mostly older ones, who have worried about politicians both of the left and the right, working hard to drive a wedge between the citizenry and their police. It’s a real thing to fear, and especially when the younger ones, can’t percieve it because they’ve been brought to believe that they’re members of a special class. What my old friends seldom consider is that the internal culture of the police, one which we should never, ever have allowed to come into existance, also works hard at driving that wedge.
In the end, we could well end up having to do what Sir Robert Peel did and begin to dismantle the existing police and replace it with something else. And it’s going to be sad, but it’s going to take yet another string of atrocities before people are convinced that it has to happen.
