"Does a billy club cracking a skull make a sound,
if the media choose to ignore it?"
-Don Felder, Boston Globe, 29 June 1989
"How many Riverside cops does it take to shoot an unconscious black woman a dozen times?"
"None. She fell down a flight of stairs while resisting arrest."
Bring up the topic of police brutality, abuse of police power, or politically-motivated false arrest, and immediately the discussion is cast in terms of race and racial animosities; the assumption in those segments of society willing to admit that the word "police" is not a synonym for "the hand of god" - being that abuses of police power invariably involve racist white cops abusing innocent blacks (or to a lesser degree, hispanics or asiatics). The people making this assumption are not, to blame: whosoever defines the terms of an argument, controls the argument, and the state-controlled media define the terms of an argument, controls the argument, and the state-controlled media define the terms of the argument for a nation of media addicts.
Make no mistake about what I say: blacks and other people of color certainly are victimized by the police; contrary to media-guided opinion, however, it is not a question of white cops, nonwhite civilians, and racism. It is, in fact, a question of class-based violence, the police bing the gestapo of a privileged elite, enforcing "plantationb law" on anyone and everyone who knows the misfortune of being born into one of the slave castes.
It must be remembered that a "professional" police force essentially a standing army, deployed in our streets to maintian control' - is a phenomenon little more than a century old in this country. That the police are deployed by the same self-constituted "upper" classes that deploy military units in countries, friendly and otherwise, around the world, gives us the clearest indication of the police mandate: the police are not constituted with the intention of preventing crime [which they plainly cannot, and do not, do], nor with the intention of enforcing the law [John & Patsy Ramsey, the Eappens, John DuPont, and Tom & Michael Skakel, among others, clearly illustrate that only poor people are ever suspected of, let alone guilty of, murder] - the police are constituted solely for the purpose of enforcing the will of the elite upon the slaves.
In 1893, Emma Goldman was arrested, tried and convicted, and imprisoned, for the "crime" of telling a crowd of poor people at Union Square that they should demand work from the rich, or, if the rich would not provide jobs, to demand food from the rich, or, if the rich gave no bread, that the poor had a 'sacred right' to take bread from the rich. She is but one well-known example of the systematic, and often brutal, victimization of the less-than-contented poor by the standing army of the elite. Through the 'Red Scare' and the Palmer raids, violent suppression of strikes and other actions before and during the Great Depression, imprisonment of conscientious objectors and draft resistors during WWII, the McCarthy-era "loyalty oaths", COINTELPRO, and the ongoing "War On Crime" and "War On Drugs", the essence of oppression, the "thing in itself" (as Marcus Aurelius would describe it), is that those who enjoy wealth and privilege arm and empower the most dangerously psychotic, violence-prone sociopaths among the slave caste to hold a gun to the heads of their neighbors, and thus keep the slave quarters under control, if not quite.
It is illustrative to note that recently-proposed legislation that would have barred anyone with a conviction for such felonies as Spousal Abuse, Domestic Violence, or Stalking, from possessing a firearm - even for work-related purposes - was defeated by vehement opposition from unions representing and prison guards, a social group distinguished by their tendency to commit precisely these felonies. These same unions are among the most aggressive supporters of gun-control legislation aimed at non- police.
While police brutality and abuses of police power are constant in our society, media interest - directed by the government for propaganda purposes - is limited to such cases as the Louima and Rodney King assaults, the Dialo murder, and to a lesser extent the ongoing efforts to free Mumia Abu Tamal. Structuring discussion in terms of race, and race alone, aside from merely, masking the full extent of the problem, also serves to keep the slaves at each others' throats, based upon perceptions that poor whites are somehow 'favored' by the police. The truth - the "thing itself" - is that the police, regardless of race-of-origin, regard the poor, regardless of race-of-origin, as legitimate targets; worse yet, easy targets, as the overwhelming majority of abusive, violent, and perjurous police are never held to answer for clearly criminal behavior. Justin Volpe and his co-conspirators in the perverse torture of Abner Louima are unique in this regard; the trial does not illustrate justice being done, it is simply a politically motivated "show trial" in the Stalinist tradition, the gestapo sloughing off a few of the peons, under orders, for the sole purpose of defusing the powderkeg and providing the illusion of Due Process and Equal Justice.
