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Title: For Punitive Populists, “Comply or Die” IS The “Law”
Source:
Lew Rockwell
URL Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog ... ists-comply-or-die-is-the-law/
Published: Dec 20, 2014
Author: William Norman Grigg
Post Date: 2014-12-20 18:31:13 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 1185
Comments: 3
“Our will is the law, and if you submit to it, we won’t kill you.” That’s the actual message behind the motto displayed on a line of t-shirts designed by South Bend, Indiana police officer Jason Barthel. The shirts display a badge insignia against set the “Blue Line” logo — the universal colors of the State’s privileged gang-banger fraternity — with the inscription: “Breathe easy — don’t break the law.” The t-shirt design is intended as a rebuke to the “I can’t breathe” protest meme inspired by the police murder of Eric Garner. “We are not here to do anything negative to the public,” insists Barthel. “We’re here to protect the public and we want you to breathe easy knowing that the police are here to be with you and for you and protect you.” The claim that police exist to protect the public is an obvious and easily documented lie: Police officers have no enforceable duty to aid a citizen threatened by actual criminal violence. If something akin to a legitimate role exists for government police it would be to identify criminal suspects and detain them for prosecution when necessary. Nearly everything police do, however, consists of scrutinizing harmless behavior by their betters in the productive class in search of a rationale to intrude in their affairs, confiscate their property, and kill them if they object — which is precisely what was done to micro-entrepreneur Eric Garner on the streets of Staten Island. The shirts, predictably, are a huge hit with Punitive Populists — the kind of people who chant the Support Your Local Police (SYLP) mantra as a way of insulating themselves from the abundant evidence that law enforcement is the single greatest source of lawless violence in our society. For such people, anyone on the receiving end of lethal attention from a police officer — a Judge Dredd-like figure invested with the power of discretionary killing — obviously must have done something to deserve it. They rarely, if ever, consider the fact that it is almost impossible to breathe easily in a country being suffocated beneath the burden of “laws” that make each of us a repeat offender — and thus liable to summary execution by police — on a daily basis. Officer Barthel, who divides his time between law enforcement and honest work as a small business owner, could very easily be prosecuted and ruined for any of the myriad regulatory infractions he commits every day as an entrepreneur. As a police officer, however, he can commit criminal violence — including homicide — and take refuge in the claim of “qualified immunity.” It has been said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. In similar fashion, a police critic is often someone who has been abused by the cops, or seen this happen to someone he cares about. Given the metastasizing plague of criminal violence by the police, we can expect to see an increasing number of Punitive Populists have that conversion experience — being beaten by the cops on the Road to Damascus, as it were. As Franklin famously said, experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
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#2. To: Deckard (#0)
Nearly everything police do, however, consists of scrutinizing harmless behavior by their betters in the productive class in search of a rationale to intrude in their affairs, confiscate their property, and kill them if they object — which is precisely what was done to micro-entrepreneur Eric Garner on the streets of Staten Island. I guess what "confuses" many people is the large number of peace officers who are dressed like special forces soldiers/marines/SEALS heading into battle in a war zone, using items such as CS gas which is prohibited under the laws of war. Some of the public even consider the peace officer aiming of automatic weapons at a crowd as a hostile action. Turning unarmed suspects into corpses also engenders disgruntled friends, relatives, and sympathizers. When the justice system is seen as offering no justice, some are impelled to engage in justice of the wild west.
There are no replies to Comment # 2. End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThe claim that police exist to protect the public is an obvious and easily documented lie: Police officers have no enforceable duty to aid a citizen threatened by actual criminal violence. If something akin to a legitimate role exists for government police it would be to identify criminal suspects and detain them for prosecution when necessary.
Replies to Comment # 2.
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