Gangsters in Blue

Here’s what I said back in April about what professional courtesy means when it comes to law enforcers:

The term professional courtesy comes from the traditions of medicine: many doctors will not charge money when they treat another doctor’s immediate family. When doctors talk about professional courtesy they are talking about a very old system of mutual aid in which one doctor agrees to do a favor for another, at her own expense, for the sake of collegiality, out of concern for professional ethics (to offer doctors an alternative to having their own family as patients), and because she can count on getting similar services in return should she ever need them.

But when the Gangsters in Blue start talking about professional courtesy, they’re talking about something quite different: a favor done for a fellow gang member at no personal expense, with the bill sent to unwilling taxpayers who must pick up the tab for the roads and parking; and a favor done in order insulate the gangsters and their immediate family from any kind of ethical accountability to the unwilling victims that they sanctimoniously insist on serving and protecting. Professional courtesy in medicine means reciprocity in co-operative mutual aid in healing sick people; professional courtesy in government policing means reciprocity in a conspiracy to make sure that any cop can do just about anything she wants by way of free-riding, disruptive, dangerous or criminal treatment of innocent third parties, with complete impunity, and the rest of us will get the bill for it and a fuck you, civilian if we don’t like it.

It turns out that the Virginia State Patrol is stretched thin right now: money is tight because of the state’s economic and budgetary troubles, and — as a result — they’ve delayed a lot of new hiring and they’re having trouble getting up enough active cops for adding special agents to the Joint Terrorism Task forces, creating a Homeland Security Division and dedicating more troopers to investigate illegal firearms purchases at gun shows. (Well, good. Three cheers for the state’s budgetary troubles, if they make for a financial roadblock against ridiculous gun grabs and Stasi statism.) But now check out what the coppers at Officer.com have to say about the Virginia State Patrol in the comments:

Posted by JJS (09/24/08 - 10:41 AM)

VSP has a bad reputation for writing tickets to other officers.

How dare they? Cops deserve to be treated more considerately than everybody else when they are stopped by other cops.

Posted by People Are Sheep [sic!] in Maryland (09/24/08 - 11:19 AM)

VSP Anti-Courtesy

For years, I have heard rumors about VSP stopping and citing police officers both on and off duty. Whatever the circumstance, it is not in the professional interest (and sometimes legal interest) for ANY police officer/trooper to stop (or attempt to stop) any on duty marked police vehicle. In some states, it’s unlawful to do so … and in some states, an arrest warrant or state’s attorney consultation is required BEFORE a stop is made and charges are cited. Off duty officers/troopers should use common sense when driving. Period. On the same token, on duty officers/troopers should use common sense and professional courtesy when it appropriate. […]

In nearly two decades as a police officer, I have stopped many, many off duty police officers for traffic violations. During those times, I have issued no tickets and made no arrests. There are alternatives to citing and arresting off duty cops: verbal warning, calling their supervisor or just assisting the officer reach their destination safely. All options are, of course, dependent upon the violation at hand.

Remember, we are all that we have out there on the street … each other. The legendary conversation between an overzealous on duty officer and the off duty officer during a traffic stop bears truth: After signing the ticket, the off duty officer says, Just remember, I could be your closest backup out here.

In other words, this sanctimonious server and protector has spent the past two decades completely abdicating his supposed professional responsibilities when they involved holding a fellow cop accountable for endangering the safety of the people he and they are supposedly hired to protect. Because he thinks it’s important never to forget that some day he may need his gang brothers to get his back.

Posted by Harry in District of Columbia (09/24/08 - 04:09 PM)

VSP Anti-Courtesy an understatement

I can in contact with a vehicle that struck a fix object at 21st and Washington Circle NW Washington, D.C. The vehicle was an unmarked VSP vehicle occuppied by 4 VSP officer. All of them had been drinking. knowing what there fate would be if I’d taken a report I had them make a call and two other off duty VSP officer responded to my location, sober, and I allow all to leave. I figured it was up to them to explain to there supervisor the damage to the unmarked cruiser. Now if they had struck another vehicle civilian driver or pedestrian there would have been a different outcome.

Shortly after that I was driving southbound on Rt.29 in Nelson County, VA at 0300hrs and was stopped by a VSP for doing 67 in a 55. I never identified myself as a police officer, probably because I had FOP licence plate, and he never inquiried, and wrote me a speeding ticket. He never spoke a word.

A month later I stoped a civilain vehicle driven by a off duty VSP trooper for a traffic violation, he immediately produced ID and I told him to that a nice day.

VSP is really short on professional courtesy.

A Texas Highway Patrol enforcer defends the honor of his crew from the allegations of a Houston cop:

Posted by TXTroop in TEXAS (09/25/08 - 11:36 AM)

VA & TX

Let me first start off by saying that RICK G in Houston is an idiot. We DO NOT get uniformed officers out of their vehicles to stand on the side of the road. If this happens in Houston it is because Houston PD officers have a habit of holding their badges out the window when they are being stopped. Very UNPROFESSIONAL. As far as our stupid cowboy hats go, even the hood is affraid of the HATS. Now that the idiots comments have been addressed, if VA Troopers are writing other officers, on or off duty shame on them! The only reason any state has a shortage of Troops is PAY. Troopers all over the Nation are reveered as the best officers in their state, they should be paid as such. Sounds like VA needs to up their pay and implement the DONT PUT COPS ON PAPER - TICKETS OR WARNING plan!!!