Such behavior - perverse sexual assaults, beatings, and outright murder - are not the isolated sickness of a few 'bad apples'; with the tacit approval of prosecutors, judges, and local politicians, the police are allowed to vent their psychosis at will as long as the targets are poor and powerless. Make no mistake, in this regard: a black cop is every bit as likely to abuse the power conferred by a badge, a gun, and a license to kill as is a white cop - it is not the color of the badge, that determines their willingness to give into their baser, more depraved instincts. Nor is the color of your skin that determines your treatment; it is the combination of indicators of your membership in the powerless slaves castes, and your lack of a badge (or weapon with which to defend yourself).
Antiabortion protestors - the nonviolent, if silly, "passive resistors", not the violent cranks - who tend to be poor whites, report experiences that are eerily identical to those reported by poor blacks: "…theguards removed their identification; a group of women [protestors] would be taken into the processing area, and then one or two at a time would be carried upstairs through a portion of the jail in which mentally-disordered male prisoners were housed…about half of these women were physically abused, en roue - some of them sexually. The warden of the jail, one Charles Lozakiewicz, directly observed all this, as well as taking active part in much of it
"...guards threatened the women with rape and sodomy, and with being stripped naked & thrown into cells occupied by the insane male prisoners. One woman was dragged up the stairs by her breasts, and had large chunks of hair pulled out of her scalp; she was held down and "wishboned" by the guards so they could get a clear shot at her genitals, where she was kicked repeatedly - this in addition to repeated kicks to the stomach. This same woman's breasts were treated as punching bags by guards ...
"...one woman, an asthmatic, had cigar smoke blown in her face and, when she suffered an asthma attack, was denied medical treatment ...
"...women were photographed with their blouses pulled up, exposing their breasts for the guards to leer at; guards groped the women's crotches and breasts repeatedly…"
- personal correspondence, author's collection; anonymous informant quoting & paraphrasing from sworn affidavits on file with attorney Susan Lucas, re: police assaults on nonviolent protestors, 11 March 1989, Pittsburgh, PA.
Had any of these assaults been perpetrated by non-police, the perpetrators would be subject to extended incarceration, followed by an indeterminant 'unofficial' sentence in a "mental hospital" as a mentally-disordered sex offender...but in this case, the sex offenders wear badges - thus, they can't possibly be sex offenders. When such brutality and depravity is noticed at all in the courts, the police invariably offer what Mumia Abu- Jamal has called the "Honorable Men" defense:
"If I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong, who, you all know, are honorable men. I will not do them wrong. rather choose to wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, Than I will wrong such honorable men...
"…I fear I wrong the honorable men, whose daggers have stabbed Caesar; I do fear it.
that have done this deed are honorable. What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
that made them do it. They are wise and honorable, and will no doubt with reasons answer you.
-William Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar, Act III Scene II
speech of Mark Antony
The police, no matter how psychotic, no matter how sociopathic no matter how reprehensible their behavior, are not judged by the same laws as are binding upon the rest of us; nor will the media permit their behavior, except under the most extraordinary circumstances, to be publicly described as reprehensible - for the gestapo are such honorable men. This is the unwritten contract that binds the police' power: do not offend masters, do not hinder or obstruct our social betters, and you may visit your most vile and reprehensible fantasies upon the other slaves, with no fear of repercussion, so long as you keep it under cover, and even when your foulness is exposed, your masters will reward your bootlicking and your brutalizing of the other slaves by making sure that the least number of you face trial and those who must be sacri-ficed will go to a soft, cushy protective-custody prison, where -you need not fear real men getting their hands on you. To merely cite the trials of the gestapo who murdered Arthur MacDuffie, who brutalized Rodney King, who sodomized Abner Louima, is to miss the essential point: these are show trials, where a few peon-level cops face a slap on the wrist (almost never imprisonment) for being caught - mind you, not for abusing power, but for being caught at it, for embarrassing their masters... you can almost hear the tame judges saying "BAD cop! No doughnut!!!" This does not negate my point but only proves it: every act performed by Hitler's gestapo, by Mussolini's brown shirts or Milosovic' Serbian army, is performed by the amerikan gestapo on an almost daily basis: rape, torture, and murder are permitted to those who wear the badge, in the interests of maintaining the power of the imperial state and the privileges of the self-designated elite, the masters.
The "law of the land" authorizes this; only the wealthy slaveholder
class in the colonies, and of course their 'legitimate' descendants,
were ever intended to enjoy the safety of citizenship and protection
from abuse by the gestapo...
"... in all times some must be rich, some poore,
some highe and eminent in
power and dignitie, others meane and in subjection."
John Winthrop, Governor,
Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630)
"The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different states in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in several states."
