Month: November 2015

Your moment of respite in a world gone mad

by digby

Otters and others:

Uhm… there you go.

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Lies, damned lies and statistics

by digby

An interesting little piece about Florida 2000.

An example of an extremely significant, decidedly unintended result of a relatively tiny event can be nightmarish. This one is, at least for me. It concerns the role I played in getting George W. Bush elected president in 2000. That I was the butterfly whose fluttering cascaded into Bush’s election still pains me. I had written an op-ed for the New York Times titled “We’re Measuring Bacteria with a Yardstick” in which I argued that the vote in Florida had been so close that the gross apparatus of the state’s electoral system was incapable of discerning the difference between the candidates’ vote totals. Given the problems with the hanging chads, the misleading ballots (in retrospect, aptly termed “butterfly ballots”), the missing and military ballots, a variety of other serious flaws and the six million votes cast, there really was no objective reality of the matter.

Later when the Florida Supreme Court weighed in, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells cited me in his dissent from the majority decision of the rest of his court to allow for a manual recount of the undervote in Florida. Summarizing the legal maneuverings, I simply note that in part because of Wells’s dissent the ongoing recount was discontinued, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and George Bush was (s)elected president.

Specifically, Judge Wells wrote, “I agree with a quote by John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, when he wrote that, ‘the margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins.’ Further judicial process will not change this self-evident fact and will only result in confusion and disorder.” (Incidentally, the CNN senior political analyst at the time, Jeff Greenfield, cited the quote in his book on the 2000 presidential election, “Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!,” and wrote, “The single wisest word about Florida was delivered not by a pundit but by mathematician John Allen Paulos.” I doubt, however, that Greenfield thought it was reason to stop the recount.)

I was surprised and flattered, I admit, by the judge but also very distressed that my words were used to support a position with which I disagreed. Vituperative e-mails I received didn’t help. Many were angry that I would support Bush. Some were clearly demented. With all due respect to these correspondents and the esteemed judge, I believed and still believe that the statistical tie in the Florida election supported a conclusion opposite to the one Wells drew. The tie seemed to lend greater weight to the fact that Al Gore received almost half a million more popular votes nationally than did Bush. If anything, the dead heat in Florida could be seen as giving Gore’s national plurality the status of a moral tiebreaker. At the very least the decision of the rest of the court to allow for a manual recount should have been honored since Florida’s vote was pivotal in the Electoral College. Even flipping a commemorative Gore-Bush coin in the capitol in Tallahassee would have been justified since the vote totals were essentially indistinguishable.

I have always thought this made sense. The tie should have gone to the guy who had the most votes nationally. But the Republican line at the tome was “rulz-is-rulz” (except when they’re not) so they did everything in their power to preserve that supposed 535 vote margin so they could say they “won” even though it was clear that they didn’t.

I don’t know how much that move has contributed to this country’s cynicism about our leaders, our system and our government but it sure contributed to mine.

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The Running Imam
by Tom Sullivan

More tales of the drone wars.

Citizen, now you can do your part to fight international terrorism from the comfort of your own MQ-9 Reaper drone console. Citing “lack of appropriately cleared and currently qualified MQ-9 pilots,” the Air Force is now hiring civilian contractors to fly the patrols in “global hot spots,” reports the L.A. Times:

For the first time, civilian pilots and crews now operate what the Air Force calls “combat air patrols,” daily round-the-clock flights above areas of military operations to provide video and collect other sensitive intelligence.

[snip]

Civilians are not allowed to pinpoint targets with lasers or fire missiles. They operate only Reapers that provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, known as ISR, said Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command.

So that’s comforting. Still:

A lengthy article in the 2013 Air Force Law Review, a publication of the judge advocate general’s office, contended that over-reliance on contractors in a combat zone risks violating international law that prohibits direct civilian participation in hostilities.

It cites a Predator missile attack that killed 15 civilians in central Afghanistan in February 2010. Although the military piloted and operated the drone, the decision to fire a Hellfire missile “was largely based upon intelligence analysis conducted and reported by a civilian contractor.”

Pardon my noticing, but the United States abandoned all pretense of following international law when it invaded Iraq on Trumped-up™ intelligence and began torturing prisoners. Now we are worried about blurring the lines between the military and civilians? Does Blackwater ring any bells?

There is a reason the Air Force is having trouble finding and retaining drone pilots for its point-and-click assassination program. Pilots are quitting in record numbers:

Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Heather Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, wrote in the Guardian. “When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience.”

