Remember the bizarre case of Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanging from a tree in Kentucky with the letters FED scrawled on his chest?  Remember the media frenzy about crazy Southerners and their hatred of the federal government?  At the time, I cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying there could be any number of explanations.  I also agreed with Andrew Sullivan that suicide was unlikely given what we then knew about Sparkman.

Well, it turns out, the unlikely explanation was the right one.

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

Bill Sparkman, 51, was found strangled Sept. 12 with a rope around his neck near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Authorities said his wrists were loosely bound, his glasses were taped to his head and he was gagged.

Kentucky State Police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said an analysis found that “fed” was written “from the bottom up.” He was touching the ground, and to survive “all Mr. Sparkman had to do at any time was stand up,” she said. Authorities said Sparkman was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of his death. His clothes were found in the bed of his nearby pickup. “Our investigation, based on evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide,” Rudzinski said.

[...]

Authorities said Sparkman alone manipulated the suicide scene, which was so elaborate that a man who discovered the body was convinced Sparkman was murdered.

Rudzinski said Sparkman “told a credible witness that he planned to commit suicide and provided details on how and when.” Authorities wouldn’t say who Sparkman told of his plan, but said Sparkman talked about it a week before his suicide and the person did not take him seriously. He told the person he believed his lymphoma, which he had previously been treated for, had recurred, police said.

Sparkman also had recently taken out two accidental life insurance policies totaling $600,000 that would not pay out for suicide, authorities said. One policy was taken out in late 2008; the other in May. If Sparkman had been killed on the job, his family also would have been be eligible for up to $10,000 in death gratuity payments from the government.

Michelle Malkin wonders, “When will the Left retract the Kentucky census worker case smear against conservatives?”  Stacy McCain piles on:

Bill Sparkman committed suicide. So much for “Southern populist terrorism” — and the credibility of Andrew Sullivan. So much for “Send the body to Glenn Beck” — and the credibility of Rick Ungar.

But at least some on the Left are quickly getting the word out.  Zachary Roth at TPM writes, “Sparkman deliberately played on rural Kentucky’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment to create the impression that he had been murdered because of his job.”  TLOOG’s Mark Thompson adds,

After all the speculation that the death of a census worker was fueled by anti-government extremismand how the Tea Party movement (whatever its faults) was a vanguard for a violent anti-government uprising, it now appears that the killing was a suicide made to look like a homicide so the man’s family could collect a substantial life insurance payout.  This is a saddening portrait of a deeply troubled man in deeply troubled times. It is not, however, evidence that anti-government activists are uniquely violent.

When information is scant, we tend to fill in the gaps based on our prejudices about how the world works.  On the whole, it’s a completely reasonable thing to do.  Indeed, the nature of wisdom is the ability to extrapolate from what we’ve learned.   But sometimes jumping to conclusions bites you in the ass.

Story links: memeorandum

The Supreme Court hears oral argument today in Pottawattamie County v McGee, wherein they will have to decide if prosecutors have immunity from lawsuits even if they frame someone for murder.

On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” They are backed by the Obama administration, 28 states and every major prosecutors organization in the country.

On the other side are two black men — Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee — men who served 25 years in prison before evidence long hidden in police files resulted in them being freed.

[...]

The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

Hard though it might be to believe, this is actually a difficult decision. The balance between protecting diligent prosecutors from suit and protecting defendants from the bad apples is not a simple thing. The good news is that a case like this is amenable to a bright-line rule against intentional misconduct. The bad news is, the Supreme Court has shown a consistent disdain for bright-line rules for some time.

Heretical Ideas previewed this case last month.

Radley Balko argues we are now seeing the fruition of Ayn Rand’s fear that government would eventually declare “so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws” in order to extend its power.

Part of the drop can of course be explained by mass incarceration—America leads the world in the percentage of its population behind bars. Putting one in every 100 citizens in jail causes its own problems, and there’s plenty of debate over just how much that incarceration has contributed to the fall in violent crime. But there’s no question that we’ve put lots of people in prison over the last 20 years, the crime rate has fallen, and part of the public likely believes (with some justification) that there’s a link betweent the two.