TXCOP in the DFW area scratches their backs and expects them to scratch his:

Posted by TXCOP in DFW AREA, Texas (09/25/08 - 11:16 PM)

Wow sounds like Rick G. got really upset. Before I moved to Texas I was a LEO in Baltimore City, Md. The only contact I had with VSP was being stopped for speeding something like 80 in 60 or something its been a few years now. But the trooper (an older older officer) made me for a cop and after showing my ID he asked me to slow down and to cut him and his friends a break next time they visit the city for a Ravens or orioles game. Now on that same trip (enroute to visit family in Texas) I was stopped about 40 miles into Texas from arkansas on I 30 by a Texas State Trooper he pulled up next to me hit the alley light and motioned to me so of course I waved at him and continued driving after a minute he motioned again so i figured he wanted me stopped so I shook my head and slowed down he then proceeded to hit the red lights and stop me and the guy in front of me. So here I am the officer stopped between both of us he came to me first and I told him I’m a Leo and have a gun so that he would not be surprised. He asked me to stay with him while he finished the other stop and then he would let me be on my way. He wrote the other guy a citation came back wrote me a warning to get his stat and then I gave him a Uniform patch and was gone.

From a Virginia sheriff’s deputy:

Posted by VA Deputy (09/26/08 - 04:58 AM)

As for professional courtesey… I have worked for a PD and a S.O. and for all you out of town guys, not everyone in VA is into writing LEO’s… professional courtesey ia alive and well in the local jurisdictions… Too many people on the outside are trying to hang us on a daily basis for no reason, we shouldn’t be hanging ourselves. As long as you don’t come out of your vehicle swinging at me, you got a pass here… Stay Safe.

That’s As long as you don’t come out of your vehicle swinging at me and you wear he same gang colors I do, of course. Those passes are not for mere civilians.

I should say that when I refer to cops as a street gang or Gangsters in Blue or what have you, I’m not indulging in metaphor. I don’t mean that cops act kinda like gangsters (as if this were just a matter of personal vices or institutional failures); I mean that they are gangsters — that is the policing system operating according successfully to its normal function — that they are the organized hired muscle of the State, and that the outfit operates just like any other street gang in terms of their commitments, their attitudes, their practices, and their idea of professional ethics. And if you wonder why, it may help to ask yourself what kind of person, and what kind of outfit, you’d need to have for this kind of talk, and this notion of professional courtesy, to make any kind of sense.

The San Antonio police department recently adopted a perfectly reasonable policy restricting the use of tasers to situations in which there isn’t any risk that somebody will get killed. Here’s part of a reader’s comment in reply to the story about the policy in POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine:

I think the one officer at a time is a good policy, but to deny them the use of the Taser is WRONG! What are we supposed to do, go back to the baton or billy club? Once an officer is SCARED he will resort to whatever it takes to save him/herself.

—konaron @ 10/16/2008 8:04 PM

Translation: according to konaron, cops are a bunch of twitchy, trigger-happy cowards who will resort to any kind of violence, no matter how excessive, in order to save their own skins. Therefore police department policies should indulge their violence as far as possible, even if it means letting them kill people with their non-lethal weapons.

And I’m the one who’s supposed to be running down cops?

See also:

• GT 2008-01-14: Non-Lethal Force

So there are a lot of cops who are involved, somehow or another, in the drug trade. Sometimes they sling the drugs themselves; often, they just protect drug dealers from arrest. Like any form of Prohibition, government Drug Prohibition creates a condition in which there are lots of black market operators who are willing to pay bribes, and lots of cops who are willing to take them, in order to keep the drug trade running without police interference. The cost of the bribe is a drain, but the profits from a well-run drug dealing outfit make up for it, and the cost of the bribe is less than the cost of getting locked up in prison for several years. In fact, the Drug War Chronicle runs a regular feature called This Week’s Corrupt Cop Stories, which I guess is intended to show how the conditions fostered by Drug Prohibition inevitably produce police corruption. A point which is pretty well conveyed just by the fact that they have plenty of stories to run every single week, as much as by any of the individual stories that they run.

But there’s a problem with the word corrupt. To become corrupt is to become impure, damaged, or worse. To be corrupt is to be doing something wrong — and when we apply it to people, it usually means that someone is bribed into doing something depraved in exchange for some form of material reward — most commonly violating personal or professional ethics in exchange for money. But protecting a drug dealer from arrest is only unethical if you have an ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers. If, on the other hand, Drug Prohibition is unjust — if enforcing drug laws means violating the rights and the freedoms of innocent people, often by locking nonviolent offenders in a cage for years at a time even though they violated nobody else’s rights — then cops have no ethical obligation to arrest drug dealers, because nobody has an ethical obligation to do an injustice to innocent people. Then a lot of what commonly gets called police corruption is really nothing of the sort; so-called corrupt cops may be turncoats in the Drug War, but they are turning from the wrong side to the right side. Those who protect drug dealers from arrest are no more dirty than cops in antebellum America who refused to turn fugitive slaves over to the slave-catchers, or cops in Nazi Germany who refused to turn hiding Jews over to the Gestapo.

