Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. – Thomas Jefferson
To hear the cops tell it, they’re the “thin blue line” that stands between civilization and a species of chaos resembling Mad Max meets Lord of the Flies in the midst of an immense drunken free-for-all in Somalia. Never mind the fact that full-time police are a comparatively recent social development, that violent crime was declining for centuries before their invention, and that police spend the majority of their time collecting revenue and harassing people for consensual behaviors; we’re just supposed to accept their word for the fact that they do a vital, dangerous, thankless job, and that those of us who criticize them would be on our knees kissing their boots and thanking the gods for their timely arrival were we to be menaced by keyboard-wielding perverts, pimps with broken taillights or drug dealers thumbing their nose at the social order via “rolling stops”.
As in so many other cases, the myth police want you to believe is almost nothing like the truth. Despite dramatically-increased armament and out-of-control “officer safety” policies justified by the pretense that police work is incredibly dangerous, the truth is that mechanics, commercial drivers, farmers, linemen, garbage men, steelworkers, roofers and pilots all have more dangerous jobs than cops. Logging and fishing are dramatically more dangerous; cops’ level of on-the-job peril is roughly equivalent to that of groundskeepers and professional athletes. Moreover, the “lawbreakers” they supposedly “protect” society from are mostly productive members of that society who are robbed at gunpoint for breaking arbitrary rules, violently attacked for amusing themselves in ways the “authorities” have forbidden, and tricked into breaking laws which carry lifelong penalties for “crimes” that didn’t actually happen and which the cops’ targets had no intention of committing in the first place. The reason for this evil fuckery? To continue the myth of the “thin blue line”, naturally; since there aren’t enough actual criminals to justify the existence of even a fifth of the cops we have (and not a hundredth of their weaponry & equipment), they have to manufacture “dangerous criminals” in order to convince the Great Unwashed that they are not merely a necessary evil but heroic defenders of “innocent children.” Here’s a recent example:
…Jason Lee…maintains that there is a stark difference between intending to buy sex and intending to buy sex from a minor…After a few text messages with his chosen escort, Lee was told that she was [supposedly] a 16-year-old runaway. The ensuing scenario is familiar to many of the men whose sullen mugshots are posted online and featured in media reports…Phoenix-area officers have used similar tactics to net dozens of suspects who police [pretend] were ready and willing to exploit young girls…But many child-prostitution defendants say police’s use of the adults-only section of the site is bait-and-switch technique that makes felons of those guilty of misdemeanor intent and no actual crime. Media attention is typically quick to follow the arrests, unjustly branding average “johns” as pedophiles…Lee admits he planned to pay for sex with an adult and said several factors led him to believe the woman at the other end of the text message was 18 or over, despite her claims. How else would she book a hotel room? If she was really a runaway, wouldn’t her parents track her down by her cell phone or credit card?…Lee believed the woman was just…lying…about her age to squeeze more money from him, he said. Further…the age of consent in Maryland, where Lee was visiting from, is 16…police [pretend that magical] code words in their [fake] ads…are…searched by those who aim for the young. Defense attorneys say the opposite is true — their clients don’t know to weed out these words. [But] few suspects, even those with a reasonably strong defense, opt to fight the charges at trial…
Nor is it only in Phoenix that such sleazy con games are played; Polk County, Florida, home to another Neanderthal Nazi of the same noxious mold as Phoenix’s Joe Arpaio, is in some ways even worse:
…While detectives used to post ads suggesting an underage teen or child was available for sex, they now routinely post more innocuous personal ads of adults on traditional dating sites. When men – many of them under 25 with no criminal history – respond, officers switch the bait and typically indicate their age is really 14 or 15 years old…law enforcement is also now routinely making first contact with men…responding to their ads on dating sites…after men start conversing with what they think are adults, officers change the age they claim to be, but try to convince the men to continue the conversation anyway…If the men indicate they [aren’t] interested, they [are] still often arrested for just talking to [a cop]…
Even if the men have the resources to hire a good lawyer, the damage is already done because Judd splashes their pictures across the media and insists that they’re “perverts” even after they’re exonerated by a court:
…Judd…either didn’t realize – or didn’t care – that a number of the 132 men whose faces appeared on his mugshot “big board” had already been cleared of committing crimes…”It’s fair…Because…when we arrest them as ‘sexual perverts on children,’ I’m going to call them [that]…”
Sooner or later, people are going to start waking up to the fact that cops are not their friends and nothing like their servants; they lie constantly, are willing to do anything to enrich themselves and can arrest, jail and destroy anyone they take a dislike to as easily as they pick their noses. They can do all these things without oversight, checks or consequences because the majority have willingly eaten their shit for several generations; our only hope is that they stop swallowing and making “nom nom nom” noises before every last one of us is condemned to prison, probation or some registry of artificial “offenses”.