“It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was there,” Bryant told KNPR Radio in Nevada. “I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself.”

Four former drone-team members held a press conference this month about killing by remote control and the grotesque culture of it. “We have seen the abuse firsthand and we are horrified,” said former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant:

The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse, further stating that some operators had flown missions while impaired.

Haas was reprimanded for failing a trainee who expressed a willingness to kill people spotted on the ground because “they look like they are up to no good.” But pilots are in short supply. Superiors ordered him to pass students in the future to maintain a steady supply. Bryant told reporters of a time his Predator drone crew fired a Hellfire missile at “five tribal individuals and their camel” believed to be carrying explosives from Pakistan to Afghanistan for use in attacking American troops. Bryant saw no sign of weapons:

“We waited for those men to settle down in their beds and then we killed them in their sleep. That was cowardly murder,” he said.

The group issued a public letter to President Obama about their concerns. Their bank accounts and credit cards have since been locked, alleges Jesselyn Radack, a national security and human rights attorney, known for her defense of whistleblowers, journalists, and hacktivists:

.@wikileaks My #drone #whistleblowers went public this wk & now their #CreditCards + #BankAccts are #frozen. Advice? pic.twitter.com/4wymwZgeZ9— unR̶A̶D̶A̶C̶K̶ted (@JesselynRadack) November 22, 2015

It is all pretty creepy. Like a real-life version of The Running Man, except the targets of the game show’s “stalkers” are not even convicted murderers, but people who from 20,000 feet and half a world away look like they are up to no good, people who “must have done something” to justify death. What do we call this ugly reality show, The Running Imam?

Because you need this

by digby

Love those guys.

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Tyranny in the eye of the beholder

by digby

Huh:

Here’s an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.

Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.

That turns out not to be quite right because it didn’t count other forms of larceny. Still, this is a truly amazing statistic. They just take the stuff, no due process, nothing. And they keep it to use for more law enforcement.

For some reason most conservatives have no problem with this. But taxing you for roads and bridges is tyranny. I don’t get it.

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How to make a paranoid police state

by digby

There are lots of methods. They probably work best in combination but you can get a lot done with just one thing: fear.

Here’s an interesting piece in the New York Times about Trumpism by Timothy Egan;

In “The Plot Against America,” the novelist Philip Roth imagines an alternative history at the dawn of World War II. Charles A. Lindbergh, aviator hero and crypto-fascist, defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Rather than go to war against Nazi Germany, he foments an atmosphere of hatred directed at Jews in the United States.

President Lindbergh’s rule is based on fear. He can violate the Constitution because enough Americans do not mind limiting the freedom of a suspect minority in the name of security.

Of course, it could never happen here. It’s a novel, silly boy — one of late-stage Roth’s better efforts. Made-up stuff. That’s what I’ve always thought. But over the last three months, in listening to plans of the Republican presidential front-runner and the views of his increasingly thuggish followers, I’m starting to have some dark fears should Donald Trump become president.

Do read on. It’s quite interesting.

Oh, and apropos of nothing:

It was 21h32 on November 13th when time stopped in France and around the world as Paris was attacked in its heart. One hundred and thirty people were killed while enjoying dinners with friends, celebrating birthdays, and dancing at a concert. The French government, with the support of most of the population and political groups, rapidly declared a state of emergency that was initially scheduled to last 12 days. This drastic measure, not used since World War II, altered the normal balance of powers in France, giving more discretion to the President and the government.

The following week, as the police and military forces were tracking the perpetrators of the attacks, people around the world sent messages showing their support for the people of Paris, and France was moved by an unprecedented rush of solidarity. Since several suspects remained at large, the President requested that the parliament extend the state of emergency to three months, and modify the French law on the state of emergency, which dates from 1955. Parliament granted both requests with limited opposition, despite the absence of justification for the changes, and despite the fact that the modifications created new measures extending surveillance powers and limiting freedoms. More radical changes could come as the French have government has chosen this difficult period to consider modifying the Constitution, which would officially shift France from the Fifth to the Sixth Republic.

