Tag: police brutality

Categories
crime and punishment tax policy

Overkill America

The death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Islander, by police chokehold, not only sparked in me the usual combination of sadness, anger and frustration — there was an additional element: would this do it?

Would the nation’s shock, incredulity, indignation amount to anything?

Lots of questions. But one thing not being focused on in the standard reports was noted by Scott Shackford of Reason. It’s not merely a question of why the bust went so violent. Why, he asks, a bust at all? “We should be concerned that the reason why the police swarmed Garner in the first place is getting lost. He allegedly possessed ‘untaxed cigarettes.’ That is it.”

A tax matter.

The police are arresting people — and going into overkill mode in the process — on tax matters.

Couldn’t this such issues be handled by mere citation, followed by a court summons? With an arrest the last resort?

Why go all violent when violence is not really in order?

But maybe it’s not just about the taxes. Or “contraband.” Maybe this is also about “drugs.” (Yes, tobacco’s a drug.) We’ve long had a “War on Drugs” in this country. It has not gone well. As I suggested last week (as well as yesterday, on Townhall), the effects have not only been wide and deep, but inevitable.

War is like that. Expect the “unintended consequences.”

Scott Shackford suggests that New York lower the city’s high sin taxes on cigarettes.

But maybe the whole mindset of the modern state needs changing. Big things, like murder, slavery, etc., those are worth fighting about. Let’s not go to war over the little things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

A Bill for Services Rendered

The satirical dystopian film Brazil does not — in case you haven’t seen it — have much of anything to do with Brazil, the country. But it does have something to do with Deming, New Mexico.

This week’s War on Drugs horror story takes place in Deming, and echoes the “comic,” gallows-humor motif of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 classic. In the movie, armed minions of the futuristic superstate raid your house, kill you, bag you, tag you, and then bill your family for the “service.”

In Deming, an officer stopped a motorist for rolling through a Stop sign. For some reason (so far not explained) the motorist was asked to exit his car, and, the officer claims, exhibited “clenched buttocks” — as if hiding drugs in his rectum.

So, the story goes (and it’s a frighteningly long story), a warrant to search the motorist was obtained, and he was taken to a hospital where multiple anal probes, an x-ray, two enemas in front of multiple witnesses, and a colonoscopy yielded no evidence of drugs.

And then the suspect — “patient,” in medical terms, though the man consented to no services — was billed. You know, for the x-ray, the colonoscopy, the enemas, and the anal probes.

Of course the victim is suing, and if the reportage is correct, that all this really happened, I hope he wins millions. The behavior of the police, the judge, and some medical personnel is inexcusable.

But it fits right in with the dystopian future America has made for itself. The War on Drugs is bringing us — has brought us? — tyranny we’d expect only from the darkest of black comedies.

Yes, it can happen here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

Bottled-Water Buyers: Threat or Menace?

Gone are the happy-go-lucky days of buying water and then going home as though it were no big deal.

Elizabeth Daly learned the hard way. As she and her roommates walked toward her car in a dark parking lot, she was accosted by a crew of Virginia state Alcohol Beverage Control agents. One jumped on her car, another drew a gun. They thought she was lugging beer instead of LaCroix sparkling water.

You must be 21 to buy alcohol in Virginia. Daly is 20.

“They were showing unidentifiable badges . . . but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” she recalled. “I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car. . . . They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were . . . terrified.”

As they made their escape, the women dialed 911.

The ABC agents charged Daly with counts of assaulting and eluding enforcement officers. (“Assault” because the car brushed past agents as Daly drove away.) She had to spend a night in jail.

We hear so many stories of government-empowered bullies using the feeblest of excuses to terrify luckless innocents. Renegade T-shirt-wearers, estranged husbands of financial-aid scofflaws, barbers . . . and now water-buyers?

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says the ABC agents should be fired.

Yes. But when “law enforcement” thugs blatantly violate the rights of innocent persons they should be more than fired. They should be prosecuted. Let’s also shut down agencies that consistently threaten innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

We Protest

You don’t need to commit violence to conduct a large, effective public protest of perceived injustice. The many Tea Party demonstrations against our federal government’s latest socialist excesses prove that.

But what if violent and nonviolent protests are equated in the minds of peace keepers?

In Reason magazine, journalist Radly Balko reports on several disturbing examples of crackdowns of persons assembled in a public place. In one incident, motivated by the occasionally violent protests of last fall’s G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, police ordered students gathered in public to disperse forthwith, though they had broken no laws. Anyone who moved too slowly was subject to arrest. Apparently, a few violent protesters hit town for the summit, but they were a distinct minority.

Balko isn’t impressed by a university official’s claim that the gatherings had to be busted up because of the “potential” for trouble. That’s a dangerous standard to apply to peaceful assembly that is not only constitutionally protected but also an important bulwark against tyranny.

Police can make honest mistakes like anybody else, especially when in charged and confusing situations. No doubt there’s sometimes a fuzzy line between a peaceful if rowdy protest and one that’s turning violent. But Balko suggests that police are increasingly harassing and handcuffing people only because they are peacefully dissenting.

Not only is that not right, it demands protest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.