I wonder how much the Neanderthal would scream if someone were to put pictures of his officers online on mere accusation of misconduct and leave them there once they were cleared (because unless they ate a baby they are keeping their job) because obviously they were a bad cop to get the formal accusation in the first place.
Perhaps it is time to consider that instead of more toys, busts, money… we need to get serious reform into the system. Where there are no cash prizes for getting a longer list of suspects in the soundbite cycle, there would be less motivation to destroy others for a budget bump.
I’ve long maintained that we do not need a police force, that in fact, police forces are they are organized and run today are the enemy of democracy.
I totally agree. I think people need to take a more active roll in providing their own security. We do have a second amendment … and the right to keep and bear arms puts us in a unique position to do exactly that. I think some of the gun laws need to be relaxed, like the ridiculous restrictions on SBR’s. Me? I’d go for relaxing the restriction on automatic weapons as well. Then citizens have everything they need to take care of themselves.
That’s the way it was done after the Revolution – for a very long time.
I think there is one problem with that, namely violent insane people. If that issue could be somehow fixed, I don’t think there would be much need for “providing security” in the first place. The current solution of making them cops if not too deranged seems to not work well, even if it is a historically well-established practice.
There must be something wrong with your statement. If the police are the enemy of democracy then why don’t I support the police? I might not change your mind but at least I ask you to consider that the only way to understand democracy is; Majority rule. Now if the police worked toward solving crimes against people and property I just might consider it to be an honorable profession. I think a case can be made for privatization of police. Even if it is not practical a lesson can be learned here. When people pay directly for a service they are not too likely to pay for things that don’t affect themselves.
Private police would result in at least as much abuse as government police and very probably even more.
Maybe, although I don’t know why you think it is probable but that isn’t the point I was making.
we pretty much have a private police force now, only paid for by the public. It’s fairly clear they work for the money lords.
If it’s paid for by government it is not private, so I’m not sure what you mean. Who are the money lords?
“Evil fuckery” indeed. Right up there with creating terrorists and the extreme sentencing now customary for “hackers”. The whole thing is not aimed at creating security, but at creating fear of the “authorities”, so nobody dare protest.
Maggie you hit the nail right on the head with this article. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it. I was watching Bill Maher and he pointed out that once the government starts a new project (such as Homeland Defense) there’s no getting rid of it. The only hope is that you are right about this moral panic coming to an end. Maybe then the violence done by the police towards sex workers and their clients will decrease. However I think the overall violence done will just continue along.
There’s definitely something that can be done: the system needs to be burned to the ground.
I’m probably going to regret stepping into this hornet’s nest, but here goes:
I read that Popehat article titled with that phrase a few months ago and I still have the same questions. Not all of them are specifically directed at you, but I think they are valid questions and need answers.
“There’s definitely something that can be done: the system needs to be burned to the ground.”
So, how are you going to do that? Are you going to lead the assault? If not, who would you be willing to follow? Where will you begin?
More importantly, who are you willing to kill? If the target is well-protected, how many grunts are you willing to kill to get to them? How much of your current existence are you willing to lose in the fight? Further, how many innocents are you willing to risk being put in the crossfire between you and those who don’t want their system violently burned down and are willing to kill to keep it? Do you expect them to be satisfied with the answer ‘sorry, it’s all for a better tomorrow?’
And yes, I realize that innocents are in the crossfire right now, but are you prepared for their number to dramatically increase when the burning starts?
How far back will we have to turn back the clock in order to ensure the ‘system’ can never rise up again to oppress? The 1800s? The 1700s? Farther?
There’s so much talk about ‘why’ the system needs burning down, but I see no talk about ‘how’ it’s supposed to get done and very little about what’s going to come after. Perhaps I’m not looking in the right places, or perhaps the people who know how are playing it smart by not broadcasting it on the internet for all to see.
But people, rightly or wrongly, are going to fear the unknown. I do, and I agree with most of what you say on this blog.
Again, I’m thinking back to Ms. Vonk’s column. A ‘golden bridge’ or a ring of fire?
A lot of political “idea-talk” … is just that … talk.
There’s not going to be an uprising against the police – so no worries about killing innocents.
For instance – I can say that … “The barbarism of IS in Iraq and Syria ought to outrage every nation on the planet – and this should stimulate the UN to lead a multi-nation war against them.”
But it ain’t gonna happen – it’s just talk.
Similarly, I can say … “The excesses of police departments ought to cause Americans to be outraged enough to de-militarize them and reform them.”
But it ain’t gonna happen – it’s just talk.
In the former example – there is no way that anything close to a majority of nations will rise up against IS – because nations have their own selfish interests. Russia hopes that America will get involved in that quagmire – so they push their own interests elsewhere free of our involvement. Likely – we hope that Russia gets more involved in it for similar reasons.
And, in the latter example – there’s no way that Americans are going to be outraged about police – because Americans have their own selfish interests – and one of them is the security and safety of their families. They’ll continue to trade liberty for safety.
As human beings on this planet – we are slaves to human nature, and to events as they unfold.
Now … Rand Paul has an effort going on now to de-militarize police. That will fail (though it might pick at a few things around the edges). It will fail because the people who oppose him will have no trouble in putting fear into Americans concerning their safety if Rand Paul is successful.
Nothing gets done in America anymore. You can’t even reform Social Security without Progressives “scaring” Americans over the potential outcome – even though Social Security is insolvent. Hell, the whole American government is insolvent and over $17 Trillion dollars of debt proves that.
Nothing’s gonna happen until EVERYTHING collapses. At that point, assuming that some dictator doesn’t take control – everything will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Maybe then, we can build things the right way and decide how we’re going to actually enforce laws in the new world.
But right now … no … nothing will happen. I just looked at a poll and American public opinion is now starting to turn against the protesters in Ferguson. In a few weeks … after a few “Kardashian” episodes – I rather doubt that Americans will think much about Ferguson at all. Such is the attention span of the American public.
While this is pretty bad, I think you are right on the mark.
The “burn it to the ground” piece was written on Popehat’s blog, but the author was Clarkhat.
The problem with the citizenry is that they are brainwashed by all the “cop shows” on TV. We get a steady diet of how local, state, and federal authorities are all working in our best interests, when the reality is very different.
The silver lining may be that the Ferguson mess is exposing the militarization of police, but who knows if anything will be done about it.
It really has nothing to do with TV shows. It has to do with the fact that Americans are SCARED of everything. Scared of letting their daughter walk to school … scared of terrorists … scared of everything.
Right now – they WANT those mine-resistant vehicles and grenade launchers in the hands of police … “just in case”.
Progressivism is kind of based on “trust in government” … all government. Police are the law-enforcement arm of government.
And … look around … “Progressivism” is all the rage these days.
Don’t get “fooled” into thinking that police militarization … or NSA surveillance … or TSA outrages … or even EPA oversteps are “separate” issues.
They are all the same issue – GOVERNMENT OVERREACH. The “cure” for all of them – is the same. LESS GOVERNMENT.
But right now – Americans are perfectly happy to sit back and let it happen. Because they think that it makes them safer.
I think the problem is not even “Government”, but just “huge concentration of power” and nobody wants to get noticed by it in a negative way. If the US Government were an openly criminal gang, things would probably look much the same. There is a reason there was so little open resistance in the 3rd Reich. They just made it very clear that you either were for them or against them, and that the latter would be pretty bad for you. For quite a while they could not really have backed that claim up on any larger scale, but people were scared….
and why is everyone scare of everything? Because the TV told them that the world was an evil and dangerous place. While we aren’t living in utopia, neither are we living in a world in which we need to spend every moment cowering in fear.
You know, when I was little, my only exposure to cops were to the two local cops who came into school. They came agross as nice, resonable, and generally intersting in making the world safer and better. When I got older, I say nothing to change my opinion about those individuals, but I was horrified to realize that they were the exception to the rule.
I think that a police force does have a place in society, but not as they are now. I also don’t think it’s the amount of cops that is the problem, but the idea that they are not safety officers but law enforcement. If cops were rewarded for not making arrests, and scrutinized and considered failures for needing to make them, it would be a very different world. I want cops to be like my fire alarm- present, functional, and silent and unobtrusive unless I’m in danger and I need them.