But there’s something else going on too, picked up in the blogosphere last week by George Washington University political science Professor John Sides. According to Gallup, since 2002 the percentage of the American public who think violent crime is on the rise has been increasing, even as actual violent crime rates continue to fall. Sides notes that from 1989 to 2001, perception and reality somewhat went hand in hand. But 2002 to 2003 saw a 19 percent leap in public perceptions that violent crime was on the uptick, and the figure has been going up in the years since—to 74 percent today. What’s going on?

[...]

Fear makes for easy politics. It both wins votes and primes us to give government more power at the expense of personal liberty. And that’s certainly true when it comes to crime. With the possible exception of an incumbent mayor, politicians only benefit from exaggerating the threat of violent crime. Senators, Congressmen, and even governors are rarely held responsible when the crime rate goes up. But they do win votes by proposing new powers for police and prosecutors to bring it down.

The result has been a one-way ratchet effect on crime policy. We’re perpetually expanding police and prosecutorial power, a process only occasionally slowed by the courts. Congress and state legislatures rarely take old criminal statutes off the books, but they’re always adding new ones. A 2008 report from the Heritage Foundation estimates that at the federal level alone, Congress has been adding about 55 new crimes to the federal criminal code each year since the 1980s. There are now about 4,500 separate federal crimes. And that doesn’t include federal regulations, which are increasingly being enforced with criminal, not administrative, penalties. It also doesn’t include the increasing leeway with which prosecutors can enforce broadly written federal conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering laws. And this is before we even get to the states’ criminal codes.

This is a longstanding problem.  See, for example, my March 2005 post “There Should be a Law Against All these Felonies.”  Heck, as Alex Knapp noted last year, one third of Atlana police academy graduates are criminals.

Harvey Silvergate also has a newish book out arguing that the average American commits three felonies a day, completely by accident.  I would swear that I’ve written about the book but can find no record of such in my archives.

Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house.

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

But lets not be hasty, these brave men in blue are putting their lives on the line after all.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

Well obviously Albert Beebe was going 58 miles per hour in his drive way because why would the police lie. Oh…wait, they aren’t sure where all the traffic fine money went, hmmmm….

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

I’m sure it was totally justified and in line with departmental policies. After all, who knows Payne might have had a pencil or paper clip on him. Those are danerous weapons you know.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

What a shock the prosecutor backs up the cop who discharges his gun at an unarmed person in a crowded room and also wounds a fellow cop in the process. Police professionalism at its highest.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

So lets do a quick recap.

• The police shot an unarmed man from behind when in scuffle with 6 other police officers.
• No charges will be brought against the police officer from the local prosecutor.
• Nobody knows where the money from the various speeding tickets went.
• The police were writing tickets outside their jurisdiction.
• City Hall is shut down.

Anyone doubt that the cops saw this as their own private racket and were using the tickets to line their own pockets? And what is up with the police officers in Jericho? Are they all totally out of shape morons that couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? Six of them are scuffling with one man and they can’t subdue him and the seventh feels he has the justification to shoot the “perp”?

Bob Dylan was on the pavement, thinking about the government. And they arrested him.

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday. “I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Woolley said.

The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses. The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name. According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

“What is your name, sir?” the officer asked.

“Bob Dylan,” Dylan said.

“OK, what are you doing here?” the officer asked.

“I’m on tour,” the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” said that he didn’t have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night’s show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation. “He couldn’t have been any nicer to them,” Woolley added.

Alex Knapp is less than pleased:

That’s just utterly disgusting to me. A 68 year old man out for a walk shouldn’t have to offer his ID to the police. Was he committing a crime? No. Was he suspected of committing a crime? No. Were there any indications that a crime was going to be committed? No. He was just “suspiciously” enjoying public rights-of-way.

Look, someone calls in suspicious behavior and I understand the need to check it out. But an old man walking down the street isn’t “suspicious.” And there’s no law that says that a person has to have ID with them at all times, so I fail to see what justified the need to have two police officers detain somebody until someone could vouch for their identity.

I concur completely.  If it were, say, 2 a.m., Dylan’s actions might have been a bit more suspicious.  But late afternoon in broad daylight?

