"We're Fighting A War": Civilian Disarmament and the Martial Law Mindset

Bonfire of the liberties: Chinese police incinerate "illegal" guns.

Denver resident Shawn Miller is accused of several acts of criminal violence. On one occasion, he and an associate beat a pedestrian, leaving the man with a broken knee and a permanent physical disability. In a second assault, Miller and another buddy beat a disabled Iraq war veteran so severely --using both fists and clubs -- that he briefly "flat-lined" as EMTs treated him.


The facts in those cases are not disputed, yet Miller has not been charged with a crime. However, he is being sued by Jason Anthony Graber, one of his victims. In light of Miller's documented history of criminal violence, the plaintiff's attorney has demanded that the assailant not be permitted to bring a firearm while being deposed.

Miller protests that this is an unconscionable act of "oppression." With the aid of the Denver City Attorney, Miller -- an Officer with the Denver Police Department -- has filed a petition with the U.S. District Court seeking a "protective order" allowing him to be armed during the depositions.

The Department's Operation Manual requires that officers be "armed at all times" -- a provision that poses some interesting challenges for officers who choose to bathe, assuming that there are any who do. "Requiring a uniformed or non-uniformed police officer to disarm when he is compelled to give a deposition at an attorney's office, or at any other unsecured location, presents a significant officer safety issue," whines an affidavit provided by Lt. Dikran Kushdilian of the Denver PD.

Attorney David Lane, who is representing Graber, quite sensibly insists that some precautions must be taken in deposing people who are "defendants because they have acted illegally and violently toward others in the past."

The Denver Police Department has a well-earned reputation for brutality and corruption, and Lane has deposed more than a few abusive cops, and those proceedings "can get very contentious. When I'm cross-examining cops about their misconduct, past and present, they get angry, and I don't wish to depose angry people who have a long history of violent behavior while they're wearing a gun strapped to their waist."

Lane demands that the deposition take place in a setting in which neither side is armed. Denver's municipal government demands that the examination should take place at the federal Courthouse, where Miller and other officers in similar cases "would surrender their weapons to the custody of the U.S. Marshall [sic], and would be unarmed during the deposition."

In other words, it's not quite the case that Denver officers have to be "armed at all times"; the critical issue is the preservation of the government's monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force in all circumstances. Lane should counter Denver's demand by offering to permit Miller to carry his firearm to the deposition, while specifying that he and his associates would also be armed. The official response to that counter-proposal would be instructive.

Leading lambs to the slaughter: "Toy Gun Bash."

While Lane most likely wouldn't choose that approach, he is sensible enough to recognize that the State's agents of armed coercion are the most dangerous element in society, and prudent enough to act on that understanding.


Owing to the tireless efforts of the organs of official indoctrination, a large portion of the public assumes that the opposite is true, and as a result can be easily convinced that only those commissioned to commit violence on behalf of government can be entrusted with the means to do so.

A splendid example of this deadly agitprop is offered by the "Toy Gun Bash," which was first inflicted on Providence, Rhode Island seven years ago by the criminal clique running the municipal government.

Each year around Christmastime, children living in Providence are compelled to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the “Bash-O-Matic,” a device described by the Boston Globe as “a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.” In exchange for feeding their toy guns into this recombinant monstrosity, each child is given a substitute toy that is deemed to be suitably "non-violent." They are also forced to endure a harangue regarding "the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake."

Maintaining the monopoly: Burning confiscated guns.

 The Providence event, continues the Globe, is "a version of the gun buyback program in which adults trade firearms for gift certificates.”

In fact, gun “buyback” programs are a form of what Dr. Edward J. Laurance of the UN’s Register of Conventional Arms calls “micro-disarmament” — or, more to the point, civilian disarmament.

The expression “buyback” assumes that government has a monopoly on the use of force, and that only duly authorized agents of officially sanctioned violence should be permitted to own guns and other weapons — and thus the State is taking back from Mundanes a privilege to which they’re not entitled.

Gun “buyback” and turn-in programs are a common feature of military occupations, both here and abroad. U.S. military personnel in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan have employed that tactic (as David Kramer notes, this helps the occupiers to acquire a useful hoard of “drop guns” that can be used to frame innocent people  as “terrorists” or “insurgents"). The same approach was used to disarm American Indians as they were cattle-penned on reservations.

Over the past decade, UN-aligned activists in several countries have staged events in which guns confiscated from civilians have been destroyed, a ritual sometimes called the “Bonfire of the Liberties.” This is in keeping with UN-promoted dogma (expressed most forcefully in its 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth) that the only “legal” weapons are those “used by armies and police forces to protect us,” and that civilian ownership of firearms is “illegitimate.”

