(Fred Weinberg) – And when are we going to stop treating citizens of the United States of America like farm animals?
Forget race or ethnicity.
The truth is that if prosecutors, judges and law enforcement don’t start respecting the people who put them there to do the jobs they are supposed to be doing, we ARE going to have an armed revolution in this country.
It appears that the new, PR approved word a Sheriff or Police Chief uses when shown a video of an officer involved shooting or excessively violent take-down is “disturbing”.
And, so it is.
The problem, the real problem, is that there is a large component of our criminal justice system which sees the taxpayers as marks from who they extract money. For many years, it was always “us against them”. The “us” being cops and the “them” being the people they police.
Any defense attorney will tell you that cops routinely lie on the stand and justify it in their minds by telling themselves that the person they were testifying against was guilty anyway.
We have a judge in Reno, Nevada who actually bound over a case at a preliminary hearing where a young man living in a third floor apartment effected a citizen’s arrest on someone who came over his balcony, called 911 and was arrested himself. Judge Patricia Lynch is not atypical of the human slugs in that part of the system.
We have a DA in Clark County Nevada, the husband of the OJ Judge, who is urging the state legislature to allow hearsay testimony at the very same hearings that Judge Lynch sleeps through anyway.
These people never stop to think that they work for us, not the other way around.
They don’t care about justice. They care about winning and/or making their jobs easier.
The problem is that justice doesn’t come easily. It requires, as an example, a District Attorney to know when he’s got a crappy case. It requires a proportionate response from a beat cop. It requires a zealous defense.
If everybody’s guilty and we keep creating more crimes for people to be guilty of, than the end result will be 1776 all over again. They dumped that tea in the harbor to make a point to a monarch in London. We have created a systematic arm of the Washington monarchy in the form of our constabulary, Federal, state and local.
Republicans who want to go all law and order on us need to think about the consequences of making everybody a criminal.
Democrats, who like to criminalize normal acts in the name of “social justice” need to understand that Cliven Bundy’s supporters were just the tip of the iceberg.
What brings this to the fore these days is technology.
Perhaps inadvertently, we have put a video camera in virtually everyone’s hand.
Now, if you carry a badge and a gun, you don’t have to worry about lying to the Internal Affairs Bureau. You have to worry about telling the media, “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
If you think that the tip of the spear—police—just started what you are now seeing every day recently, you’re smoking crack.
And, by the way, it doesn’t take a big percentage of bad cops to deliver us a large number of these incidents.
I’ve heard from law enforcement that we have placed these people under unbearable pressure and, sometimes, they just snap.
That’s a load of crap and you all know it.
The problem we have is sorting it all out. The race baiting poverty pimps like Al Sharpton see every officer involved shooting as a racial statement.
They are wrong.
There are enough bad ones we don’t need to add in the ones which were justified—like Michael Brown in Missouri—to get a big number.
I have two solutions. First, remove the near unlimited immunity prosecutors and judges have for malfeasance. Second, stop passing new laws criminalizing everyday behavior.
Police behavior will suddenly stop being a problem.
Mr. Weinberg is publisher of the Penny Press. Get to know more about him by visiting www.PennyPresslv.com.
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