The Supreme Court has been very deferential to police on these matters.  In the landmark 1968 case Terry v. Ohio, the court held that “Where a reasonably prudent officer is warranted in the circumstances of a given case in believing that his safety or that of others is endangered, he may make a reasonable search for weapons of the person believed by him to be armed and dangerous regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest that individual for crime or the absolute certainty that the individual is armed.” The so-called Terry Stop doctrine has expanded over the years to the point where, arguably, Americans have little in the way of 4th Amendment rights outside their homes because policemen simply claim that they feared for their safety and judges are, not surprisingly, loathe to overrule them.

The most recent case of which I’m aware that applies here is Hiibel v. 6th Judicial Circuit of Nevada (2004), in which the Supremes upheld the arrest of a man for “refusing to identify himself to a police officer during an investigative stop involving a reported assault” in violation of Nevada’s “stop and identify” statute.   The Court did not rule on whether an ID requirement would be unreasonable; Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion did, however, note that “the Nevada Supreme Court has interpreted the instant statute to require only that a suspect disclose his name. It apparently does not require him to produce a driver’s license or any other document. If he chooses either to state his name or communicate it to the officer by other means, the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs.”

UPDATE: Several other accounts of the story make it clear that Dylan’s activities were indeed more suspicious than taking a walk in the broad daylight.   It was pouring rain and he had no umbrella or raincoat.  And he had wandered off of the sidewalks and was peering into the windows of a house that was for sale.  ABC’s Chris Francescani speculates that Dylan may have been looking for the house where Bruce Springsteen wrote “Born to Run;” it was only two blocks away.

Two other points.  Several commenters object to my use of the term “arrested” since Dylan apparently was not slapped in irons.  But when the police detain you and you are not free to leave, you are under arrest.  The Supreme Court says so.

That said, Tom Maguire makes a fair point:

Finally, who says that the police are only responsible for possible criminal activity?  Dylan may have been a confused old man who was having a mild stroke, or had slipped in the rain and hit his head, or was a hit-and-run victim – the non-criminal possibilities are endless.

But a brief conversation should have been able to ascertain that Dylan was not a danger to himself or others. Once that’s established, the police have done their jobs and should go.  It really doesn’t matter whether he’s really Bob Dylan at that point.

ss

The theme of Wednesday’s edition of OTB Radio was “Crazy Politics.” Spurred by the bitterness of recent discussion threads on seemingly innocuous topics, Dave Schuler and I wondered where it was all headed.

Well, we got a pretty good clue last night.

Six people were arrested last night in St. Louis  after one of the many town hall meetings going on between Members of Congress and their constituents on the attempt to reform our health care delivery and payment system.

St. Louis County police on Thursday arrested at least four people, including a Post-Dispatch reporter, outside a town hall forum held by Rep. Russ Carnahan, said Dawn Majors, a Post-Dispatch photojournalist who witnessed everything unfold.

It happened about 8:30 p.m at Bernard Middle School on Forder Road in Mehlville. Carnahan, D-St. Louis, had drawn a rowdy crowd that overflowed the school gym and left dozens of people outside. Many of those who showed up at what had been billed as a forum on aging carried signs about the national health-care debate.

Dozens of people were kept out because there was no room for them inside. Members of the local Tea Party Coalition, a movement that has emerged to counter President Barack Obama’s policies, had urged their members to attend, which in turn spurred Democrats to establish a strong presence.

The event was winding down when Majors said she saw a police squad car turn its lights on and went to see what was happening. As she approached it, her eyes started to burn. “And that’s when I realized I’d walked through remnants of pepper spray,” Majors said. She turned her attention to taking pictures. She said she saw a woman in handcuffs who was complaining about the pain of the spray and asking to wash her face and eyes. The response of the officer who was arresting her was, “I warned you,” Majors said.

[...]

Two of those were arrested on suspicion of assault, one of resisting arrest and three on suspicion of committing peace disturbances. Carnahan was gone when the ruckus started.

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started. “It just seems there’s no freedom of speech without being attacked,” he said.

Jim Hoft reports on the incident firsthand and claims that Carnahan’s folks were trying to sneak a thousand “union thugs” from the SEIU into the meeting as a counterweight to the Tea Party Taxpayers.  Of course, this meeting wasn’t supposed to be an open forum about health care but rather a meeting with seniors; thus, neither the protestors nor the union activists should have been there.

Meanwhile, in Florida,

Bitter divisions over reforming America’s health care system exploded Thursday night in Tampa amid cat calls, jeering and shoving at a town hall meeting.

“Tyranny! Tyranny! Tyranny!” dozens of people shouted as U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, struggled to talk about health insurance reforms under consideration in Washington, D.C.

“There is more consensus than there is disagreement when you get right down to it,” Castor offered, immediately drowned out by groans and boos.

She pressed on, mostly unheard among screams from the audience estimated by Tampa police to be about 1,500.

“Tell the truth! Tell the truth!” “Read the bill!” “Forty-million illegals! Forty million illegals!”

[...]

Thursday’s forum/near riot was sponsored by state Rep. Betty Reed, D-Tampa, and the Service Employees International Union, who apparently had hoped to hold something of a pep rally for President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposal.

Instead, hundreds of vocal critics turned out, many of them saying they had been spurred on through the Tampa 912 activist group promoted by conservative radio and television personality Glenn Beck. Others had received e-mails from the Hillsborough Republican Party that urged people to speak out against the plan and offered talking points.

An overflow crowd of critics was left waiting outside the building — and in some cases pounding on the meeting room doors — while health care reform activists complained that Democrats and union members were guided into the room for prime seats. Tampa police officers maintained control the entire night.

Let’s just say that this is no way for a civilized Republic to conduct its business.  And there’s no small irony that the protestor in St. Louis is carrying a sign mocking the fact that Paul Krugman and others have dubbed these people an angry mob.  What the hell else would you call them?

On the merits, I share my colleague Alex Knapp’s sense that “On the one hand, the system we have sucks and there’s really no defending it. On the other hand, most of the reform proposals also suck.”  I come down on the side that the crappy status quo is better than the crappy alternatives and Alex sides with the crappy alternatives to the crappy status quo.

Regardless, however, we should be able to agree that shutting down public debate on the matter in the guise of “being heard” is not only unproductive but un-American.

Justin Barrett, a 36-year-old soon-to-be-former Boston cop and Massachussetts Army National Guard captain, is making the headlines with a letter he circulated describing, a bit too enthusiastically, his views on a Boston Globe column on the Henry Louis Gates incident.

Alan Colmes has the background:

His palpable anger appears to be directed at Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham, to whom he refers as “a hot little bird with minimal experiences in a harsh field.”

Barrett refers to himself as “a former English teacher, writer, current police officer, father, husband and military veteran.”  He says he’s “embarrassed I paid the 1.50 for the paper” which he calls “sub standard,” “one sided” and “fourth grade level.”  About Gates he writes, “He is a suspect and will always be a suspect.”

The “former English teacher” goes on to state, “if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”  Barrett continues to criticize the Globe by mockingly asking, “I might as well ax you the question, ‘Is this your first test at reporting’?”

Attacking Gates’ credentials, Barrett asks, “[He's] famous for what?…What has he done for me and my family?  What has he done for the law enforcement community or military veterans or to secure freedoms and our borders in this country?  What has he done to help limit and reduce my income tax?”

The author of the article to which Barrett objects is told she is a failure who deserves to be serving him coffee and donuts.   The officer concludes by screeching, “Go ahead, ax me what I think? Gates is a goddamned fool, and you the article writer simply a poor follower and maybe worse, a poor writer. Your article title should read ‘CONDUCT UNBECOMING A JUNGLE MONKEY-BACK TO ONE’S ROOTS’.”  JB

The National Guard has already suspended Barrett,

The Massachusetts National Guard does not and will not tolerate racially insensitive language.

The language contained in the e-mail violates policies of the Massachusetts National Guard and what it stands for in its commitment to uphold and protect the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Constitution of the United States.

Capt. Justin Barrett’s actions and opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the Massachusetts National Guard. Capt. Barrett’s opinions are in complete violation of Army and National Guard Values and will not be tolerated.

Not surprisingly, he’s been suspended from the BPD as well and the mayor says he’ll be gone permanently.

Barrett, a 36-year-old who has been on the job for two years, was stripped of his gun and badge yesterday and faces a termination hearing in the next week, said police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll. He has no previous disciplinary record, she said.  “Yesterday afternoon, Commissioner Davis was made aware that Officer Barrett was the author of correspondence which included racially charged language,” she said. “At that time, Commissioner Davis immediately stripped Officer Barrett of his gun and badge, and at this time we will be moving forward with the hearing process.”

[...][Mayor Thomas M.] Menino said he was angry when Davis informed him of the incident Tuesday night. Of the suspended officer, Menino said he told Davis: “He has no place in this department and we have to take his badge away. That stuff doesn’t belong in our city and we’re not going to tolerate it.” The mayor stressed that the incident was about one officer, and ”one officer doesn’t make up a police department.”

Menino, speaking to the Globe before an evening event in the South End, said he hadn’t seen the e-mail Menino said while the officer is not officially terminated, he might as well be “He’s gone, g-o-n-e. I don’t care, it’s like cancer, you don’t keep those cancers around.”

Barrett says it’s all a big misunderstanding.

Except, apparently, members of the public with whom he has disagreements.

In response to a commenter’s assertion in my Police Taser Deaf, Retarded Man post that “officers are killed in the line of duty are the time,” Jim Henley retorts, “Define line of duty and all the time.”

Kelley Vlahos does just that in a piece for The American Conservative.  The numbers are surprising:

According to federal statistics, the number of police officers shot and killed in the line of duty is at an historic low. The nationwide number actually dropped 40 percent — from 68 in 2007 to 41 in 2008. The numbers have been on a downward trajectory for years, and Tasers are in part, credited. But there are other reasons, too, like the fact that overall violent crime is down, police wear super high-tech bullet-proof vests today and some 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated and off the streets.

Meanwhile, the stats on the number of American citizens police have killed in that timespan are much more elusive. According to this 2007 report (unverified), 9,500 people were killed by cops from 1980 through 2003, an average of 380 a year, one a day. These recent DOJ numbers jibe, with 1,540 killed by police from 2003-2006. Amnesty International says 351 people have died from police Tasers since 2001.

Now, frankly, if those 351 people were all violent criminals who posed a real danger to the police officers or civilians, I could live with that.  But that’s not the case.

[A] quick Google News search of the last month alone reveals a barrage of police tasing incidents across the country one more barbaric than the other: grandmas, grandpas, the mentally ill, teens and even children. Some of these taser victims died. One (ok, in Australia) burst into flames, another was left with burns in his anus, and yet another, a 14-year-old girl, got it in the head — running away after a dispute with her mother over a cell phone (caution, graphic).

All — in varying degrees — needed to be “subdued” by police, and were. It is, after all, a most effective tool in that regard, especially when dealing with  pregnant women, 16-year-olds with broken backs and 6-year-old boys. After reading news reports dating back to 2004 about the hyper-use of these 50,000-volt zap guns, it’s not difficult to imagine what might have happened if Gates were say, in Boise, and had hurled one more insult, used a few expletives, raised a hand or moved toward Officer James Crowley in a “threatening manner,” much like this guy, who was irate and scary, but nonetheless handcuffed and shackled, when he was Tasered in a Kentucky court on July 22.

When Reason wrote about Tasers in 2005, there were 6,000 law enforcement agencies employing Taser guns. The high-voltage weapons, according to the Amnesty International statistics in the report, “are used on unarmed suspects in 80 percent of the cases, for verbal non-compliance in 36 percent, and for cases involving ‘deadly assault’ only 3 percent of the time.”

Officers do what they’re trained to do and, sadly, that often means bullying citizens and escalating to violent confrontation quite rapidly.  Accordingly, if  they’re prudent, honest citizens accosted by boorish cops will behave more like Colin Powell than Christopher Hitchens.   But we should change the culture so that we don’t have to.

Related:  A rather off-color public service announcement from Chris Rock:

UPDATE:  Radley Balko points to this positively frightening post by a pseudonymous LAPD officer at NRO.

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

It’s thinking like that that gives “police state” a bad name.  See Radley’s take-down.

Photo by Flickr user hradcanska under Creative Commons license.