The UN’s campaign for civilian disarmament -- which, just like matters of national disarmament, is assigned to the world body's Office for Disarmament Affairs -- was inaugurated in 2000 as part of the “human security” agenda promoted by then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In late 1993 and early 1994, Annan -- who at the time was head of the world body’s “peacekeeping” operations -- presided over the disarmament, and subsequent annihilation, of roughly 1.1 million Rwandans.

Annan was actually an accessory before the fact to that genocide: Informed in early 1994 of the impending slaughter by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding UN peacekeeping troops, Annan ordered Dallaire to pass along his intelligence to the same government that was planning the massacre.

Dallaire, who had been ordered to disarm the future victims, was ordered not to raid the government arms caches that were later used to carry out the murder rampage.

Most of the killing was carried out by machete-wielding mobs acting as government subcontractors. But it would have been impossible to butcher hundreds of thousands of armed people, nor would the mobs have been able to round up and annihilate the targeted population without the active support provided by the regime’s armies and police forces — you know, the armed agents of state violence who were there to “protect” those who were hacked to pieces.

Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda (as well as places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee) when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers — but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.

One of the cases used to promote the Toy Gun Bash in Providence actually underscores the reliably fatal consequences of a government monopoly on force. The Globe points out that as children were herded toward the Bash-O-Matic, they were told the cautionary tale “of a 14-year-old boy who police nearly shot after they confused his air pistol with a real gun.” For rational people, this incident illustrates the compelling need to disarm the police, rather than swipe toys from innocent children.

The same schools that use DARE programs to recruit children into the Pavlik Morozov Brigade consistently force psychotropic drugs on children who display unfortunate symptoms of non-conformity. This principle applies to the issue of firearms: In the name of “Zero Tolerance,” children are routinely punished for such supposed offenses as bringing toy “weapons” to school (including -- I am not making this up -- candy canes), improvising them from school supplies, or even drawing pictures of guns, yet they are routinely encouraged to write letters to members of the imperial military who are “serving our country”  by killing people who have done us no harm.


Those who insist that religion has no place in the government-run school system aren’t paying attention: The entire purpose of “public” education is to catechize youngsters in the worship of the Divine State. Rituals like Providence’s Toy Gun Bash serve a sacramental function; they are the equivalent of a child’s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction.

 While the little lambs are taught to be docile, submissive sheeple, the Regime is honing the lupine instincts of those supposedly tasked to protect them.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently described how recruits at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy are indoctrinated into perceiving the world as a 360 degree battlefield, where they are perpetually under siege and should be prepared to employ lethal force without hesitation.

"When you put that badge on, there are people who want to kill you," intoned Officer Wil Germonsen, who -- like a large and growing number of local police officers, has a military background.

The Review-Journal plays an extended riff on the familiar, fatuous, and entirely false assumption that law enforcement is a spectacularly dangerous occupation:

"After some time on the street, the recruits will never see the world the same way. They'll always be on guard -- carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It's like a switch that flips on and never turns off...."

"I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors," insists Germonsen. "We're fighting a war."

What this means, of course, is that the state-created armed tribe to which Germonsen belongs is an army of occupation -- primed to kill, given broad discretion in the use of lethal force, and trained to consider all of us who don't belong to their tribe as potentially lethal enemies. Some way had better be found -- and pretty damned soon -- to de-fang those wolves in sheepdog disguise.  Meanwhile, it would be wise to do what we can to avoid placing ourselves at a potentially fatal disadvantage when dealing with those who belong to the Brotherhood of Sanctified Violence.

                                                     UPDATE: Bringing the War Home

"Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve," reports the AP. 

A report compiled last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance "warns that the blurring of the line between combat and confrontations with criminal suspects at home may result in `inappropriate decisions and actions — particularly in the use of ... force. This similarity ... could result in injury or death to an innocent civilian.'"

The Imperial Military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose "civilian" job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. As noted above, police recruits are being trained to consider themselves "warriors" on a battlefield, rather than peace officers. We really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus. (h/t The Agitator.)

                                   Second Update: Seattle as a Battlefront

Courtesy of commenter QB we see the following video of 27-year-old Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk gunning down John T. Williams, an artisan who was carrying a carving knife and a block of wood. No more than four seconds pass between Birk's demand (it wasn't a lawful order, because Williams was threatening no one) that he drop the knife, and the first of several gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly eight seconds.

Williams had a troubled past, but was not known to be violent. He had some emotional problems and, most importantly, was functionally deaf -- which meant that he couldn't hear the demand that he drop his knife -- which was closed when photographed by crime scene investigators, despite Birk's claim that it was open at the time of the shooting.

A peace officer in this situation would have taken at least a little more time to resolve the situation without drawing his gun, let alone discharging it. But, as we've seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is "overkill."

It's worth noting that one of the officers who responded to Birk's "shots fired" report tells him that he did the "right thing" -- even though the official review subsequently ruled that the shooting wasn't justified.

Your donations help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Coda to a Killing: No Justice for Derek Hale

Derek with his wife, Elaine.

 
The practice of police "accountability" generally consists of using money stolen at gunpoint to buy off victims and survivors of officially sanctioned criminal violence.

Few better examples can be found than the $975,000 settlement paid by the City of Wilmington, Delaware, to Elaine Hale, whose husband Derek was murdered by Wilmington Police on November 6, 2006. 

The settlement brings to an end a federal lawsuit that was scheduled for trial next July -- more than four years after Derek, a Marine veteran who served two tours in Iraq, was shot three times at point-blank range after being tasered seven times within the space of about a minute. Unarmed and cooperative, Derek was not a criminal suspect and had done nothing to justify arrest, let alone summary execution.

Pay-offs of this kind are part of a ritual of self-exculpation in which the police and the local criminal clique they serve loudly proclaim their complete innocence, even as their cynical actions offer eloquent testimony of their guilt. William S. Montgomery, one of the palace eunuchs who serve Wilmington Mayor James M. Baker, performed his role perfectly.

Serving the Regime that would later kill him: Derek in Iraq.

"We were very confident in our case and know that our officers acted properly and professionally," lied Montgomery in announcing the settlement, which -- as he went on to say -- meant that the supposedly rock-solid case would be spared "the inherent risk of a jury trial." 

Fortunately, Montgomery pointed out, the risk of a trial was "eliminated for less than the cost of defense." 


Through the miracle of socialized municipal risk management, nobody will face accountability for the extra-judicial killing of a 25-year-old husband and father of two stepchildren who had celebrated his first wedding anniversary just days before he was murdered.

Shortly after receiving a medical discharge from the Marine Corps, Derek joined an "outlaw motorcycle club" called the Pagans. In November 2006, Derek and some friends from the club made a run from Virginia to Wilmington as part of a Toys for Tots promotion. Derek didn't know that for more than a year before he joined the club the Pagans were the subject of a Delaware State Police investigation. 

Derek was house-sitting for a friend on the day he was murdered. Sandra Lopez, the soon-to-be ex-wife of Derek's friend, arrived with an 11-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter early in the afternoon to remove some personal belongings. Derek -- wearing a hooded sweatshirt -- was sitting quietly on the front porch of the home when an unmarked police car and a blacked-out SUV arrived at around 4:00 PM and disgorged a thugscrum of 8-14 heavily armed police. According to eyewitnesses, the officers were dressed in black, and displayed no police insignia of any kind.  

 

Click to enlarge. Note: Derek was Tasered seven times.

At the time, Lopez and her children were standing behind Derek on the small porch, which was at the top of a short stairway. The armed strangers ordered the woman and her kids to move away from Derek, who by this time had risen to his feet. One of the cops ordered Derek to remove his hands from his sweatshirt. No more than a second or two later, according to eyewitnesses, he was hit with the first of what would be seven Taser strikes.

The Taser blast knocked Derek sideways and sent him into convulsions. His right hand involuntarily shot out of its pocket, clenching spasmodically. Ordered to put his hands up, Derek struggled to comply, but found himself paralyzed. So he was struck with a second Taser blast that drove him to the side and induced him to vomit in a nearby flower bed. 

“Not in front of the kids,” Derek pleaded. “Get the kids out of here.”

The officers continued to order Derek to put up his hands; he was physically unable to comply.

So they tased him again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again.

"That's not necessary!" exclaimed eyewitness Howard Mixon, a contractor who had been working nearby. "That's overkill! That's overkill!"

One of the bold and brave paladins of public order swaggered over to Mixon and threatened him: "I'll f*****g show you overkill!" snarled the barely literate tax-feeder. Meanwhile, Derek -- left to wallow in a puddle of his own vomit -- was trying to comply with the demands of his assailants. 

Mixon.

“I'm trying to get my hands out,” Derek  gasped, trying to make his tortured and traumatized body obey his will. Horrified, his friend Sandra screamed at the officers: “He is trying to get his hands out, he cannot get his hands out!”

Few things bring out the raw courage of a cop like the sight of an unarmed and defenseless "suspect." Acting with the serene confidence that his victim couldn't harm him, Lt. William Browne of the Wilmington Police Department -- who was close enough to seize and handcuff Derek, if this had been necessary -- shot him at point-blank range, sending three .40-caliber rounds into his chest. 

In May 2007, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden -- yes, the glorious outpouring of Vice Presidential loins -- issued a report vindicating Browne's actions. The report began by claiming that "the purpose of the Tasering was to overcome Derek Hale's resistance to the arrest so he could be taken into custody without injury to himself or to the officers." 

Leaving aside the fact that the Taser assault caused severe injury to Derek (as a coroner's report later confirmed), and also made it impossible for him to comply with police orders, every eyewitness to the murder who wasn't implicated in the crime insists that the victim never resisted arrest in any way. Furthermore, Thomas Neuberger, one of the attorneys who represented Derek's widow,  pointed out that the Wilmington PD's departmental policy on Taser use does not authorize the use of that reliably lethal weapon on non-resisting suspects. 

Biden's report also claimed that Derek's “menacing” behavior -- which consisted of vomiting into a flowerbed while begging the police to get the kids out of harm's way -- led the timid creature known as William Browne to believe that "he was in immediate danger" and that "the use of deadly force was immediately necessary to prevent serious injury or death" to him or to one of his partners in state-sanctioned crime. 

No charges were filed against the individual who murdered Derek Hale. Shortly after Biden issued his report, Browne was promoted. This infuriating detail was merely filigree on the tapestry of mendacity woven by Delaware's "law enforcement community" to cover up the murder of Derek Hale. 

Derek with step-children Taylor and Garrett.

In the years prior to the anti-Pagan crack-down by the Delaware State Police (DSP), the agency was besieged with lawsuits alleging civil rights violations, and subject to several ongoing corruption probes. 

Attorney Thomas Neuberger told me three years ago that DSP Commander Thomas MacLeish (or "Colonel Tom," to use Neuberger's not-at-all affectionate nickname), who was appointed to his post in 2005, made improving the agency's public image his highest priority. A high-profile campaign against a big, bad biker gang was just the thing to repristinate the department's image. 

The State Police operation eventually yielded a 160-count indictment, much of which was withheld from the public. After prosecutors had cluttered the air with lurid but vague allegations of "racketeering" and "gang activity," thirty-two Pagans were arrested on narcotics and weapons charges. The investigation came to a thoroughly anti-climatic end when a fewer than a half-dozen Pagans were charged with narcotics-related offenses. All of them were given deals that didn't involve prison time.

Like six-year-old Aiyana Jones, who was murdered by police last May in a Detroit SWAT raid staged for TV cameras, and 21-year-old Las Vegas resident Trevon Cole, who was murdered by police (while trying to dispose of a misdemeanor-sized amount of marijuana) in a hotel drug raid that was also the outgrowth of a "reality TV" program, Derek Hale was a casualty of a police PR campaign. He didn't become a "person of interest" until after he had been killed.

Derek's mother.

Immediately after the shooting, the DSP contacted the Virginia State Police and -- in a deliberate act of official perjury -- told them that the murdered Marine was a suspect in a narcotics investigation. Police from Delaware and Virginia barged into the Hale family's Manassas home, shoving aside a grieving wife and two devastated children in order to carry out a charade of a search in the service of an official fiction. 

The architects of this cover-up weren't content to terrorize Hale's devastated widow and step-children; they also traduced the character of the murder victim. 

On November 21, 2006, roughly three weeks after Derek's death, the DSP issued a breathtakingly dishonest press release alleging that the victim had "resisted arrest" and claiming that he "was at the center of a long term narcotics trafficking investigation which is still ongoing." Meanwhile, prosecutors frantically cobbled together the above-mentioned ominum gatherum indictment in the hope that somebody -- anybody -- connected to Derek would be charged with an actual crime. 

Now, three years later, the people responsible for the murder and cover-up have taken care of the final detail by paying off the victim's family at taxpayer expense.

Derek grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Shortly after he was murdered, a man who had known Derek in his childhood contacted me to express his outrage that a "responsible, respectful" young man of exceptional character could survive two tours of duty in Iraq, only to be slaughtered by a Death Squad here at home.

"There is no way in hell he would have threatened a police posse," Derek's friend told me. "When I saw his obit in the local paper I thought he must have been killed in Iraq or something -- but alas our own home-grown terrorists took the life of an innocent man."

 Your donations help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Fallujah, U.S.A.

While commanding a Marine platoon occupying Fallujah, Illario Pantano gunned down two unarmed Iraqi men during a search of their vehicle. After perforating the bodies of his victims with more than 60 rounds from his M-16 (which means he had to reload), Pantano attached a sign to the corpses that read: "No better friend, no worse enemy."

In Pantano's retelling, the victims, Hamaady Kareem and Tahah Ahmead Hanjil, made a "threatening movement" in his direction after briefly conversing in Arabic. The intrepid second lieutenant, fearing for himself and the men under his command, shot them in "self-defense," leaving the sign as a "warning" to other "insurgents." That version was embraced by the militarist Right when Pantano confronted a court-martial in 2005.

During Pantano's 2005 Article 32 hearing at Camp Lejeune (the military equivalent of a grand jury), both sides stipulated that the supposed insurgents were unarmed; that they had been detained for over an hour while their sedan was thoroughly searched under Pantano's supervision; and that shortly before the shooting Pantano suddenly changed the "search" procedure, ordering the two unarmed Iraqis to search the car together after ordering two other Marines who were present to "face flank" -- that is, away from what would become the scene of a war crime.

In his summation at the Article 32 hearing, Pantano's defense attorney, Charlie Gittins, insisted that there were only two valid considerations.

Lt. Pantano.

The first was that whatever Pantano may have done in Fallujah on April 15, 2004, he was a Marine of irreproachable character. Presumably, this means he was simply entitled to waste a couple of unarmed Iraqi civilians.

"One of the great things about the military justice system is that character does count," Gittins insisted. "A military judge told me a couple of weeks ago that good character still is, alone, sufficient to result in an acquittal, that you can take [the] character of the accused, you can weigh it, and you can determine that alone provides you with sufficient reasonable doubt to acquit."

What this means, of course, is that Pantano could be exonerated of war crimes on the basis of who he supposedly was, rather than what he actually did.

The second defining consideration, Gittins continued, was that "you can't import civilian standards into a combat situation." Sure, there is a series of steps that military personnel are required to carry out when detaining a suspected "insurgent," but everything else is subordinate to the needs of "force protection."

Rather than being governed by the demonstrated facts of the case, Gittins insisted, the presiding officer should consider an "alternative scenario":

"Lieutenant Pantano is standing at the vehicle three or four feet away from these Iraqis. They converse in Arabic. They decide they're going to take his weapon and they're going to rush him.... Lieutenant Pantano might get a shot off, but one of them is going to get to him. And if that had happened, that would really be a crime. That would truly be a crime, to have a lieutenant of [the] Marines killed by two Iraqis."

"Under no circumstances would it be reasonable for Lieutenant Pantano to get within reaching distance of those two individuals," insisted his attorney. "Shoot. Aim center of mass, shoot to kill. Just shoot if you don't have time to go through the steps." There's nothing improper about pumping several dozen rounds into the targets as well, since "it's only the first shot that matters."

Nor does it matter that the victims were unarmed and outnumbered, Gittins maintained, since as "a matter of common sense -- and you can watch it on COPS, you can watch it on any show where they have actual video ... police officers on a day-to-day basis are killed by people who have no weapons."

This would seem to contradict Gittins' argument that it is "improper [to] import civilian standards into a combat situation." That apparent contradiction is resolved once it is understood that every encounter between domestic police and unarmed "civilians" is considered a combat situation.

Major Mark Winn, the officer who presided at the Article 32 hearing, dismissed all of the charges against Pantano. Elsewhere, the same military "justice" system that saw nothing wrong with Pantano's actions is pressing war crimes charges against Omar Khadr, who is accused of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at at U.S. soldier during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. 

Please forgive a brief but relevant digression:

Khadr, a Canadian citizen whose relatives include Jihadis sympathetic to al-Qaeda, was 15 at the time he was wounded in Afghanistan and taken into U.S. custody. He has spent more than a third of his life in Gitmo, were interrogators used threats of gang rape to terrorize him into "confessing" that he had thrown a grenade that killed an American sergeant. His interrogator was later court-martialed for abusing detainees at Afghanistan's Bagram air base.
 
Thus according to the Regime's moral calculus, a partisan fighter who may have thrown a grenade at an armed U.S. soldier invading a foreign country is a "war criminal," but a Marine who guns down two unarmed Iraqis and then defiles their bodies in a premeditated act intended to "send a message" to insurgents is a war hero. 

Support Your Local War Criminal: Deputy Pantano.

Owing to the strength of his appeal to the militarist Right, Pantano is likely to be elected to the House of Representatives in a couple of weeks. His first career move following his exploits in Iraq was to serve briefly as a Deputy Sheriff in Wilmington, North Carolina. 

This is entirely appropriate, given that the mindset Pantano displayed in Fallujah -- "force protection" is the highest and most urgent consideration -- is substantively indistinguishable from the "officer safety uber alles" mindset that typifies contemporary domestic law enforcement. 

Despite the fact that law enforcement is a ridiculously safe occupation -- much safer than many forms of productive labor -- those who wear the habiliments of the state's coercive caste are relentlessly indoctrinated in the belief that they occupy a 360-degree battlefield, and that every Mundane they encounter should be treated as a potentially lethal threat. 


In any encounter between a police officer and a mere civilian, advises Sgt. Matthew Koep of the South Plainfield, New Jersey Police Department, "What's going to cause the situation to get worse is for the fear factor to rise in that officer. The officer is more likely to cut you a break as long as you can reduce that fear." 