Of course, someone who has to be bribed into doing the right thing may not deserve blame for what she does; but she probably doesn’t deserve praise either. And so-called corrupt cops may in fact do other things that do deserve blame. (Many, if not most, of the narcs or patrol cops who get involved in the drug trade do end up acting much like Terrence Richardson in Houston — that is, as thieves, thugs, or shake-down artists, using their police power or threats of violence in order to intimidate and coerce competing drug dealers who don’t have the same connections to the Gangsters in Blue. But here the problem isn’t that the cop is slinging drugs. The problem is that the cop is cracking skulls of other people who sling drugs, and getting the drugs he slings by stealing them from other drug dealers.) Hence the two cheers, rather than three. But then consider a case like that of Keenan Colson, a cop in Lake Wales, Florida:

Lake Wales police officer Keenan Colson, 50, was arrested Wednesday by the Polk County Sheriff’s Department on multiple charges stemming from information he leaked to 25-year-old Clayton Hoerler, a known criminal offender, including blowing the cover of an undercover cop, said LWPD Chief Herbert Gillis.

[…] Colson faces one count of conspiracy to engage in a pattern of racketeering action, five counts unlawful use of two-way communications device, and four counts unlawful use of computer access after he was tied to an investigation that ultimately netted 18 people arrested in conjunction with what was described by county law enforcers as a violent marijuana distribution ring.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd agreed with Gillis, noting in a phone interview Thursday that the blame rests solely on Colson and his actions.

It’s important to point out we don’t in any way suspect anyone other than Keenan Colson. We don’t want to leave any impression of that being anything other than an ethical police department. They run a great shop there. The men and women there are very dedicated. This is just one crooked cop, he said.

But it was one cop nobody seems to have expected to compromise the integrity and safety of his fellow police officers.

Colson’s actions sent shock waves throughout the LWPD.

Captain Patrick Quinn said he was hurt and shocked because he regarded Colson as the rock, a man who was always there, went to his calls, took his reports, was dependable.

Quinn, who was not involved in the investigation, was briefed about the situation on Tuesday.

Several people fall from grace, he said. That stinks, that hurts. We hire people, unfortunately people are going to do stupid things sometimes.

Quinn said Colson made a bad choice and was going to have to answer for his bad choice, but added that everyone in the department was upset.

We have lost a member of our family for his bad choice, he said.

What frustrated the chief so much is the concept that the lives of other officers were put in danger. Undercover work presents challenges of it own, he noted, calling it one of the most dangerous jobs in law enforcement because of its vulnerability.

And for Keenan Colson to identify to criminal offenders, this undercover officer, this undercover deputy, could have caused him to be killed, and could have caused the deputies that were working with him, the undercover officers to be injured, he said. That is something that will never be forgiven.

Gillis said Colson’s arrest was about justice for the police officers that are doing a good job every day. And it is those who trusted Colson that wonder what went awry with him.

Having had no prior indications to believe that Colson was capable of betraying his fellow officers, the chief described Colson as a very likable guy, very respectful, very quiet, very courteous.

How he got hooked up with a known criminal offender still stumps investigators, Gillis said.

Judd said he isn’t sure of the connection either, but said investigators did believe there was a prior relationship. In the late 1990s, Colson was an officer in Lake Hamilton, and Clayton Hoerler, identified as being one of the alleged ring leaders, apparently lived in Lake Hamilton at that time as well. Hoerler, 25, was identified this week by the county sheriff’s office as being a Lake Alfred resident.

We know from the investigation that they were good friends, Judd said. We know they discussed criminal activity freely, and that Colson give him intricate instructions in how to avoid arrest and how to protect himself from covert investigation. He was certainly the consultant for Hoerler.

—Kathy Leigh Berkowitz, The Polk County Democrat (2008-08-18): Lake Wales Police Officer Arrested for Leaking Information

If that’s what Keenan Colson did, then good for Keenan Colson.

The Drug War is an aggressive war by the government against innocent people. Neither using marijuana, nor selling marijuana violates anybody else’s rights. Like all so-called victimless crimes, it is in fact not a crime at all in any moral sense; crimes have identifiable victims, and consensual exchanges between willing parties have none. Cops who use force to shut down drug dealing outfits — and that is the only way that cops shut anything down, by beating people, tasering them, pepper-spraying them, pulling guns on them, restraining them, handcuffing them, confining them in police cars and holding cells, and ultimately by having them locked up in cages for years at a time, all of it backed up by the threat of inflicting pain, injuring you, or killing you if you should resist their orders — those cops, I say, are using violence against peaceful people; they are hurting, restraining, and imprisoning people who have never violated the rights of any identifiable victim. If they come after your friends on the basis of these unjust drug laws, then, morally speaking, they are the criminals, and using your connections and your knowledge of the system in order to defend your friend and his livelihood from their aggression — by telling him how to avoid detection, by telling him how to keep from getting unjustly arrested, and by exposing the undercover police spies who have been sent to infiltrate his circle and facilitate the narcs’ efforts to seize innocent people and locking them in cages for the next several years, is not corrupt. It’s certainly not an unforgivable sin. That’s protecting the innocent, and doing so while putting yourself at considerable personal risk from the same uniformed gang that you are trying to protect your friend from. It is, in fact heroic, and Keenan Colson deserves the title of hero far more than the vast majority of the arrogant, preening, entitled cops who never stop hollering about their own heroics and the protection they inflict on unwilling recipients every day.

Meanwhile, the police chief in Lake Wales has decided to engage in a low form of farce:

If your officers do commit criminal acts, they need to be arrested just like anyone else, the chief said. A lot of times things may be handled where people may be just terminated or let go. That’s not the way you are supposed to do things, that’s why I told the officers around here hold your heads up. We’ve been through a lot, we’ve been in the paper a lot with our officers who have done stuff wrong.

We are going to hold offenders accountable, because we hold our people accountable. To me that is a good thing because we hold ourselves accountable first, we hold offenders accountable second. And that’s a position you want to be in law enforcement, that’s accountability, that’s integrity, he added.