Before turning in last night, we watched Monday’s “Colbert Report” which featured this segment on the increasing use of tasers by police forces, including on helpless old women:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Current Events – Tasers
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

This morning, I see that several people are commenting on a story about Mobile, Alabama police tasering a deaf, retarded man on the grounds he had locked himself in a public bathroom and was carrying a dangerous weapon — an umbrella.

Officers who used pepper spray and a Taser to remove a man from a store bathroom found out only later he was deaf and mentally disabled and didn’t understand they wanted him to open the door, police said Tuesday. A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers’ actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon — an umbrella.

But relatives of Antonio Love, 37, have asked for a formal investigation and said they plan to sue both the police and the store. “I want justice,” Love’s mother, Phyllis Love, said Tuesday.

The woman said her son hears only faintly, has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old and didn’t realize that it was the police who were trying enter the bathroom. “He thought the devil was out there trying to get in to get him,” she said.

Antonio Love, in a written statement and in a television interview given in sign language about the confrontation, said he had a badly upset stomach last Friday and went into a Dollar General store to use the restroom.

Police spokesman Christopher Levy said Tuesday store workers called officers complaining that a man had been in the bathroom for more than an hour with the door locked. Officers knocked on the door and identified themselves, but the person didn’t respond. Officers used a tire iron to open the door, but the man pushed back to keep it shut. Officers saw the umbrella and sprayed pepper spray through a crack trying to subdue the man, Levy said. They shot the man with a Taser when they finally got inside, he said.

Officers didn’t realize Love was deaf or had mental problems until he showed them a card he carries in his wallet, Levy said. He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, but officers released him and took him home after a magistrate refused to issue a warrant.

Levy said officers were justified in using force against Love since he had an umbrella. “The officers really worked within the limits of our level-of-force policy,” he said. “We had no information about who this guy was.”

Now, I’m less apoplectic about the particular case than Paleo Pat, digby, or William Grigg because I actually buy the police explanation that they had no idea who this guy was or that he was disabled. All they knew is that a large man was locked in the bathroom for an inordinately long time and had refused the demands of store management to leave — necessitating calling the police to begin with — and that he was then refusing police orders and pushing back on the door as police were trying to enter.

That’s suspicious activity.

It’s not the police department’s responsibility to know that an unidentified person they’re called out to respond to is disabled.  And the fact that Love thinks the devil is attacking him in bathrooms and that he is unable to cope with his surroundings is perhaps an indication that he shouldn’t be out unsupervised.

The officers in question undoubtedly acted as they were trained to do.

No, the problem, as in the Henry Louis Gates case, is a police culture that sees all non-police as potentially dangerous perps and that demands instant respect and obedience from the public.  Watch any random episode of “Cops” and you’ll see outrageous police conduct by officers who know that they’re being filmed for television.   Police increasingly see themselves as soldiers in a war zone and behave with an arrogant, bullying attitude toward the citizenry even in clearly non-dangerous situations.

In last night’s press conference, President Obama weighed in on the disorderly conduct arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates.

“The police are doing what they should,” he said. “There’s a call. They go investigate. What happens?

“My understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his I.D. to show that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct.”

“I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Mr. Obama continued. “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that the president would weigh in so strongly against a local police officer on such sketchy evidence.  He concedes that Gates is a friend but, still, president’s traditionally stay out of such matters until they develop.  This isn’t a Rodney King situation where we have video.  Further, Obama is eliding some steps in the incident; I guarantee Gates wasn’t charged with disorderly conduct for simply showing ID.

Dave Schuler and I discussed the incident toward the end of last night’s episode of OTB Radio.  We agreed that 1)  the specific facts of the case are fuzzy, with Gates and the arresting officer releasing accounts that put themselves in the best light and 2) Cambridge is a small community and police should know who its most prominent citizens are.

I think it’s probable that Gates went into outrage mode quickly and that the officer felt disrespected and wanted to assert his authority and basically goaded Gates into a situation where an arrest was possible.  Henry Farrell’s explanation on that score strikes me as quite plausible.

As I’ve written numerous times before, police, especially in urban areas, have adopted a militaristic attitude toward their jobs, viewing the citizenry as hostiles to be pacified rather than as the community they’ve pledged to serve.   It’s a dangerous and lamentable development.

This is by no means universal.  Dave, who lives in a suburban-style community within the city limits of Chicago, has a much more pleasant experience with the police.  The police and citizens have a cordial, cooperative relationship.

UPDATE:  Jules Crittenden has some interesting background on Officer James Crowley that will likely reinforce whatever view you already have on the matter.

AP Photo

Robert Cox passes on the story of Demetrius Hazelton, the 17-year-old son a New Rochelle police detective, who is suing said PD after he was arrested after using a  “white racial monotone voice” which police claim is the same voice used by Dave Chappelle “when making fun of white people.”

Bob supplies the following Chappelle video, which is decidedly R-rated:

Dave Chappelle Stand Up – Scared Of The Police

The beginning of the monologue is especially amusing in light of yesterday’s news that Harvard African-American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates was recently arrested for breaking into his own house.

Kevin Drum links an LAT piece on the “charm” of Irvine, California, a “little planned community” that both conforms perfectly to Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” stereotype – with houses made out of ticky tacky that all look the same — and seems to make everyone who lives there feel safe and happy.   And, mostly, it is indeed quite charming.  But these passages strike me as a bit creepy, too:

On the street of two-story suburban homes, lined with jacarandas and palms and curbside recycling bins, a father and his 14-year-old son were arguing about water polo practice while he gave his other son a haircut in the garage.

Two police cars were on the scene within minutes.

Miller defused the situation with some gentle words to the father and son, smiling as he stood on the front lawn, looking more the part of mediator than hardened lawman.

The officer quickly typed the police code for “disturbance” in his patrol car’s computer: 415 over son not doing what dad wants. Verbal only. No crime.

[...]
Students who come to UC Irvine from urban areas are “blown away by the level of peaceableness that exists here,” said Currie, the criminology professor.

That is not to say serious crimes don’t occur.

But when that rare violent attack or homicide is recorded, the community is stunned and police react forcefully.

When a man walked into a home through an open garage on a recent afternoon, demanding cash from a woman at gunpoint, police dispatched more than 40 units, four police dogs and a helicopter before a suspect was collared. A neighboring grade school was put on lockdown.

It’s nice, I suppose, that crime levels are low enough for police to actually be in the business of prevention rather than post-hoc investigation.  But I’m not sure I want the cops to show up every time someone raises their voice.  Or to deploy helicopters and police dogs for muggings.

And why they are bad as a general rule.

Even if police always got the right house and every raid were performed flawlessly (and that’s obviously not the case), the image of police dressed as soldiers routinely breaking into private homes to serve warrants for non-violent crimes is one we ought to find disturbing. At one time we did. There’s an old Cold War saying, “Democracy means that when there’s a knock at the door at 3am, it’s probably the milkman.” Masked government agents dressed in black barging into private homes in the middle of the night was once an image we associated with totalitarian states. We seem to be troublingly comfortable with it, now.–emphasis added

Indeed we seem to like the fact that police officers are armed with machine guns, tasers, databases, and can enter our homes on even the flimsiest of evidence.

Radley Balko continues to cover “wrong door no-knock raids” and police militarization here.

Hilzoy and Andrew Sullivan pass along this interesting tidbit from Slate’s Christopher Beam:

Post-election protests continued in Tehran for the fifth day on Wednesday. In many photos, riot police wear uniforms with the English word police on them. Ambulances, too, bear the word ambulance in English. Why not use Persian words instead of their English equivalents?

Because everyone knows English. Like many capital cities, Tehran has its emergency personnel wear markings that are internationally recognizable. Street signs, too, are translated into English, and police cars are generally inscribed in both English and Persian. That makes the city more tourist-friendly without sacrificing clarity for locals. After all, the Persian word for police is the same: polise. (Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language that uses an Arabic script, but people will often use Latin lettering, also known as Penglish or Fingilish, especially when typing or texting.) It’s also the same word in French (police), German (polizei), Italian (polizia), Czech (policie), and many other languages. Iranian students are required to take English classes in high school. So using the English word for police actually maximizes the number of people who will understand it.