This is why, according to columnist Jennifer Waters (who synthesized advice offered by Koep and several other police personnel), motorists who are stopped by the police should behave as if they're being detained at a military checkpoint: "Don't make any quick movements, and don't turn to grab your purse or put your hands in your pocket or under your seat to retrieve your license -- until the officer instructs you to. Then do it slowly." 

If you do anything to startle the timid creature in a government costume, you may very well end up dead -- and it would be your fault.

Sure, it's a terrible thing when a Mundane is injured or killed as a result of excessive or entirely unwarranted police violence. However, to paraphrase Charles Gittins' defense of

Orphaned at a checkpoint in Fallujah.

Pantano's atrocity in Fallujah, it "would truly be a crime" for a sanctified personage in a policeman's uniform to come to harm.

Anchorage resident David Zellmer was treated to a display of that same mindset on the front porch of his home after an encounter with an animal control officer. Zellmer wasn't inclined to answer questions about his dog, so the dog catcher returned with three police officers in tow. In an transparent effort to bully their way into Zellmer's home without a warrant or probable cause, the officers demanded his ID. Zellmer -- who recorded the exchange -- offered to retrieve it, but the officers insisted that they be allowed into his home.


"You guys can stay out here and I'll go and get it," Zellmer told them.


"Actually, we're going to go inside with you," one of the tax-fattened functionaries asserted.


"No, you're not, unless you have a warrant," Zellmer replied.


"I don't need a warrant," lied the armed tax-grazer. 


Eventually one of the heroes in blue held up his portable torture toy.


"You see that red dot?" he sneered. "That's a Taser. You don't want that."


"Sir, you're not going to go into the house where you have access to a weapon without us going with you," added one of the Taser-wielding thug's boyfriends. "It's that simple."






Bear in mind that there were four police officers present, at least three of whom -- unlike Zellmer -- were armed. One of them threatened the unarmed man with a lethal weapon because he had correctly asserted his constitutionally "protected" rights. Yet the assailants were the ones who saw themselves as potential victims.


"We frequently remind the officers, and we train the officers, that once you make contact with a person at the front door, particularly if you can observe them, you have somewhat of a controlled circumstance," explained Derek Hsieh of the local police officers union. "Once the person leaves your view, you can end up with an uncontrolled circumstance."


This is exactly the same "force protection" doctrine Pantano successfully invoked to justify his war crime in Fallujah.


"Basically, they bullied me and the threatened to Tase me," Zellmer summarizes. "I sit in my living room and there are four cops standing in my living room. It was totally surreal. I just couldn't believe I was in America and this was happening to me."

The setting may be Fairbanks, Fargo, Frankfort, or Fallujah; it makes no difference. When the State's armed enforcers are trained to act as an army of occupation,  geography is inconsequential.


Thanks for helping keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless. 

Be sure to tune in each Saturday evening from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network. 







Dum spiro, pugno!

Speak No Ill of the County Dictator

Early in a dictatorial reign that left millions dead, Indonesian dictator Suharto enacted a series of laws punishing public dissent as "criminal defamation" of state officials. Those laws, which remain in force today, are frequently used to punish activists who publicize police abuses. Similar laws have been used to similar effect in Singapore, Mexico, and even in Canada. That list has now expanded to include Montana's Lake County Sheriff's Office.

On September 30, Sheriff's deputies raided the Bigfork home of Terry Leonard, an outspoken critic of the department who maintains a website called www.asksheriffluckylarson.com. The officers seized computers -- including an iPad belonging to Leonard's wife, and a personal computer belonging to his 7-year-old son -- as well as printed e-mails, electronic storage media, and anything else they could find that might be related to the website. 

Deputy-turned-critic: Leonard.

Lake County Attorney Mitch Young has refused to comment on the reasons for the seizure, beyond offering the predictable and perfunctory observation that the matter is an "ongoing investigation."

Prior to the raid Leonard was already the subject of an election practices complaint filed by LannyVanMeter, treasurer of the Jay Doyle for Sheriff campaign and a Detention Officer at the County Jail. (Jay Doyle is currently Undersheriff to incumbent Sheriff "Lucky" Larson, who is not seeking re-election). That led to the search, which may result in a charge of "criminal defamation" against Leonard.

Sheriff Lucky Larson

"Lake County has sent a clear message," Leonard told the local press. "The message that they're sending is don't question us, don't accuse us of wrongdoing, don't even look at us sideways. Or, we will come take your stuff, and try to make you be quiet."

Leonard is both an outspoken critic and a veteran of the Lake County Sheriff's Office. Earlier this year he was fired by the department for "failing his probation" as a full-time deputy. The reasons for the termination were not specified. 

 

"I was an officer for seven years, six of them in the reserve force," Leonard told Pro Libertate. "This is a huge county -- we're in Montana, which is a huge state -- and we often had just a few officers to cover this vast territory. There is a real disparity between regular officers and reservists, in terms of what they're permitted to know and the level of access they have. So it wasn't until I was hired to be a full-time officer that I discovered how bad things have become."

As Leonard describes it, becoming a full-time deputy in the Lake County Sheriff's Office was a bit like becoming a "made man" in a crime syndicate.

"I'd be sitting around with members of my team and my sergeant, and they'd be telling me things that I'd have to call a litany of criminal behavior," Leonard recalls. "Some of it involved violations of department policy, or petty acts of everyday corruption. But more than a few were actual crimes," such as allegations of poaching by department personnel, which are currently under investigation.

How they see themselves: Detail of an SRT t-shirt.

Of particular concern to Leonard was that he described as the pervasive attitude that the "badge lets [law enforcement officers] to do whatever they want. They think it's OK to bully citizens and other officers. They think it's OK to take ammo from the ammo locker for their personal use without permission, even though the taxpayers paid for it.... They think the badge on their uniform means they don't have to answer to anybody."


Many of Leonard's most serious allegations focus on the Lake County Special Response Team (SRT), a SWAT-style paramilitary unit.

Last March 19, Leonard alleges, an SRT exercise involving an Army-issue M-117 roadside explosive nearly cost the life of a local woman, who literally stumbled on the device while out walking her dog. "Jay Doyle's SRT team left the device unattended and unwatched," he complains.

Leonard's website also offers photographs of a commemorative t-shirt distributed to SRT officers by a team member who was re-deploying to Iraq. The black t-shirts contain a movie-style "advisory" warning that "Use of this team may result in broken doors, windows, heads; along with the risk of live fire injuries and possible death. When using this product please use extreme caution: Strong violence/gore and some language may occur."


Those t-shirts -- which bear more than a passing resemblance to commemorative garb issued by other police departments -- were not the only tangible illustration that the SRT viewed itself as part of an army of occupation.


"Right now the ATF is investigating a case involving an unregistered machine gun that was used by one of the deputies as a duty weapon," Leonard pointed out to Pro Libertate. "The base weapon was an AR-15 owned by the department" -- which, of course, had been provided to the Sheriff's Office through a Pentagon program. "This deputy -- who claimed to be an ex-Marine, and told all kinds of bogus combat stories -- purchased an auto-sear kit and converted it to full-auto," Leonard continues. "All he had to do was register the weapon, but he refused to do so this. Like others on the force he believed that the rules didn't apply to him, because of his badge. He had this same SRT kick-in-your-door mindset. `I'm a cop -- I can do whatever I want.'"

The accumulating evidence of institutionalized corruption in the Sheriff's Office "created something of a moral conundrum for me," Leonard recalls. "I liked my job, of course, but more importantly I have a wife and two kids and a house to pay for. But I couldn't just ignore what was going on."

"Look, I don't claim to be the most moral individual I know," Leonard concedes. "I'm an old Navy man, and I've been arrested before, with good reason. I've made my share of mistakes, been in my share of scuffles, and I'm not particularly proud of it. As I've gotten more mature, I've learned to hold myself to a higher standard, and not let testosterone dictate my response to situations. So when I left for work every morning I would literally look at myself in the mirror and remind myself to use my head, do what is right, and make good decisions."

One decision Leonard made was to complain about the casual corruption he encountered, which meant that "within a couple of weeks I had been fired."

A week after being expelled from the force, Leonard -- whose "hands were no longer tied" -- created his website. It was ignored for about eight months "until last week," he observed just a few days after the raid. The same County Attorney who signed the complaint that led to the raid, Leonard relates, "signed one of the many letters of recommendation that led to the decision to hire me in the first place."


The raid "was a simple bullying and intimidation tactic," Leonard observes. He remains on friendly terms with active-duty deputies who agree that the department is in need of an ethical overhaul.  "Four other deputies traveled with me to Helena and testified to the POST [Police Officers Standards and Training] Council regarding the problems in the Sheriff's Office," he points out. When contacted by Pro Libertate on October 6, Leonard was on his way to meet with a current deputy who was providing a signed affidavit for an anticipated lawsuit arising from the September 30 raid. 

"Whatever happens in the election on November 2, we're still going to be pressing for accountability," Leonard maintains. "If the department and the County want to go to court, that's fine with me; I'd love to be able to depose those people under penalty of perjury. The citizens of Lake County demand the truth about what's going on in their Sheriff''s Office."

Ironically, this is true not only of Lake County, Montana, but also of Lake County, California.

A campaign pitting incumbent Lake County Sheriff Rod Mitchell against Deputy Frank Rivero has churned to the surface detailed allegations of internal strife and malfeasance similar to those Leonard found in Lake County, Montana. 

Rivero, a 10-year veteran LEO who joined the Lake County, California Sheriff's Office in 2007, has accused Mitchell of running a department rife with "mismanagement, cronyism and racial discrimination," notes one local press account. 

Whatever the merits of the racial profiling charge, the public record is replete with evidence that the department is a festering puddle of corruption. Five deputies have been cashiered over the past year, including one charged with stealing from the department's armory, one accused of conducting illicit surveillance, and another who used money from a federal marijuana eradication grant to take helicopter flight lessons.


The most serious scandal to emerge from the 200-member department involves former Chief Sheriff Deputy Perdock, who killed 51-year-old Lynn Thornton in an April 29, 2006 boating accident at nearby Clear Lake. Perdock had been operating his 385-horsepower, 24-foot powerboat at speeds in excess of up to 60 MPH on the gloomy, moonless night when it struck the stern quarter of the sailboat containing Thornton and her companion, Bismarck Dinius.

"I'm a victim": Former Chief Deputy Perdock

"There goes some idiot who is going to kill himself or someone else," grumbled an onshore observer -- a retired police officer -- just seconds before that prophecy was fulfilled. The "idiot" in question, however, was part of Lake County's protected punitive caste. His victims enjoyed no similar immunity.

Dinius, who was at the tiller of the sailboat at the time of the accident, was prosecuted for causing the death of Thornton and a felony charge of boating under the influence of alcohol.He was acquitted on all charges following a trial in which the defense utterly annihilated the prosecution's case. Perdock, Sheriff Mitchell's second in command, was never charged; he was kept on the payroll for a year on paid vacation (aka "administrative leave") before being dismissed from the force. 





"I see myself as a victim," simpered Perdock in a pre-trial interview with the Lake County DA, who at the time was preparing to prosecute the actual victim, Bismarck Dinius.

In a "notice of claim" filed in anticipation of a wrongful prosecution suit against Lake County, Dinius charges that Sheriff Mitchell, working with "numerous LCSO officials" and Lake County District Attorney John Hopkins, "concealed, manipulated, and/or suppressed material inculpatory evidence" against Perdock. This accusation is buttressed by an account offered by one of the deputies who played a central role in the case.




Former Deputy James Breland, who investigated the fatal accident, was ordered by his superiors not to administer a preliminary alcohol screening to Perdock at the scene. In a court deposition Breland later testified that he expressed his concerns over this order to a deputy district attorney prior to Dinius's trial. Rather than investigating Breland's complaint, the prosecutor attempted to suborn perjury from the deputy by instructing him "to use words to describe the `order' as a `discussion' ... when testifying at the preliminary hearing of Bismarck Dinius."


Unfortunately, Breland did as he was told, only to find that this gesture of tribal loyalty was inadequate. Within days he found himself "subject to a continuing barrage of investigations for acts which Sergeant Breland did not do or for acts which everyone else does but are [for which they] are not disciplined," he attests. In retaliation for expressing his misgivings to the deputy DA, Breland's reputation was destroyed and he was eventually fired.

According to Breland's deposition, the department maintains "a system of discipline where favored officers are given mild treatment for extraordinary offenses" -- a form of "patronage discipline" in which the internal affairs process is used "to attack the credibility of deputies who fail to adhere to the unwritten code of conduct of the Sheriff's Department."


In his deposition, Breland lists two dozen cases in which deputies involved in criminal behavior or serious misconduct "were disciplined lightly or not at all." 

The cases include several potentially fatal episodes in which a firearm was improperly discharged; one instance in which a deputy "aimed his duty revolver at another deputy while in a highly intoxicated state"; a physical assault on a female deputy by a male colleague; a SWAT team member responding to a call while intoxicated; a deputy who "used his taser in an off-duty incident involving alcohol"; and several allegations of sexual misconduct, including one involving a minor.



Whether or not Frank Rivero is more ethical than Sheriff Mitchell and his claque, Rivero performed a significant service to Lake County by mounting a campaign against the incumbent, who had previously run unopposed. 

After Rivero peeled away the LSCO's facade of probity, Mitchell retaliated against the whistleblower by following the precise formula Breland described: Rivero suddenly became the target of an Internal Affairs probe alleging sexual assault against a woman who was arrested in December 2008. 


The sexual assault charge against Rivero appears to be devoid of merit. The timing certainly seems to validate Breland's charge that the LCSO uses Internal Affairs investigations to retaliate against officers who speak ill of the county dictator -- the same "offense," in a different guise, that may lead to the spurious prosecution of Terry Leonard in another Lake County nearly 1,200 miles away.


Thanks for helping keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless. 

Join me each Saturday evening from 8:00-11:00 PM Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network. 







Dum spiro, pugno!