Before the attacks

France has historically been a country with a strong tradition of defending human rights. The French Revolution and the Enlightenment inspired many human rights declarations around the world. Despite this proud record, more recently abuses and violations of those universal rights have taking place in France, as highlighted in a recent Human Rights Watch report. The past two years have been particularly liberticide. Ostensibly in response to terrorist threats, France has passed no fewer than four separate laws extending its surveillance powers since December 2014: the Military Programming law, the Anti-Terrorism law, the Intelligence law, and the International Surveillance law. Together, these laws have made France an all-seeing state, capable of monitoring the population, collecting and retaining personal data for excessive periods, snooping on the private communications of individuals in France or abroad, and the list goes on. Given France’s ever-expanding surveillance authorities, many see the government’s immediate response to the attacks in Paris as relatively measured and calm. However, it may simply be that there are not many more surveillance powers for the government to seek. That said, the newly adopted proposals have nevertheless further extended the French surveillance state to extremes never previously seen in the digital age.

What is in the new law on the state of emergency?

The law adopted on November 20th declares a state of emergency in all French territories for three months, during which:

Warrantless house searches are authorised night and day, unless the house is occupied by a lawyer or a member of Parliament. This authority is granted by the Home Affairs minister or the Prefect of a region. The law also provides that a prosecutor be notified without undue delay. While remaining broad, this measure is a limitation of the 1955 law that authorised such house searches without notifying a prosecutor. If there is a wrongful or unsupported search, an individual can seek redress from of an administrative court.
Warrantless searches of electronic devices are authorised. Data can be accessed and copied by law enforcement.

The Home Affairs minister has the power to place individuals under house arrest if “there are serious reasons to believe that his/her behavior constitutes a threat to security and public order”, a provision created under the 1955 law. Now, these individuals can also be placed under invasive surveillance. While the parliament debated whether to prevent these individuals from accessing the internet, members of parliament abandoned the idea because the French constitutional court previously established that access to the internet is a fundamental right. However, the Home Affairs minister can order a limit or temporary suspension of their communications.

The government has the right to dissolve groups or associations that “take part in the execution of acts that represent a serious infringement to public order or whose activities facilitate or incite the execution of such acts.” Under French law, public order is a subjective notion, which can be interpreted in different ways depending on the situation. It has never been defined by the French constitutional court.

The law includes a measure to allow authorities to block websites that promote or incite terrorism, without the intervention of a judge. However, this mirrors a proposal that was already adopted in November of last year during reform of the Anti-Terrorism law, and that measure remains in effect. This makes the new measure nearly duplicative. Under the new provision, the limited oversight mechanism provided in the Anti-Terrorism law, which has been executed by the national data protection authority called CNIL, is no longer compulsory, and it is not clear whether there will be any mechanism for redress.

Silver lining: The 1955 law gave authorities control of the media, and this is no longer authorised.

But the biggest change might be yet to come. François Hollande, the French President, has announced a proposal to modify the French constitution to “adapt the State’s response to emergency situations.” The Prime Minister has been tasked with preparing this proposal, and it is expected to be released in the next few weeks. While everyone awaits the release, several political groups are already expressing doubt as to whether the government needs to modify the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, which has been in place since 1958. A change in the constitution would officially create the Sixth Republic in France.

More at the link. They’ve put climate activists under house arrest.Evidently they must believe they are in cahoots with ISIS. Or they’re using their expanded powers for other purposes. I wonder what it could be?

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QOTW: Trumpie

by digby

Talking about the “bad people”:

We can’t let it happen anymore. We have to be strong, we have to smart. We have to be fair, we have to be fair to all side. And it’s tough. You know, if you’re Muslim — and there are so many, they’re so great, they’re such good people — but we to be smart, because it’s coming from this area. I mean, there’s something going on. There’s some nastiness, there’s some meanness there. There’s something going on in the mosques and other places. And we have to at least say there’s a problem so we can solve it. We can’t close our eyes.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Obama — he wants to close his eyes and pretend it’s not happening. Why is he so emphatic on not solving the problem? There’s something we don’t know about! There’s something we don’t know about. (Shouts from the audience can be heard, declaring that Obama is a Muslim.)

So, we have to go out — and again, the greatest source for this is our local police. And the really greatest source is all of you, because you have all those eyes. And you see what’s happening. People move into a house a block down the road — you know who’s going in. You can see. And you report them to the local police. You know, it’s too complicated — call the federal government, who do we call? it’s a big bureaucratic mess, nobody knows what they’re doing, okay?

But you people, and me and everybody, you know when somebody moves to an apartment near you, or to a house near you — you’re pretty smart, right? We know if there’s something going on. Report them! Most likely you’ll be wrong, and that’s okay. But let the local police go in and check out [sic], and you’ll get rid of this stuff. That’s the best way. Everybody’s their own cop, in a way — I mean, you gotta do it, you gotta do it.

We might like to think that’s way outside the mainstream. But unfortunately, it isn’t:

“Mississippi is a great state, but like all 50 states it has troubled souls that might look to find meaning in this sick, misguided way. The challenge that we face in law enforcement is that they may be getting exposed to that poison and that training in their basement,” Comey said. “They’re sitting there consuming and may emerge from the basement to kill people of any sort, which is the call of ISIL, just kill somebody.”

So he stressed that the threat is very real, not just for military or law enforcement or the media, all of whom have been warned by the FBI that ISIS could be gunning for them, but for ordinary citizens as well.

“If you can video tape it all the better, if it’s law enforcement all the better, if you can cut somebody’s head off and get it on tape, what a wonderful thing in their view of the world,” he continued. “That’s the challenge we face everywhere.”

Comey expressed particular fear that restrictions on information gathering could give terrorists more leeway because they are harder to track.

“I’m very worried about where we’re drifting as a country in respect to law enforcement’s ability to, with lawful process, intercept communications. I’m not talking about sneaky stuff. I’m talking about situations where we have probable cause to believe that somebody is communicating with a terrorist group,” he said. “… We’re drifting into a place where there are going to be large swaths of this country beyond the reach of the law.”

Because of that, Comey said, citizens need to be constantly on the watch. The current climate of the world does not make it acceptable to see something and not report it.

“Ordinary folks should listen to the hair on the back of their neck,” he said. “We’ve gone back through every homegrown violent extremist case in the United States and studied it. In every single case, someone saw something online, at a religious institution, in a family setting, at a school, that was weird, that was out of place, this person was acting in a way that didn’t make sense.”

No word on whether or not we should report armed Trump voters but they sure make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m going to guess that’s not what either FBI chief Comey or Donald Trump have in mind.

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Who’s the terrorist?

by digby

Via the New York Times from last June:

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases had become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

We’re just talking about political violence in that chart. (Mass shootings and general gun violence has literally killed hundreds of thousands of people in that time frame.)

Now ask yourself, which of those violent ideologies is more likely to present an existential threat to our way of life? Which one influences more Americans to take up the cause? Which one has power within our governing structure?

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A now a word from the right

by digby

From former congressman and current grifter Allen West, on the Planned Parenthood terrorism:

Here’s the ONE FACT about the Planned Parenthood shooting liberals refuse to admit

Written by Allen West on November 28, 2015

I had a great run along Ft. Lauderdale beach this morning — big difference between here and Dallas weather. I’d hoped to get in some scuba diving this Thanksgiving weekend, but the seas are just too rough. However at least there’s no freezing rain. One thing for certain, I am having fun watching some REALLY good college football rivalry games — more to come on this Saturday.

However, tragedy has struck out in Colorado Springs and I wanted to express my condolences to the families who’ve lost loved ones — especially to the law enforcement officer who lost his life — our everyday guardians. As I watched the coverage and read some of the online social media responses, along with the protests in Chicago, figured I had to offer my assessment. And for those liberal progressives who feel my words don’t matter, then why are you here reading them?

We don’t know the motive behind the shooting in Colorado Springs, yet I’ve already seen the “right wing Christian” negative castigations — the whole fear of right wing Christians as opposed to militant Islamic terrorists. I think the liberal progressive media and their acolytes need be careful in exposing themselves to a blatant hypocrisy. The incident that occurred in Colorado Springs is horrible and surely will reflect upon a demented mind. But those on the left need to be aware that EVERY DAY Planned Parenthood is in the business of killing babies. That is not debatable. Murder is murder, and if the left believes it can leverage this as some political scoring point, you are dearly mistaken.

I know, the retort will be that Roe v Wade provides for the legal killing of babies – but do any of you find comfort in that logic? I suppose we’ve come to a point in America where we — well, the progressive socialist left — cherry picks which killings are ok, i.e., politically advantageous.

And so it is in Chicago where folks under the false narrative and deceptive guise of “black lives matter” are protesting — again — and blocking seasonal shoppers.

Now just how many black lives have been killed in Chicago? Yet they’ve chosen the disturbing shooting of a drug-induced young black man wielding a knife to champion. What about the nine-year-old black child who was lured and executed as part of a gang-related feud, in Chicago? Crickets. And could it be possible that the over 13 million black lives – babies — been killed since Roe v Wade mean so very little? After all, they don’t fit into the desired political narrative of the liberal progressive left.

Nope, their lives don’t matter since the white liberal progressive mass media says they do not.