—Kathy Leigh Berkowitz, The Polk County Democrat (2008-08-18): Lake Wales Police Officer Arrested for Leaking Information

That’s bullshit, is what that is.

When cops harass, unjustly imprison, beat, hurt, torture, rape, or kill the people that they contemptuously dismiss as civilians, there isn’t a damn bit of accountability. They may be transferred to another precinct; they may be given a paid vacation for a few months before fellow cops exonerate them in administrative hearing for a few months; in really extraordinary circumstances, where evidence of guilt is undeniable and has also, by the way, been reeased to the public, someone might actually lose their job over it. But they will almost certainly never face jail time, or any criminal responsibility whatsoever, for what they do. As the victim, you might, if you are very lucky, get an Oops, our bad; realistically, what you’re more likely to get is Fuck you, civilian.

The reason that Keenan Colson has been arrested and is now threatened with jail has exactly nothing to do with any general commitment by the police force to accountability or integrity. The unforgivable sin for which he is being arrested and prosecuted is the fact that he gave out information that messed with the game of the other cops who were coming after his friend. Cops protect their power, and they’ll do just about anything to anybody who endangers that by valuing the safety of a friend over the ability of his gang brothers to go on with their activities unimpeded. Keenan Colson is only the latest to get the long knife treatment for the unforgivable sin of acting like a responsible human being at the expense of gang loyalty. He won’t be the last.

(Via Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-29 and Drug War Chronicle 2008-08-22.)

Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!

Today, March 15^th, commemorates the assassination of two tyrants. Today is the 2,051^st anniversary — give or take the relevant calendar adjustments — of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar, the military dictator who butchered his way through Gaul, set fire to Alexandria, and, through years of conquest, perfidy, and proscription, battered and broke every barricade that republican institutions had put in the way of military and executive power, until he finally had himself proclaimed dictator perpetuus, the King of Rome in everything but name. On March 15^th, 44 BCE, a group of republican conspirators, naming themselves the Liberatores, rose up and stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. Meanwhile, Thursday, March 13^th, was also the 127^th anniversary (give or take the relevant calendar adjustments), of the death of Czar Alexander II Nikolaevitch, the self-styled Caesar of all the Russias. Alexander was killed by grenades thrown by a group of anarchist conspirators on March 13^th, 1881 C.E., in an act of propaganda by the deed. In honor of the events, the Ministry of Culture in this secessionist republic of one has proclaimed March 15^th Tyrannicide Day (observed), which is kind of like President’s Day, except cooler. Instead of another dull theo-nationalist hymn on the miraculous births of two of the canonized saints of the United States federal government, Tyrannicide Day gives us one day in which we can commemorate the deaths of two tyrants at the hands of their equals — men and women who defied the tyrants’ arbitrary claims to an unchecked authority that they had neither the wisdom, the virtue, nor the right to exercise. Men and women who saw themselves as exercising their equal right of self-defense, by striking down the would-be tyrants just like they would be entitled to strike down any other two-bit thug who tried to kill them, enslave them, or shake them down.

It is worth remembering in these days that the State has always tried to pass off attacks against its own commanding and military forces (Czars, Kings, soldiers in the field, etc.) as acts of terrorism. That is, in fact, what almost every so-called act of terrorism attributed to 19^th century anarchists happened to be: direct attacks on the commanders of the State’s repressive forces. The linguistic bait-and-switch is a way of trying to get moral sympathy on the cheap, in which the combat deaths of trained fighters and commanders are fraudulently passed off, by a professionalized armed faction sanctimoniously playing the victim, as if they were just so many innocent bystanders killed out of the blue. Tyrannicide Day is a day to expose this for the cynical lie that it is. As many reasons as there are to criticize the strategy behind the assassinations of Czars, Princes, and Dictators Perpetual, the fact that the brutal absolute monarch of a monster State lay dead at the end is not among them.

There are in fact lots of good reasons to rule out tyrannicide as a political tactic — after all, these two famous cases each ended a tyrant but not the tyrannical regime; Alexander II was replaced by the even more brutal Alexander III, and Julius Caesar was replaced by his former running-dogs, one of whom would emerge from the abattoir that followed as Augustus Caesar, to begin the long Imperial nightmare in earnest. But it’s important to recognize that these are strategic failures, not moral ones, and what should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street.

Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the age-old self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had these moral insights at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such.

I have been informed that March 15^th is also commemorated as the International Day Against Police Brutality. Make of that what you will; what the Ministry of Culture will make of it is an excellent opportunity for a program of commemorative song.

Our first piece is a skolion for the Athenian lovers Aristogeiton and Harmodius, who assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus in 514 BCE, using swords they had concealed in ceremonial myrtle wreaths. In the Athenian democracy, the couple were celebrated as martyrs for liberty, and often remembered in hymns and songs sung before banquets. This is Edgar Allan Poe’s 1827 translation of the most famous surviving Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius; feel free to sing it at your Tyrannicide Day holiday dinner:

Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I’ll conceal
Like those champions devoted and brave,
When they plunged in the tyrant their steel,
And to Athens deliverance gave.

Beloved heroes! your deathless souls roam
In the joy breathing isles of the blest;
Where the mighty of old have their home
Where Achilles and Diomed rest

In fresh myrtle my blade I’ll entwine,
Like Harmodius, the gallant and good,
When he made at the tutelar shrine
A libation of Tyranny’s blood.

Ye deliverers of Athens from shame!
Ye avengers of Liberty’s wrongs!
Endless ages shall cherish your fame,
Embalmed in their echoing songs!

—Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius, trans. Edgar Allan Poe (1827)

Our second piece, in honor of the combined occasions for the day, is one of the most famous outlaw corridos from the south Texas borderlands, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, a cowboy and small-time farmer in Karnes County, Texas, who became a legal cause celebre, and a folk hero for many Tejan@s, after he fought back against a racist sheriff in June 1901. Sheriff W. T. Brack Morris was interrogating Cortez and his brother, and accused them of horse-thieving — based on nothing more than the fact that they did have a horse, and Cortez met the description of the suspect in a recent horse-theft — a suspect who had been described only as a middle-sized Mexican. Morris tried to arrest Cortez; Cortez told him off, and said that Morris had no reason to arrest him. The deputy who was translating mistakenly claimed that Cortez had said No white man can arrest me; that was enough for Morris, who pulled his gun and shot down Cortez’s brother. Cortez fired back, killing Morris, and then fled across the state on foot. He managed to elude capture for ten days, repeatedly making daring and close escapes when surrounded and outnumbered by sheriffs, posses, and the rinches (Texas Rangers). The cops threw his wife, his mother, and his children into jail. Anglo papers called for him to be lynched, and Anglo mobs rioted against Latin@s in Gonzales, Refugio, and Hayes counties. After Cortez was finally captured and put on trial for murder, his supporters organized legal defense campaigns, arguing that Cortez had killed only in to defend himself and his family; eventually they got all but one of the murder convictions reversed on appeal. In 1913, they convinced governor Oscar Colquitt to grant Cortez a conditional pardon. Meanwhile, his fame spread in the countryside through this ballad.

Gregorio Cortez Traditional (1900s–1920s). En el condado de El Carmen miren lo que ha sucedido, murió el Cherife Mayor quedando Román herido. Se anduvieron informando como media hora después supieron que el malhechor era Gregorio Cortez. Decía Gregorio Cortez Con su pistola en la mano: —No siento haberlo matado, lo que siento es a mi hermano.— Soltaron los perroes jaunes pa’ que siguieran la huella, pero alcanzar a Cortez era seguir a una estrella. Tiró con rumbo a Gonzales sin ninguna timidez: —Síganme, rinches cobardes, yo soy Gregorio Cortez.— Y en el condado del Kiansis lo llegaron a alcanzar y a pocos más de trescientos allí les brincó el corral. Decía Gregorio Cortez, con pistola en la mano: —¡Ay, cuánto rinche cobarde para un solo mexicano!— Cuando les brincó el corral, según lo que aquí se dice, se agarraron a balazos y les mató otro cherife. Decían Gregorio Cortez con su alma muy encendida: —No siento haberlo matado, la defensa es permitida. Salió Gregorio Cortez, salió con rumbo a Laredo, no lo quisieron seguir porque le tuvieron miedo. Decían Gregorio Cortez: ¿Pa’ qué se valen de planes? No me pueden agarrar ni con esos perros juanes. Decían los americanos: —Si lo alcanzamos ¿qué hacemos? Si le entramos por derecho muy poquitos volveremos.— Allá por El Encinal, Según lo que aquí se dice, le formaron un corral y les mató otro Cherife. Ya se encontró a una mexicana, le dice con altivez: —Platícame qué hay de nuevo, yo so Gregorio Cortez. —Dicen que por culpa mía han matado mucha gente, pues ya me voy a entregar porque eso no es conveniente.— Venían todos los rinches, por el viento volaban, porque se querían ganar diez mil pesos que les daban. Cuando rodearon la casa Cortez se les presentó: —Por la buena sí me llevan porque de otro modo no. Deciá el Cherife Mayor, como queriendo llorar: —Cortez, entrega tus armas, no te vamos a matar.— Decía Gregorio Cortez, gritaba en alta voz: —Mis armas no las entrego hasta estar en calaboz’.— Ya agarraron a Cortez, ya terminó la cuestión, la probre de su familia lo lleva en el corazón. Ya con ésta me despido a la sombra de un ciprés; aquí se acaba el corrido de don Gregorio Cortez.

Gregorio Cortez Trans. (2008) Charles Johnson. In the county of El Carmen, Look what’s gone down The Big Ol’ Sheriff is dead, Leaving Roman dying on the ground. They walked around asking questions and in half an hour or so they found out the man who did it was Gregorio Cortez. And so said Gregorio Cortez, with his pistol in his hand, I don’t feel sorry that I killed him; what I feel sorry about is my brother. They unleashed the hound dogs, to follow on his trail, but chasing after Cortez was like following a star. He tore off down toward Gonzales Not timid in the least; Come after me, cowardly rinches; I am Gregorio Cortez. And in the county of Kiansis, They showed up to try and grab him, A bit more than three hundred There, and he jumped out of their corral. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With his pistol in his hand: Man, look how many cowardly rinches For just one Mexican! But when he jumped the corral, What they say around here is, The bullets started flying, And he killed them another sheriff. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With his soul burning bright, I don’t feel sorry that I killed him. A man’s got a right to defend his life. Then Gregorio Cortez got away, got away down the way to Laredo; they wouldn’t have wanted to follow, Now he had them scared to. And so said Gregorio Cortez: What’s the good of your plots? You can’t get your hands on me, Not even with those hound dogs. And so said the Americanos: If we catch up to him, what can we do? If we go after him in a straight-up fight, There won’t be many coming back. Out there by El Encinal, What they say around here is, They got him in another corral And he killed them another sheriff. Then he met another Mexican, And he said with some arrogance, What’s the news? Tell me— I am Gregorio Cortez. They say that because of me, They’re killing lots of folks So now I’ll turn myself in, because that ain’t fit at all. Down came all the rinches, Flying through the wind, Because they wanted to get ahold of Ten thousand pesos like they were offered. When they surrounded his house Cortez showed himself to say: You’ll take me in by my own will, And not any other way. And so said the Big Ol’ Sheriff, like he was about to cry: Cortez, hand over your guns, and you won’t have to die. And so said Gregorio Cortez, With a great big yell, I’m not handing my guns over Until you’ve locked me in my cell. And so they took in Cortez, And that’s where it came to an end. His poor family Carry him in their hearts. And with that I’ll say my goodbye In the shade under a cypress; Here I’ll finish off the ballad Of Don Gregorio Cortez.

Thus always to tyrants. Beware the State. Celebrate the Ides of March!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-23: The present anarchy of our commerce features a Tyrannicide Day commemorative t-shirt from the Rad Geek People’s Clothing Collective storefront
• GT 2007-03-15: Tyrannicide Day 2007: The fourth annual celebration, with an oration and a commemorative reading from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, a dramatic retelling of the legendary Swiss tyrannicide which, if genuinely historical, was perhaps the most strategically successful tyrannicide in history.
• GT 2006-03-15: Tyrannicide Day ceremonies for 2006: the third annual celebration, with some thoughts on equality and a commemorative reading from The Tragedy [sic] of Julius Caesar.
• GT 2005-03-15: Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!: the second annual celebration, and some thoughts on tyrannicide and terrorism
• GT 2004-03-15: Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!: the first annual celebration. It’s like President’s Day, only cooler.
• Professor Wilkes: Tyrannicide Not Terrorism
• Leo Tolstoy (1900): Thou Shalt Not Kill

Rapist on patrol: Officer David Alex Park

(Story via smally.)

Last month, in Irvine, California, Officer David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, was acquitted by a jury of eleven men and one woman. He was acquitted, not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence. He was acquitted because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club, and so the jury concluded that she made him do it, and besides, if she strips for a living, she must have been asking for it anyway.

You might think that I am exaggerating the defense’s position for polemical effect. No, I’m not. Here’s defense attorney Jim Stokke: She got what she wanted, … She’s an overtly sexual person. And in cross-examination of Lucy, the survivor: You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do, … And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!

Back in the real world, outside of Jim Stokke’s and Officer David Alex Park’s pornographic power-trip succubus fantasies, what actually happened is that a professional cop, while armed and on patrol, used the extensive arbitrary powers that the law grants to police in order to get personal records on several different women at the strip club, picked out the one he liked the best, followed her, waited for the first excuse to use his legally-backed coercive power against her, used the power of his badge and gun to force her to pull over, used that same power to bring her under his custody and keep her there against her will, threatened her with arrest and jail, and then forced her into sex against her will. He didn’t give a damn about what she wanted because she’s just a woman, and an overtly sexual one at that. And he could force what he wanted on her because he’s a cop—so he has the power to restrain and threaten her—and she’s a stripper—so he had every reason to believe that a jury would give him every possible (and some impossible) benefit of the doubt, while they treated her bodily integrity and her consent as worth less than nothing, and blamed her for anything that happened to her, anyway. As, in fact, they did.

As I said about a case with several male cops in San Antonio back in December:

What as at stake here has a lot to do with the individual crimes of three cops, and it’s good to know that the police department is taking that very seriously. But while excoriating these three cops for their personal wickedness, this kind of approach also marginalizes and dismisses any attempt at a serious discussion of the institutional context that made these crimes possible — the fact that each of these three men worked out of the same office on the same shift, the way that policing is organized, the internal culture of their own office and of the police department as a whole, and the way that the so-called criminal justice system gives cops immense power over, and minimal accountability towards, the people that they are professedly trying to protect. It strains belief to claim that when a rape gang is being run out of one shift at a single police station, there’s not something deeply and systematically wrong with that station. If it weren’t for the routine power of well-armed cops in uniform, it would have been much harder for Victor Gonzales, Anthony Munoz, or Raymond Ramos to force their victims into their custody or to credibly threaten them in order to extort sex. If it weren’t for the regime of State violence that late-night patrol officers exercise, as part and parcel of their legal duties, against women in prostitution, it would have been that much harder for Gonzales and Munoz to imagine that they could use their patrol as an opportunity to stalk young women, or to then try to make their victim complicit in the rape by forcing her to pretend that the rape was in fact consensual sex for money. And if it weren’t for the way in which they can all too often rely on buddies in the precinct or elsewhere in the force to back them up, no matter how egregiously violent they may be, it would have been much harder for any of them to believe that they were entitled to, or could get away with, sexually torturing women while on patrol, while in full uniform, using their coercive power as cops.

A serious effort to respond to these crimes doesn’t just require individual blame or personal accountability — although it certainly does require that. It also requires a demand for fundamental institutional and legal reform. If police serve a valuable social function, then they can serve it without paramilitary forms of organization, without special legal privileges to order peaceful people around and force innocent people into custody, and without government entitlements to use all kinds of violence without any accountability to their victims. What we have now is not civil policing, but rather a bunch of heavily armed, violently macho, institutionally privileged gangsters in blue.

—GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol

In Irvine, the same thing is happening all over again—just another Bad Apple causing Yet Another Isolated Incident. Except that in Irvine, the legal system has not even gone so far as to get to the part about individual blame and personal accountability. Overt misogyny against women who dare ever to be overtly sexual, combined with overt authoritarianism in favor of any controlling macho creep with a badge and a gun and a pocketful of wet dreams, have combined to get this admitted sexual predator completely off the hook, and leave all of his old buddies back at the department free to stalk, harass, extort and rape suspect women, with every expectation of more or less complete impunity for their actions.

Christ, but there are days when I hate being proven right about the things I write about.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2007-12-02: Men in uniform

Cops are here to protect you by looking in on an upset young man who locked himself in a room with a small kitchen knife, then drilling a hole in the wall and spraying pepper spray to force him out from the room when he wouldn’t come out voluntarily, then shooting him to death when the pepper spraying forced him out of the room, because he brought out the small kitchen knife that he had taken in with him.

All for his own good, of course. It became necessary to destroy Scott Rockwell in order to save him.

Cops are here to protect you by using handcuffing and arrest to put an end any argument. Even if you’re a firefighter who’s busy trying to rescue an auto accident victim.

Cops are here to protect you by dumping you out of your wheelchair onto the jailhouse floor, and breaking two of your ribs. Just to make sure you weren’t lying, when you told them you can’t stand up because you’re paralyzed from the shoulders down.

Cops are here to protect you using pain compliance, for example hitting you with 50,000-volt electric shocks at least three different times to make you do what they tell you to do, even when you pose no threat of violence to anyone, when you already have your hands cuffed behind your back, and when you are already surrounded or even pinned down to the ground by three armed professionals.

Cops are here to protect you by pinning a 13 year old boy to the ground and choking him for the crime of skateboarding. Then grabbing a teenaged girl in a chokehold for trying to walk away from the scene. Then wrestling down another teenaged boy who tried to protect her from getting manhandled. Then arresting the lot of them on the grounds that failing to immediately obey a cop’s arbitrary orders is a violation of city ordinances against disorderly conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by threatening a 14 year old boy with juvi for backtalk, threatening to smack your mouth for attitude, wrestling him to the ground to steal his skateboards, screaming in the boy’s face for being addressed as dude, and then turning around to threaten another teenager who happens to be filming their professional conduct.

Cops are here to protect you by trashing your college art project and threatening to beat the hell out of you for using public space in ways that confuse and enrage them.

Please note that if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, the people around us would more or less universally conclude that we’re belligerent and dangerous lunatics. In fact, if you or I or anyone else without a badge and a gun acted like this, and it was caught on camera, we would soon be in jail for on a charge of assault and battery. When someone with a badge and a gun acts like this, and it’s caught on camera, with a very few exceptions, the worst that ever happens is that they might get fired. The most common response from the powers that be is either to do nothing at all, or else to give the pig a paid vacation and a verbal reprimand. Meanwhile, state legislators propose laws to withhold records of the abuse as classified information for reasons of state security. Fellow cops and freelance sado-fascist blowhards can all be counted on to make up any excuse at all, even in defiance of the clear evidence of their senses, in order to get the pig off the hook, no matter how obviously out-of-control the cop may be and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless his victim.

The mainstream newsmedia writes stories with clauses like this:

The skateboarders, who were violating a city ordinance, are claiming police brutality and some say the pictures back up their claim.

The video shows a 13-year-old being held to the ground by his throat. It also shows a girl being held in what appears to be a chokehold.

—KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Other cops say things like this:

Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means says, If a subject becomes confrontational, the officer has a right to defend himself. There are certain steps: first of all a verbal command. Like I said, if that subject becomes combative, that officer needs to do all he can do to get that subject under control.

—KTHV Little Rock: Video Brings Controversy To Police Department

Please note that Hot Springs Police Department spokesman McCrary Means believes that police officers have a right to grab you and beat the hell out of you in order to defend themselves against a verbal confrontation.

And freelance police-enabling blowhards write in with letters like this:

In regard to the YouTube video in which the Baltimore police officer seems to go overboard in his actions regarding a teenage skateboarder, I’d point out that teenage boys typically resent authority, often continue to do the wrong thing even after repeated instructions to stop and are, in general, a minor menace to society until they grow out of their teenage years.

When they’re doing something wrong, you can ask them to stop over and over again, and they’ll often simply ignore you until you get loud or otherwise assert your authority.

As the uncle of two teenage boys, I have no doubt that the officer reacted in a normal manner and that he should not be subject to disciplinary action.

Jerry Fletcher
Waldorf

And:

When YouTube recently showed a video of a teenage skateboarder being manhandled by a Baltimore police officer, public reaction was swift and severe.

Mayor Sheila Dixon called him a bad apple and the officer was immediately suspended.

I find this rush to judgment without a complete investigation disturbing, especially as the alleged victim had little more than his feelings hurt.

Police officers put their lives on the line every day, and the lack of public support for these men and women, especially from the mayor’s office, is an embarrassment.

Might it be possible that these kids were just punks harassing a veteran officer? And if these upstanding skater dudes were so in the right, why didn’t they file a complaint against the officer?

Let’s hear the whole story before destroying the career of a dedicated public servant.

E. Mitchell Arion
Goldsboro

If E. Mitchell Arion hasn’t watched the video that he speaks so confidently about, then why keep talking about it when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? If, on the other hand, he has actually watched the video, he must believe that this hollering uniformed thug is in fact a dedicated public servant whose precious career needs to be handled with kid gloves, even though he watched Officer Salvatore Rivieri going up to one of the people he is supposedly serving, screaming in his face, ordering him around, insulting him, telling him to shut up, threatening him, grabbing him, wrestling him down, shoving him back down to the ground, robbing him of his private property, lecturing him, and getting up in his face about the proper titles to use when the kid addresses his putative servant.

It takes an awfully special kind of dedicated servant to treat you like that.

(Hat tips to Lew, Balko, Anthony Gregory #1, Anthony Gregory #2, Bill Anderson, Anthony Gregory #3, Anthony Gregory #4.)

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform
• GT 2007-12-23: Law and Orders #5: Daytona Beach cop takes control at Best Buy by shocking an unarmed, retreating woman
• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
• GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling

I’m in San Antonio, visiting family for the holidays. This is not the sort of story that I had hoped would greet me on the local news.

2 SAPD Officers Face Oppression Charges

SAN ANTONIO — Two San Antonio police officers were charged Thursday with official oppression in connection with an incident involving a woman.

Victor Hugo Gonzalez, 36, a six-year veteran of the force, was also charged with promotion of prostitution and sexual assault.

Police Chief William McManus said that Gonzalez propositioned and sexually assaulted an 18-year-old woman while on patrol at a park near Riverside Golf Course in June.

McManus also said that woman was forced to commit a sex act for a friend of Gonzalez.

Also charged with official oppression was Michael Anthony Munoz, 33, a five-year veteran of the force.

McManus said that Munoz groped the woman and stood watch for Gonzalez.

—KSAT San Antonio (2007-12-20): 2 SAPD Officers Face Oppression Charges

Wanted SAPD Officer Surrenders To Police

SAN ANTONIO — A third San Antonio police officer charged with sexually assaulting of a woman turned himself in to authorities early Friday morning.

Raymond Ramos, 28, turned himself in Friday morning on charges of sexual assault, civil rights violations and official oppression in a Nov. 11 incident involving a 28-year-old woman.

Police investigating Ramos’ incident came across information that led to the Thursday arrests of two other officers in a separate incident.

… All three officers – now out on bond – worked overnight patrol out of the Southside substation.

—KSAT San Antonio (2007-12-21): Wanted SAPD Officer Surrenders To Police

To their credit, the police department and the D.A. are, for the most part, treating these as serious crimes; that’s better than you can say for some police departments. The cops believed the complainants enough to charge the officers, the arrested cops have been taken off of patrol duty while the indictment is pending (although they have only been transferred to desk jobs; why not just put them on leave entirely?), and the D.A. says that she plans to seek indictments from a grand jury by next month. On the other hand, the boss cops still insist on talking about these rapists in terms of Yet Another Couple of Isolated Incidents — a way of talking about it that takes these particular crimes seriously while also guaranteeing that crimes just like these will keep on happening over and over:

Wednesday’s arrests bring the total of police officers arrested in 2007 to five, four of whom worked out of the Southside Substation on the 700 block of West Mayfield Boulevard.

McManus called Thursday’s allegations disturbing, but he also said that all officers should not fall under the umbrella of a few who might have broken the law.

McManus said an officer at the substation was the one who brought the allegations to his attention after a woman complained to him about an officer assaulting her.

These types of incidents are not only embarrassing, but frustrating, and they do make you angry, McManus said. By no means are we going to tolerate it, by no means are we going to soft step it.

—KSAT San Antonio (2007-12-20): 2 SAPD Officers Face Oppression Charges

What as at stake here has a lot to do with the individual crimes of three cops, and it’s good to know that the police department is taking that very seriously. But while excoriating these three cops for their personal wickedness, this kind of approach also marginalizes and dismisses any attempt at a serious discussion of the institutional context that made these crimes possible — the fact that each of these three men worked out of the same office on the same shift, the way that policing is organized, the internal culture of their own office and of the police department as a whole, and the way that the so-called criminal justice system gives cops immense power over, and minimal accountability towards, the people that they are professedly trying to protect. It strains belief to claim that when a rape gang is being run out of one shift at a single police station, there’s not something deeply and systematically wrong with that station. If it weren’t for the routine power of well-armed cops in uniform, it would have been much harder for Victor Gonzales, Anthony Munoz, or Raymond Ramos to force their victims into their custody or to credibly threaten them in order to extort sex. If it weren’t for the regime of State violence that late-night patrol officers exercise, as part and parcel of their legal duties, against women in prostitution, it would have been that much harder for Gonzales and Munoz to imagine that they could use their patrol as an opportunity to stalk young women, or to then try to make their victim complicit in the rape by forcing her to pretend that the rape was in fact consensual sex for money. And if it weren’t for the way in which they can all too often rely on buddies in the precinct or elsewhere in the force to back them up, no matter how egregiously violent they may be, it would have been much harder for any of them to believe that they were entitled to, or could get away with, sexually torturing women while on patrol, while in full uniform, using their coercive power as cops.

A serious effort to respond to these crimes doesn’t just require individual blame or personal accountability — although it certainly does require that. It also requires a demand for fundamental institutional and legal reform. If police serve a valuable social function, then they can serve it without paramilitary forms of organization, without special legal privileges to order peaceful people around and force innocent people into custody, and without government entitlements to use all kinds of violence without any accountability to their victims. What we have now is not civil policing, but rather a bunch of heavily armed, violently macho, institutionally privileged gangsters in blue.

More Isolated Incidents:

• GT 2007-12-02: Men in Uniform
• GT 2007-11-30: Oops. Our bad.
• GT 2007-10-13: Gangsters in Blue
• GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling