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Thursday, December 14, 2017

SALLY MORRIS:  THE GREATEST DANGER TO AMERICAN CIVILIANS?

America is descending into a dangerous police state.  We see again and again incompetent or malicious police practices and outrageous injuries to innocent citizens.  In the recent past we have seen the Philando Castille case - where a man driving a car was pulled over and in the interest of being open and honest with the police informed them that he had a gun and it was properly registered.  He was shot without cause as he tried to provide his registration information.  The cop who shot him got off scot free.  Never mind the value of his victim’s life or the trauma to the passengers.  The police officer who killed Castille was tried and acquitted.  Because Castille was black there were protests - put down with force, but at least heard.


More recently we have had another case, also in Minnesota, as was the Castille case, of an Australian woman in Minneapolis to be married to an American citizen.  She thought she heard the sounds of someone being attacked in her alley and called 911.  When the police arrived she went out to their car to tell them what she heard.  She was unarmed.  She was shot in the abdomen right through the car door by Officer Mohammed Noor, the passenger-seat cop, without a word of warning uttered.  It was a shock even to his partner.  One possibility is that the cop firing the shot - an immigrant, as it happens, from Somalia - might have been involved in illicit activity and didn’t want to pursue the investigation the lady called about.  Instead the case was about an innocent woman who died of her injury at the hands of this “public servant”.  It is pertinent that Noor had complaints already on his record for harrassing civilians.


Now we have another case, this time from Mesa, Arizona.  A travelling pest control man showing off his professional equipment - a pellet gun - to other guests in a motel, was seen pointing what looked like a gun out of a window.  In the wake of the (completely botched) incident in Las Vegas, no one could be faulted for panicking when they saw a gun pointing out of a window.  But the handling of this case might be worse than the two above-cited incidents.  Without recounting the entire traumatic and tragic event, let it suffice that police brutally murdered this innocent man without any apparent cause whatsoever.  If you are not yet familiar with the grotesque episode, please look at this link:  http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/454504/police-murder-daniel-shaver


The sorry end of this is that the officer was tried - and again acquitted by a jury.  When you see this video it is nearly impossible to imagine that a jury could find such a murderer not guilty.  There was no provocation for any use of force on this victim.  This was quite clearly a brutal demonstration of cruelty and bullying and the confidence that he would be allowed to get away with murder, which is something he seemed to enjoy. Unfortunately this video was withheld from the jury!  As one astute observer queried, what are these body cam’s for if not to be used as evidence of guilt or innocence?   Not only that, but he stated that he would do the same thing all over again.  


Why does this keep happening over and over again?  We are arriving at a point where our police look more and more like ISIS.  We are now becoming afraid of the people we appoint to protect us and protect our rights.  


Conservatives are part of the problem - not all conservatives, but a large majority of them - because they just pick sides.  The people who get shot are the “bad guys” - they are not “one of us”, they are probably minority-race people who are “trouble makers”.  The cops are the “good guys”.  They always wear white hats, save the damsel in distress, stop the bad guy with the handlebar mustache and protect us from the gangs, right?  But no.  They have become the “gang”.  When the victim IS a minority, particularly if he is black and has the allegiance of organizations which demonstrate, at least he is going to be a cause.  When the victim is white, like the Minneapolis woman, or the pest control guy, no one cares except their families.  They are NOT a cause.


What we must learn from these incidents is that our police are horribly badly trained.  Today they attend universities.  UND has a “criminal justice” program.  They used to just go to police academies.  Maybe that was better.  Maybe without a university degree they retained some humility.  Whatever the case, universities are long on training police on how to intimidate, manipulate and apply force to civilian citizens; they are coming up empty on the basis for everything - the Constitution and Bill of Rights - and the attitude they must demonstrate that they are SERVING the public, not CONTROLLING the public.  True, there are times when force and intimidation are appropriate to protect the public.  It should never come to killing an unarmed person - EVER.  But when police respond to a call they should first be prepared to protect the public, but also first be prepared not to injure anyone who does not pose a threat to the public.  There is virtually no way that the woman who thought she heard someone being attacked in the alley could have been mistaken for a perpetrator.  No way.  She came out in her pajamas and had no weapon.  There is no way that the pest control man could have been perceived in any way to have been a threat to the police or anyone else.  He was crawling on his knees, no weapon in sight, on his stomach.  Any police officer who would have shot either of these people, or Philando Castille, for that matter, could not have been behaving rationally.  If they were frightened of these people they need to get into another line of work that does not involve guns.


And that these people are getting off and juries are acquitting them tells us something else - it tells us that the far left has done a great job of un-educating us.  People who sit on juries reflect the general population.  What they are showing us is that almost no one is left in this country who has a clue as to what it is all about.  A DA should put this question in his jury selection routine:  “Does a person have any rights to being presumed innocent?  Does this apply to the victim of police violence as well?” or “Do you believe that the police are there to protect you?”  Because if the prospective juror believes that the presumption of innocence is only applied to the guy on trial for murder, or that the police are there to protect us, they need to be dismissed out of hand.


The bottom line is this:  unless we want a genuine police state (which is developing here now) where the citizen has no rights and no expectation of surviving an encounter with a police officer, we had better make citizens’ rights the first and foremost part of any police training.  I know  that UND puts our Constitution last in its Criminal Justice program - stuck in at the last minute for show, but after all the other techniques of intimidation have been absorbed by the trainees, “Ethics and Police Procedure” being a last-ditch “capstone” senior topic.  


Then we have to look to our jury pool.  The general population needs to be first trained in our rights, strange as this may sound.  It is more important than learning to read.  Parents are neglecting this as they motor off to their two income jobs and drop the kids off at daycare or public school.  It is their fault ultimately - the neglectful parents.  Who else is there to see to the kids’ instruction ultimately?  Who should monitor the classroom?  Who should discuss events and news with their children?  Parents.  With or without two jobs.  Their primary job is raising their kids to be free Americans.  It is high time we get going on this remedial parenting work.  For if police officers are convicted when they murder innocent people word will eventually get around that America, our hallways, our backyards, our front lawns, are not killing fields and cops are not free to shoot us because they feel like it or they are frightened.  They should be frightened, but they should fear their day in court more than they fear a man on his stomach begging for his life.  As of right now, we can only consider police a danger.


It is strange, too, that no other police departments around the country are condemning this.  We use as a reason for mistrusting Muslims that they never condemn terror attacks.  We should expect law enforcement throughout the nation to take a stand that this is improper and unacceptable behavior.  Instead they circle the wagons or just remain silent.


The problem with this is that soon we will become a completely “old west” vigilante society that understands we must take matters into our own hands because the last thing we want to do is involve the police.  In cities with rampant police corruption this is already the case.  I could name one for example.  Memphis.  That is the downside, for the information of the police - they will not be called even as a last resort.  Is this what we want?  Because it is guaranteed that the more of these instances of police brutality we see the more we will realize that we do not want to lose control to the police in any event.  This is something to think about when devising police training.  The eventual day when the police are seen as the enemy and not summoned in the first place and if they arrive find they are targets of citizens who have become conditioned to being “frightened” of police.  It goes both ways.  Police pull out the excuse that they are conditioned to fear people, but people are becoming conditioned to fear police.  Could be that we are brewing up a lot more trouble than a few court cases.  Knowing what you know now, if you heard something in the night would you rather load your own gun and check it out or would you take a chance on police?  And that is the point.  


 

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