Come to think about it, where are the protests over the Indiana pregnant pastor’s wife who was killed and raped by several black males? Nah, her life doesn’t matter. And what of the New Orleans medical student who stepped in to save the life of a woman being assaulted by a black male — he was shot in the stomach? And we all saw the video of the assailant pointing the gun to his head as he lay on the ground — thankfully the gun jammed and his life was spared. Does the life of the medical student, or the woman he saved, matter? Nah, they don’t fit into the liberal progressive left political agenda, narrative.

So here is my recommendation to the progressive socialist left, based on my assessment: shut the hell up and stop the bovine excrement. Stop cherry picking what lives matter in order to further your sick and insidious manipulation for your own political advantage.

You all are a bunch of miserable useful idiots, per Vladimir Lenin, who need to get a grip and realize just how stupid you’re making yourselves look. You’re consistently opening up yourselves to hypocrisy alerts as if you don’t believe anyone sees this, or perhaps believe no one will call you out on it.

Just stop, put down the George Soros paid for and produced signage. Go home and watch some college football, but stop with the Rahm Emanuel mantra of “never let a good crisis go to waste.” You’re manufacturing crises while ignoring real issues — like al-Qaida terrorists just attacked a U.N. compound in Mali. Y’all on the liberal progressive left and your media accomplices just want to distract us, but what you are proving is this.

The only lives that matter are those you can manipulate for your gain and advancement of your political end state. The police officer in Chicago has been arrested. The shooter in Colorado Springs has been apprehended and certainly will not be released.

But babies will continue to be murdered in Planned Parenthood clinics. More little black children will be killed by black-on-black gang violence. And there will be more whites assaulted and killed by blacks.

My saying this does not make me an Uncle Tom, sellout, Oreo, white man’s porch monkey, or house ni!@er. It means I know the facts, see through your crap, and will not tolerate it. Your disparaging name-calling just fuels my desire to speak out even louder because your lies must be exposed.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Now back to ESPN College Game Day.

Honestly, you don’t want to know what most of the right has been saying about this shooting. It’s obvious that many of them are like West and pretty much think that it was a justified shooting. Even the cops, apparently, for whom they have spared almost zero  compassion. Others have been dancing on the head of a pin desperately trying to find some way to prove that this wasn’t a political act, whether it was going on for hours yesterday trying to make people believe that the location of the shooting was some kind of coincidence and the man was really a bank robber or a crazy person holed up on Planned Parenthood so he could shoot shoppers in a nearby strip mall. I’m not kidding.

Today they are saying this is nothing like Islamic terrorism because the killer is rumored to have had mental problems which, apparently, makes the fact that he shot 12 people, killing 3 in a Planned Parenthood clinic not a political act. Because suicide bombers are all perfectly sane, we know that.

They are also very upset that the president condemned the shooting saying “enough is enough” because “the facts aren’t in.” I don’t know what to make of that, frankly, because the dead bodies are in the morgue and the others are in the hospital so it seems to me that those facts are in and the president is required to say something in that event.

At this writing, Ted Cruz is the only Republican candidate to speak out.  But they’re in a tough spot. An anti-abortion zealot (also known as their base) “exercised his 2nd Amendment remedies” at a Planned Parenthood clinic. He also shot five police officers, killing one of them.

How in the hell can they thread that needle?

Update: Buzzfeed found twitter users who were dancing on a virtual Jersey City rooftop:

I wish I could see how these people with such alleged reverence for life are any different than the nihilistic Islamic fundamentalists who cheer the shooting of people in restaurants and concert halls.

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No cop left behind
by Tom Sullivan

“He must have done something,” says the voice in my head when I think about Laquan McDonald. It is the voice of my parents’ generation, a generation that went from seemingly never questioning authority to always questioning it. Except when members of minorities run afoul of police. I wonder if “He must have done something” was the model of justice our Founders thought they were pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish? Or is that the kind of colonial-rule justice from which they fought to separate themselves? Are they now rolling over in their graves?

As police in Colorado Springs led away the alleged Planned Parenthood murderer in handcuffs, I was still trying to process the latest police shooting news from Chicago. The Guardian’s database this morning lists 1033 people killed by police in the U.S. so far this year. Police killed “more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than police in England and Wales did in the last 24 years,” as reported by the Independent, noting “police in Norway fired their guns only twice last year – and no one was hurt.”