Police isn’t the only word Farsi borrows from English. There’s a long list of “loanwords” that have trickled into the language since World War II. For example, Iranians use the words computer, chat, and mobile (as in, cell phone) in the same way English speakers do. Hot dog isn’t a perfect translation, but it refers to a sausagelike sandwich popular in Iran. Persian slang often incorporates English, too. The phrase love terekkundan—literally, to burst with love—is slang for hooking up. Top means cool. And you can use the phrase trip zadan to say, “He’s tripping,” in a literal (i.e., drug-related) or figurative sense.

Yet more evidence that English is gradually becoming the world’s universal language.  Indeed, there are few major cities in the world where English speakers can’t get by quite comfortably.

If your native language is not English, then English is hands-down the obvious choice for a second language.  If you travel at all, it’ll frequently come in quite handy.  For that matter, even if you don’t travel, it’d be useful in watching movies.   Conversely, if you’re a native English speaker, it’s not at all obvious what second language you should learn.  Unless you routinely travel to a specific place or live in an area with a large immigrant population, you’re unlikely to use it with enough regularity to be worth the effort in learning, much less keep your skills sharp.

A British judge has ruled against a blogger who sought an injunction against having his secret identity published in the Times.

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.  In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.

[...]

In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”. The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.

[...]

The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.

It’s hard to argue against Eady’s reasoning here. The journalist found Horton’s identity through legitimate means and there was a genuine public interest in learning who this cop was who was revealing all manner of juicy inside details about the police force.

Gawker’s John Cook agrees, arguing, “nobody ought to have a right or privilege to publish whatever they please without the consequences of their ideas redounding to them” and “the notion that anonymous publishers have a right, in perpetuity, to keep their identities a secret—or that people who learn their identities are honor-bound not to reveal them—is nonsense.”  He adds, “There’s nothing inherently wrong with blogging anonymously … though some motivations are more cowardly than others. And much good can and has come from people who are free to write the truth without bearing the consequences. But the decision to do so carries with it certain exceedingly obvious risks, and when the jig is up, it’s best for anonybloggers to endure the scrutiny with dignity rather than complain that people who had no obligation or interest in preserving their anonymity have behaved as such.”

That’s all right, both as a matter of law and practicality. And I agree with Don Surber that “If it might cost you your job or your reputation, then you ought not be doing it.”

I would add, however, that some motivations for revealing the identity of anonymous (or, as in most of these cases) pseudonymous bloggers are more noble than others.  In this case, Foster had a perfectly valid reason for wanting to inform the public as to who this BlackJack fellow was.

UPDATE: Guy Herbert notes that, while Horton has deleted the NightJackblog in order to save his career, “deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult.”  He provides a delicious sampling of what was once there, a posting titled “A Survival Guide for Decent Folk.” Among the long list of tips for those taken into police custody:

Admit Nothing
To do anything more than lock you up for a few hours we need to prove a case. The easiest route to that is your admission. Without it, our case may be a lot weaker, maybe not enough to charge you with. In any case, it is always worth finding out exactly how damning the evidence is before you fall on your sword. So don’t do the decent and honourable thing and admit what you have done. Don’t even deny it or try to give your side of the story. Just say nothing. No confession and CPS are on the back foot already. They forsee a trial. They fear a trial. They are looking for any excuse to send you home free.

Keep your mouth shut
Say as little as possible to us. At the custody office desk a Sergeant will ask you some questions. It is safe to answer these. For the rest of the time, say nothing.

Always always always have a solicitor
Duh. No brainer this one. Unless you know 100% for sure that your mate the solicitor does criminal law and is good at it, ask for the Duty Solicitor. They certainly do criminal law and they are good at it. Then listen to what the solicitor says and do it. Their job is to get you off without the Cops or CPS laying a glove on you if at all possible. It is what they get paid for. They are free to you. There is no down side. Now decent folks think it makes them look like they have something to hide if they ask for a solicitor. Irrelevant. Going into an interview without a solicitor is like taking a walk in Tottenham with a big gold Rolex. Bad things are very likely to happen to you. I wouldn’t do it and I interview people for a living.

Actively complain about every officer and everything they do
Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers. Nothing like a complaint to muddy the waters and suggest that you are only in court because the vindictive Cops have a grudge against you. Far fetched? Wait until your solicitor spins it in court and you come over as Ghandi.

Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it
You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.

One can see where Horton’s employers might have preferred him not offering up such tips for the public in his spare time.