Articles of Confederation., SIV 1778 (the Articles are subsumed into the Constitution, and stand as the binding authority by which the Constitution is interpreted),
"Every person, and every class and description of persons, who were at the time of the adoptions of the Constitution recognized as Citizens in the several states, became also citizens of this new political body; but none other..."
Dred Scott v. Sanford [US SCt. 1857) 19 How. 393 @405, 406
"We think it as competent and necessary for a state to provide precautionary measures again-- the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence which may arise from unsound and infectious articles imported."
New York v. Miln (US SCt 1837) II Pet. 102 @142)
You have no rights that the wealthy, or their hired thugs can be required to respect.
Thus it is that media attention is but seldom attracted by reports of abuse of police power; only "sexy" cases, politically-useful cases that keep the slaves at each others' throats, are given airtime. Everyday abuses of power - planting evidence, or fingerprints; perjury and subornation of perjury; witness tampering; even beatings administered to extract a 'confession' in a hard-to-solve case - are ignored. The state-controlled media - and make no mistake, the media in this country isa under the same species of control as that of Stalin's Russia or Mao's China -turns a blind eye to all but the most egrgeious cases, and will even ignore those if ordered to do so.
... what if media doesn't sympathize with the victims of police abuse]? What if it does its best to conceal official acts of violence? With no one there to tell the story,the public is obvlivious as decent men and women Are subjected to infamies worthy of a fascist regime."
- Don Feder, in op. cit.
Those who control the media count on our famous lack of attention- span, the american inability to hold a train of thought any longer than the time between commercial interruptions. Police brutality is not a "real" crime, because hand-picked judges choose not to convict; this is why the four gestapo thugs actually charged in the Rodney King beating were acquitted at their criminal trial, and why the Miami- gestapo who beat Arthur MacDuffie to a bloody pulp, and then vented their homicidal rage on is motorcycle, were acquitted at their trial in Tampa. In those rare instances where the jackbooted thugs are brought into a courtroom as defendants, they are almost invariably tried by juries selected from the relatively privileged suburbs, the lowest level of the social hierarchy who consider the gestapo a barrier between their own relative privilege and the starving rabble in the ghettos. Of course, each such "trial" is touted by the state-controlled media as "yet another instance of the system working" - when in reality it is an indication that the system works only for those who control it from above, and to a lesser extent for those cowardly thugs who take the badge in order to protect themselves from any real retribution... and yet, this is one opinion you'll never see expressed on the network news, nor printed on the Op-Ed page of your local propaganda paper.
This is the essence of our cities: ghetto, favela, the slave quarters of plantation amerika. For all the "urban renewal" - sports complices and convention centers paid for by extorting taxes from the poor, then given as gifts to obscenely-wealthly owners of sports teams - our cities are nothing more than vast behavioral sinks, in the tradition of Skinner and Calhoun. Education is purposely underfunded, the gestapo are given all manner of expensive and deadly toys to deploy against the trapped slaves, and out past the decaying working-class suburbs, out where birds still sing in green, healthy trees under bright, clear skies, in the walled and gated "private communities", the John and Patsy Ramseys of 'our' country compose new gun-control laws that take weapons out of the hands of the poor.
The most interesting, and perhaps least-understood phenomenon of the police state is the incidence of crime itself. Any sociologist can tell you that, given a set of variable factors and certain fairly standard presumptios, the incidence of crime in any population of known size in postindustrial society is a predictable, and relatively stable, percentage of the number of the total population, with variables based on population density (number of people per square mile) and relative availablity of staple necessities and desired "comfort" items. When the "War On Crime" and "War On Drugs" were first promulgated, the gestapo and their apologists had to induce a crime-hysteria, based on class and race antagonisms, to gather anything resembling public support for the next step: increased numbers of police, more draconian laws (such as "Three- Strike" and "One-Strike" laws, all of which just make encounters with actual criminals more dangerous), greater impediments to post-conviction justice for the innocent accused (the so-called "Antiterrorism And Effective Death Penalty Act" of 1996 - almost completely overturns our right of Habeas Corpus). It s interesting to note that each increase in the number of police deployed is soon followed by an increase in the crime rate, which is used to justify another increase in police deployment, which is then again followed by an increase in crime.
The less-credulous among us can see the pattern for what it is: the gestapo grow stronger with increasing numbers of recruits invariably drawn from the ranks of the terminally-unemployable and the violently-sociopathic to believe that a crimewave of epic proportions is underway, allowing the gestapo to demand that their numbers be increased, their weapons be upgraded, and their budget expand exponentially. Once the increase is achieved, further solemn pronouncements by gestapo spokesthugs inform us that the crimewave has increased and more police, more money and bigger & more deadly toys are required if civilization is to survive.
I am reminded of the doctors' strike L.A., some years back - during which the mortality rate actually dropped for the duration of the strike. More crime does not lead to more police; more police lead to more crime - at least, this is the case if the gestapo's own statistics are to be believed.
The annual total cash value of the U.S. cocaine trade tops $40 billion, and the U.S. market share of global cocaine consumption is at least 70% - it is obvious that the politico-korporate power structure is up to its armpits in the cocaine trade; such massive quantities could never cross the border otherwise. The reports, in recent years, of U.S. covert intelligence involvement in importation. and distribution - not to mention police involvement in smuggling and distributing (or prison guards' involvement in smuggling drugs into prison, here in california, as recently confirmed, albeit grudgingly, by the media) are plainly not some paranoid delusion; any smuggler or 'protected' street-level dealer can confirm "our" government's interest in introducing controlled amounts of expensive, addictive, debilitating substances into a slave economy, as yet another tool of socioeconomic control in the favelas of postindustrial plantation amerika.
During the 1980's, this same elite invested at least $4.5 billion (in addition to untold "black budget" amounts) to "foster democracy" in Central and South america, bolstering fascist tin-pot dictatorships and encouraging inhumane acts of brutality against even the most inoffensive opponents, such as nuns and charitable volunteers ... and the weapons sent to the fascist thugs in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and elsewhere exited this country from the same covert airbase at Mena, Arkansas, that was used to import the cocaine that flooded the favelas, providing "makework" for ever-expanding domestic death squads.
According to several sources - journalist Mark Koernke among them - millions of dollars are being invested in street gangs by "our" government, in a program to deploy these 'gangstas' to areas away from their home cities for use as stormtroopers to raid private homes and conduct searches for firearms, once gun-control legislation has been emplaced to disarm us. When last I checked, gangs in New York and Chicago were in negotiation, and those in LA had already signed on. Gangs in LA have a long standing agreement with the LAPD, or should I say, the leadership of these gangs; those in the 'upper echelons' of the gangs are never made to do serious jail or prison time, and are able to get charges against favored lieutenants dismissed or decreased in severity, as per the terms of the deal. What do the gangs give the LAPD in return? They don't enter those neighborhoods declared "off limits", and discourage any of their underlings who desire to do so. As long as Brentwood and Beverly hills are not soiled by the presence of Crips or Bloods, the LAPD leaves the leadership & their inner circles intact & allow them to victimize the poor neighborhoods.
This is not surprising, considered in tandem with the LAPD's handling of actual criminals in general, such as the massive corps of snitches that help the District Attorney's office "win" cases. Case in point, Steven Jesse Cisneros: mentally disordered sex offender and darling of LA's prosecutors. At least ten women suffered brutal sexual assaults by Cisneros, but each time the police would pick him up, he'd immediately cut another deal to "provide information - which he has since admitted was false - to help prosecutors obtain convictions. Needless to say, up until his final arrest in 1989, Cisneros would buy release again and again - but no such release is available for those falsely convicted on the strength of his perjured testimony. Nor do I exaggerate when I describe these 'informants' in terms of an army; no less a source than the Los Angeles Times has determined that, at any given time, Los Angeles' county jails hold between 50 and 100 of them, spread throughout the system, 'developing cases' in which they will later claim firsthand knowledge or claim to have heard a jailhouse confession.
This is how "LA's Finest" - and other city gestapos - "protect and serve". Given the behavior of the LAPD, it comes as no surprise that Kalif. Senator Dianne Feinstein has been pushing legislation - SB580 - mandating a national identity card, and laws requiring every american to carry an implanted microchip containing voiceprints, retinal scans, and digitized DNA "fingerprints", with mandatory federal prison terms for ID tampering - she says that thes measures would be perfect for tracking down future gun ownership violations. This would dovetail well with senator Alan Simpson's SB269, which could require a federal computer database on all americans, as a "counterterrorism" measure.
The elite are obsessed with "anticrime" measures to protect their own privilege - would that they were equally obsessed with guaranteeing justice, not easy convictions and extensive prison sentences, for the slaves.
The crime rate most assuredly has increased; but the criminals - the united states kleptocracy, their gestapo, and the various favored lackeys thereof - will never be made to face the draconian laws they impose upon the slaves.