Brian Burghart’s web site fatalencounters.org tracks police shootings in the U.S. because the government will not. Burghart and colleagues are building a database of people killed in interactions with American law enforcement since 2000:

This site is founded upon the premise that Americans should have the ability to track [under what circumstances police use deadly force]. This idea was conceived in the wake of the Oct. 6, 2012, killing of a naked, unarmed college student, Gil Collar, at the University of South Alabama. Media reports contained no context: How many people are killed by police in Alabama every year? How many in the United States?

It turned out that Collar was on drugs, including marijuana and the hallucinogen 25-I. It also turned out the freshman never got within 5 feet of the officer, and the officer attempted no less-lethal methods to subdue Collar. On March 1, 2013, the policeman was cleared of wrongdoing.

That, in a 9mm shell, is the crux of the issue. In the United States of America, police routinely kill citizens they are pledged to serve and protect, deploying deadly force in encounters such as that one above, or in the Laquan McDonald case from Chicago. Collar was white. McDonald was black. Fellow officers stood by as the accused killer, Officer Jason Van Dyke, emptied his weapon into McDonald, then they stood silent for a year before their department this week released the dash-cam video of the sixteen shots, and then only under court order.

When will the Fraternal Order of Police retract this obviously false claim? https://t.co/67BEd8Mq6X #LaquanMcDonald pic.twitter.com/ftWqIgg9v4— Josh Nelson (@josh_nelson) November 25, 2015

It seems that being a law enforcement officer is another way — besides being rich or a bank or a government-paid torturer — to enjoy a separate and privileged system of American justice. Only with the advent of cell phones and police cameras as the public gotten a window into the brutality scattered officers wield with heretofore legal impunity, especially in communities of color. Jerome Karabel, a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, writes that “Extra-judicial killings by the police … now number more than 1,100 per year — more than four times the number of people lynched or executed by capital punishment in the worst of years.”

Seth Stoughton and Josh Gupta-Kagan, both law professors from the University of South Carolina, decried the criminalization of school discipline problems in the Atlantic after cell phone video went viral of a school resource officer flinging a student to the floor and across a classroom. As Burghart also found, data on certain aspects of policing is lacking. They write:

The limited studies that exist are often inconsistent with each other. As with other aspects of policing, more and better data is essential to making informed policy decisions. This includes data about police violence in school settings; the fact that no one knows how often police are using force against children should not just be alarming, it should be horrifying.

While one of those killed in the Colorado Springs shootings was a police officer, Stoughton (himself a former police officer) produced FBI data weeks ago that show assaults on police officers dropped sharply in 2014. Responding earlier this year to the Tamir Rice shooting, Stoughton wrote:

Why do most officers, charged with serving and protecting their communities, persist in asking whether a use of force was justified rather than necessary? I put a great deal of blame on the expansive “warrior mindset” that has become so highly esteemed in the law enforcement community. To protect themselves, to even survive, officers are taught to be ever-vigilant. Enemies abound, and the job of the Warrior is to fight and vanquish those enemies.

That’s not the right attitude for police. Our officers should be, must be, guardians, not warriors. The goal of the Guardian isn’t to defeat an enemy, it is to protect the community to the extent possible, including the community member that is resisting the officer’s attempt to arrest them. For the guardian, the use of avoidable violence is a failure, even if it satisfies the legal standard.

As I wrote here in April,

We are expected to treat police officers as public servants and heroes willing to lay down their lives to protect us. So it baffles me how, as Stoughton writes, “would-be officers are told that their primary objective is to go home at the end of every shift.” What is heroic about that? About sacrificing others before you would sacrifice yourself? What is heroic about shooting unarmed suspects in the back or choking them to death for selling loose cigarettes? Stoughton rightly blames the training, and offers suggestions on training Guardian Officers rather than Police Warriors. But beyond that, there is a culture growing within law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence community that, post-September 11, increasingly views the public they are meant to serve as “enemy forces” to be dealt with. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden must be smiling.

Police are the ones supposedly trained to respond coolly and professionally in charged situations. In another context, police shootings would be receiving more study and harsh scrutiny, scrutiny to which law enforcement seems immune. In another context — publicly funded schools, perhaps — lawmakers would point to under-performance as indicative of systemic training failures, blame the teachers and their unions, and call for yanking funding from institutions that fail to meet standards. But police are privileged. Politicians do not blame police failures on predominantly white precinct “culture.” They do not call for “No Cop Left Behind” programs and threaten to pull funding for police academies that fail to perform to the highest standards. We don’t threaten to privatize police departments, a la Robocop. Yet.

The title for this video of British police speaks volumes about how police are viewed in this country. One would think that would be cause for reforming the training and less blue wall of silence: