This is a most telling report from Dr Roberts about the US Police but it can apply equally well, bar some cutural difference to the UK Police.
Author: Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
LifeWise
“The goon thug psychopaths no longer only brutalize minorities–it is open season on all of us –the latest victim is a petite young white mother of two small children“
The worse threat every American faces comes from his/her own government.
At the federal level the threat
is a seventh war (Syria) in 12 years, leading on to the eighth and ninth
(Iran and Lebanon) and then on to nuclear war with Russia and China.
The criminal psychopaths in
Washington have squandered trillions of dollars on their wars, killing
and dispossessing millions of Muslims while millions of American
citizens have been dispossessed of their homes and careers. Now the
entire social safety net is on the chopping bloc so that Washington can
finance more wars.
At the state and local level
every American faces brutal, armed psychopaths known as the police. The
“law and order” conservatives and the “compassionate” liberals stand
silent while police psychopaths brutalize children and grandmothers,
murder double amputees in wheel chairs, break into the wrong homes,
murder the family dogs, and terrify the occupants, pointing their
automatic assault weapons in the faces of small children.
The American police perform no
positive function. They pose a much larger threat to citizens than do
the criminals who operate without a police badge. Americans would be
safer if the police forces were abolished.
The police have been militarized and largely federalized by the
Pentagon and the gestapo Homeland Security. The role of the federal
government in equipping state and local police with military weapons,
including tanks, and training in their use has essentially removed the
police from state and local control. No matter how brutal any police
officer, it is rare that any suffer more than a few months suspension,
usually with full pay, while a report is concocted that clears them of
any wrong doing.
In America today, police murder
with impunity. All the psychopaths have to say is, “I thought his
wallet was a gun,” or “we had to taser the unconscious guy we found
lying on the ground, because he wouldn’t obey our commands to get up.”
There are innumerable cases of
240 pound cop psychopaths beating a 115 pound woman black and blue. Or
handcuffing and carting off to jail 6 and 7 year old boys for having a
dispute on the school playground.
Many Americans take solace in
their erroneous belief that this only happens to minorities who they
believe deserve it, but psychopaths use their unaccountable power
against everyone. The American police are a brutal criminal gang free of
civilian control.
Unaccountable power, which the
police have, always attracts psychopaths. You are lucky if you only get
bullies, but mainly police forces attract people who enjoy hurting
people and tyrannizing them. To inflict harm on the public is why
psychopaths join police forces.
Calling the police is a risky
thing to do. Often it is the person who calls for help or some innocent
person who ends up brutalized or murdered by the police. For example,
on September 15 CNN reported a case of a young man who wrecked his car
and went to a nearby house for help. The woman, made paranoid by the
“war on crime,” imagined that she was in danger and called police.
When the police arrived, the young man ran up to them, and the police shot him dead.
People who say the solution is
better police training are unaware of how the police are trained. Police
are trained to perceive the public as the enemy and to use maximum
force. I have watched local police forces train. Two or three dozen
officers will simultaneously empty their high-capacity magazines at the
same target, a minimum of 300 bullets fired at one target. The purpose
is to completely destroy whatever is on the receiving end of police
fire.
US prosecutors seem to be the equal to police in terms of the
psychopaths in their ranks. The United States, “the light unto the
world,” not only has the highest percentage of its population in prison
of every other country in the world, but also has the largest absolute
number of people in prison. The US prison population is much larger in
absolute numbers that the prison populations of China and India,
countries with four times the US population.
Just try to find a prosecutor who gives a hoot about the innocence or
guilt of the accused who is in his clutches. All the prosecutor cares
about is his conviction rate.
The higher his conviction rate, the greater his success even if every
person convicted is innocent. The higher his conviction rate, the more
likely he can run for public office.
Many prosecutors, such as Rudy Giuliani, target well known people so
that they can gain name recognition via the names of their victims.
The American justice (sic) system serves the political ambitions of
prosecutors and the murderous lusts of police psychopaths. It serves
the profit motives of the privatized prisons who need high occupancy
rates for their balance sheets.
But you can bet your life that the American justice (sic) system does not serve justice.
While writing this article, I googled “police brutality,” and google
delivered 4,100,000 results. If a person googles “police brutality
videos,” he will discover that there are more videos than could be
watched in a lifetime. And these are only those acts of police
brutality that are witnessed and caught on camera.
It would take thousands of pages just to compile the information available.
The facts seem to support the case that police in the US commit more
crimes and acts of violence against the public than do the criminals who
do not wear badges.