This is why the Gallardo family, of Dinuba, Calif., has to fight like hell to receive a paltry $12.5 million settlement after the local SWAT team kicked in their door without probable cause, and murdered 64 Tear old Ramon Gallardo in cold blood, planting a knife on the scene in an attempt to "justify" the murder; but a friend of Bill Clinton's can get a congressional law - the "Flatow Amendment" - passed, awarding him $247 million in damages against the government of Iran because that government gives financial aid to the Palestinian freedom fighters who bombed a bus in Jerusalem, inadvertently killing tourist Alicia Flatow. I have yet to hear that the families of american nuns raped and murdered by CIA backed terrorists in Central America are being favored in this way; granted, forces more powerful than Ol' Arkansas Bill have decreed that Mr. Flatow must jump through a few hoops in order to get his money…but such is the burden of the wealthy and well-connected.
Terrorism is terrorism, whether the perpetrators are Palestinian freedom fighters or the cowardly jackbooted thugs of the amerikan gestapo; but if the gestapo kills the father of a poor family, the worst that will happen to him is that other poor taxpayers will be extorted to pay a paltry sum to quiet the family (and it should be noted that the Dinuba police are challenging the settlement in court, claiming that one of Ramon Gallardo's sons has "gang connections" - surely justification for gunning down an unarmed 64 year old man in his underwear, while his family watches).
It is not a question of race, it is a question of class; and removing firearms from the powerless has nothing to do with making us safer - it has everything to do with giving the gestapo free reign, allowing them to vent their perversions with impunity, without concern that we might just find the backbone to fight back. To speak of the problem in racial terms is horribly mistaken, and serves the elite and their thugs: it is only a "racial" question if one considers the poor, regardless of color, a race unto themselves - which the elite obviously do.
If we assume a very conservative estimate of 5% wrongful convictions, nationwide, then the united states currently incarcerates at least 75,000 innocent people, 8,000 of them in kalifornia alone. The number of wrongfully-convicted and wrongfully-condemned prisoners released from Illinois' death row now exceeds the number that state has executed since reinstatement of the death penalty there. And yet, the network propagandists drum it into our heads, night after night, that the gestapo are our last, desparate hope for safety, regardless what wrongs they may commit, "…for Brutus is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorabl men" (Shakespeare, in op. Cit.); "TV - it gives so much, asks so little; it thinks for you. It is your friend." (character, "EERIE INDIANA: The Other Dimension"; FOX TV network, broadcast 7 Feb. 1998).
Nowhere in the basic document of the constitution, nor in the articles of confederation (still legally binding - the constitution is a derivative document), is there any guarantee of "equality", nor even any mention of that concept. What does appear is the clear legal distinction between "citizens" (the wealthy classes) and the rest of us, the "paupers and vagabonds" - in short, the slaves.
QUOD LICET JOVI, NON LICET BOVI
(what is permitted for gods, is not permitted for oxen
"Limitations ... can be preserved in practice in no other way than through the courts ... without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing."
-Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist #78
"CORRECTIONS-A Fortune 500 industry…take advantage of the sales opportunities this burgeoning industry has to offer…as the industry grows, the billions of dollars spent on daily operations expenditures and construction translates into extensive sales opportunities…[1]
"MAKE THE CONNECTION... enjoy the surge! Corrections is facing an explosion…why shouldn't your company profit from this incredible growth?" [2]
-American Correctional Association
[1] Annual Conference Brochure, &
[2] 1994 Promotional Brochure
Never will you hear the propaganda outlets tell the truth about the police state; nor will the true terrorists, protected by their badges and a state-issued license to kill, ever be identified as such.
A free people police themselves; only slaves are policed by armed thugs, let alone armed thugs who hide behind badges and count upon the active, participatory sanction of kangaroo courts.
Make no mistake: regardless of race, you are not free. The gestapo and their tame courts do not exist to protect you, but rather to protect the privileges of the self-designated 'master caste' from you. Unless you are a member of the privileged gene pool, all members of the system - the gestapo, the judges, and the state controlled attorneys - consider you a slave; slaves have no rights that the masters can be required to respect. Courtrooms are not venues of justice, but battlefields in a class war, and law is a weapon whose sole purpose is to spill blood, inflict pain, and frighten the slaves into submission.
Keeping your head down and your shoulders bent in abject submission - being a "good little slave" - won't protect you; it's far less expensive to arrest and convict you, and send you to prison, where you can perform your job for the same rate of pay as workers in the Third World sweatshops, than to let you earn a living wage outside of these walls. You cannot sit idly by, watching the gestapo drag your neighbors away, and honestly believe that it can't happen to you; sooner or later, master's thugs will, I guarantee, come for you.
Just keep telling yourself that I'm a raving paranoid.
How lucky do you feel?
9 June 1999 Wayne Henderson