(Apologies for the incredible amount of typeos)
If the system is burnt down the only thing that will happen is chaos, the whole planet will be like Iraq.
To coin a phrase, “Not all cops are like that”. But while I can sort of sympathize with your “the system needs to be burned to the ground”, particularly in light of the unending litany of police abuses of due process, I think the position fails to take into account any number of quite crucial facts and principles. For instance, it seems that many people, in general, have a notable tendency to break the law if they know they can get away with it, if they know no one is looking. An interesting quote from Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (highly recommended):
Now, I suppose one might argue that that was due to some intrinsic flaws in capitalism which some Marxist or Libertarian utopia might obviate. But it sure looks to me like a consequence of the fact that there’s a non-trivial segment of the population who simply happen to be predators, sociopaths, and psychopaths – either as a result of genetics (nature) or environmental stresses (nurture) which may absolve them of some degree of culpability. But if that happens to be true then “burning the system to the ground” is likely to be extremely counter-productive, to say the least. As an exchange in the movie, A Man for All Seasons put it:
But I’ll readily concede that America in particular – though Canada is leaning in that direction, particularly with our Bill C36 – has gone hog wild on the Prohibitionist front, as you persuasively argued in your New Excuse post. Sure seems many are slow to learn the lessons of history, notably that governments attempting to criminalize modes of behaviour that the populace have no heart for merely call into disrepute the government itself, as well as corrupting the system of justice designed to enforce those behaviours – not to mention enriching and promoting the criminal element, the predators and psychopaths, that the government is supposed to be protecting us from: perverse incentives, indeed.
However, that said, I think that even you would concede that, yes, some modes of behaviour should in fact be prohibited – for instances, driving on the “wrong” side of the road, and, as I think you’ve previously conceded, pedophilia and rape. And in that dichotomy between things that might and might not reasonably be prohibited – even if the line between them is periodically rather blurry – I think, or at least hope, that you’ll agree that “burning the system to the ground”, though it might be a pleasant thought, is decidedly impractical: accentuate the positive, and all that.
We must rein in the police, and the cynical, morally corrupt prosecutors and judges who feed on the fruits of police misconduct. But before you burn the system to the ground, read your Hobbes. As Pinker points out, Hobbes’ “Leviathan” – i.e., all of us turning over our right to personally effect “justice” on the perpetrators of the wrongs done to us, and instead invest the State with the exclusive monopoly on the use of force to redress wrongs – looks like the greatest civilizing force the world has ever seen, by orders of magnitude.
Even libertarians need the police and the courts. Just not what our current police and courts have devolved into.
The police & courts, as designed and implemented, are expressly intended for the purpose of keeping the powerful in power and the subjects subjugated. There is and can be no “justice” in them. We did well without standing police forces for most of human history, and though courts are a necessity they must be based on a strictly-constrained government of laws that control ONLY violence or else they are merely instruments of tyranny.
I repeat: the system needs to be burned to the ground. Pinker’s observations apply to the whole of human society, not the degenerate empire in which we happen to live.
“Media attention is typically quick to follow the arrests, unjustly branding average ‘johns’ as pedophiles….”
A related point is the sensationalizing media’s careless usage (and/or deliberate exploitation of the popular misunderstanding) of the term “pedophile”.
“Pedophilia” involves pre-pubescents — children under age 11 (or under 12 or under 13, depending on some variables). Two other terms apply to pubescents whom local law may classify as minors/under-the-age-of-consent: “hebephilia”, which involves 11 to 14 year-olds; and “ephebophilia”, which involves 15 to 19 year-olds.
The media typically makes little to no effort to distinguish ages by using these three terms, choosing to employ a generic lump-all usage for “pedophilia”. The media’s approach not only does doing nothing to prevent the public from assuming the worst whenever someone is involved with a minor but actually incites public hysteria by using a wording that all implies “offenders” are preying upon pre-pubescent children.
Thanks Maggie McNeill for having the courage to shine a light on the sleaziness of some of the cops that are engaged not in police work, but in their own personal vendetta against everybody who differs with their narrow world view. They are morally corrupt to the core, not the presumed predators.
Only a woman can do this because if it had been published by a man, he would be labeled ‘pedophile’.