According to the FBI crime Statistics in 2010 there
were 1,246,248 violent crimes committed by people without police
badges. Keep in mind that the definition of violent crime can be an
expansive definition. For example, simply to push someone is considered
assault. If two people come to blows in an argument, both have
committed assault. However, even with this expansive definition of
violent crimes, police assaults are both more numerous and more
dangerous, as it is usually a half dozen overweight goon thugs beating
and tasering one person.
Reports of police brutality are commonplace, but hardly anything is ever done about them. For example, on September 10
, AlterNet reported that Houston, Texas, police routinely beat and murder local citizens.
The threat posed to the public by police psychopaths is growing rapidly. Last July 19 the
Wall Street Journal reported: “Driven by martial rhetoric and the
availability of military-style equipment–from bayonets and M-16 rifles
to armored personnel carriers–American police forces have often adopted a
mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and,
more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new
figure on the US scene: the warrior cop–armed to the teeth, ready to
deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar
American liberties.”
The Wall Street Journal, being an establishment newspaper, has to put
it as nicely as possible. The bald fact is that today’s cop in body
armor with assault weapons, grenades, and tanks is not there to make
arrests of suspected criminals. He is there in anticipation of protests
to beat down the public for exercising constitutional rights.
To suppress public protests is also the purpose of the Department of
Homeland Security Police, a federal para-military police force that is a
new development for the United States. No one in their right mind
could possibly think that the vast militarized police have been created
because of “the terrorist threat.” Terrorists are so rare that the FBI
has to round up demented people and talk them into a plot so that the
“terrorist threat” can be kept alive in the public’s mind.
The American public is too brainwashed to be able to defend itself. Consider the fact
that cops seldom face any consequence when they murder citizens. We
never hear cops called “citizen killer.” But if a citizen kills some
overbearing cop bully, the media go ballistic: “Cop killer, cop
killer.” The screaming doesn’t stop until the cop killer is executed.
As long as a brainwashed public
continues to accept that cop lives are more precious than their own,
citizens will continue to be brutalized and murdered by police
psychopaths.
I can remember when the police
were different. If there was a fight, the police broke it up. If it
was a case of people coming to blows over a dispute, charges were not
filed.
If it was a clear case of
assault, unless it was brutal or done with use of a weapon, the police
usually left it up to the victim to file charges.
When I lived in England, the police walked their beats armed only with their billysticks.
When and why did it all go
wrong? Among the collection of probable causes are the growth or urban
populations, the onslaught of heavy immigration on formerly stable and
predictable neighborhoods, the war on drugs, and management consultants
called in to improve efficiency who focused police on quantitative
results, such as the number of arrests, and away from such traditional
goals as keeping the peace and investigating reported crimes.
Each step of the way
accountability was removed in order to more easily apprehend criminals
and drug dealers. The “war on terror” was another step, resulting in
the militarization of the police.
The replacement of jury trials with plea bargains meant that police
investigations ceased to be tested in court or even to support the plea,
usually a fictitious crime reached by negotiation in order to obtain a
guilty plea. Police learned that all prosecutors needed was a charge
and that little depended on police investigations. Police work became
sloppy. It was easier simply to pick up a suspect who had a record of
having committed a similar crime.
As justice receded as the goal, the quality of people drawn into
police work changed. Idealistic people found that their motivations were
not compatible with the process, while bullies and psychopaths were
attracted by largely unaccountable power.
Much of the blame can be
attributed to “law and order” conservatives. Years ago when New York
liberals began to observe the growing high-handed behavior of police,
they called for civilian police review boards. Conservatives, such as
National Review’s William F. Buckley, went berserk, claiming that any
oversight over the police would hamstring the police and cause crime to
explode.
The conservatives could see no threat in the police, only in an
effort to hold police accountable. As far as I can tell, this is still
the mindset.
What we observed in the police
response to the Boston Marathon bombing suggests that the situation is
irretrievable. One of the country’s largest cities and its suburbs–100
square miles–was tightly locked down with no one permitted to leave
their homes, while 10,000 heavily armed police, essentially combat
soldiers armed with tanks, forced their way into people’s homes,
ordering them out at gunpoint. The excuse given for this unprecedented
gestapo police action was a search for one wounded 19-year old kid.
That such a completely
unnecessary and unconstitutional event could occur in Boston without the
responsible officials being removed from office indicates that “the
land of the free” no longer exists. The American population of the past,
suspicious of government and jealous of its liberty, has been replaced
by a brainwashed and fearful people, who are increasingly referred to as
“the sheeple.”
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts who was Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street
Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university
appointments. Visit his blog here where this article originally featured.
