While emptying a service revolver into Michael Brown was bad enough, there is a fear that his killer may get away with it – one more “justified” police killing of an unarmed citizen. It’s impunity that has many people upset. Police impunity is just another of the many forms of injustice that roils this country.

“Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men,” said Gerald Ford – right before pardoning Nixon for all the laws he had broken.

Nixon in turn pardoned Jimmy Hoffa and William Calley, the only soldier held accountable for the massacre of 500 people in My Lai, Viet Nam.

Reagan pardoned Nixon’s FBI burglars.

Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive donor to Clinton’s presidential library and his wife’s Senate campaign, as well as his own brother, Roger, on federal drug charges.

George Bush (Sr.) pardoned the ringleaders of the Iran-Contra Affair, which included Reagan’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense.

Bush Junior commuted the meager 30 month sentence given to Irving (Scooter) Libby for leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Aside from pardons, which are often a professional courtesy extended to former administrations, not even the most severe criminal acts by political leaders are ever investigated or prosecuted.

The US may have played a role in the show trials in Nuremberg, but now it refuses to be bound by the World Court. The US uses its UN Security Council veto to shield itself from charges of war crimes and human rights abuses. International law is for quiche-eating foreigners, not us.

CIA kidnapping, murder and torture have gone unpunished. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about spying on citizens. The CIA destroyed torture tapes and spied on a Senate team investigating it. And nothing ever happens. A president lies to the nation about weapons of mass destruction. Nothing happens. A famous general takes those lies to the United Nations. Nothing happens. Whistleblowers are hounded for exposing lies. Nothing happens – except to the whistleblower. The FBI kills hundreds of people over several decades and not one agent is ever disciplined for an unjust shooting.

But if government impunity is well-understood, so is that of corporations and the very wealthy.

A July article in Forbes reported: “Six of the 60 richest families in the country include heirs who have killed, raped or sexually abused someone. The circumstances of the tragedies vary — some were accidental car crashes and others were deliberate crimes. But one thing was consistent: the perpetrators hardly received any punishment.”

Deregulation, preferential tax rates or forgiveness, special laws giving corporations “religious” rights to ignore laws that others have to follow – all these diminish our ability to hold accountable anyone other than the average citizen. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, but when was the last time you saw one in jail? – in a nation that incarcerates more humans than any other.

And in the rare case where corporate misbehavior is so egregious that token punishment is unavoidable – JPMorgan Chase and British Petroleum come to mind – it turns out even their fines are tax-deductible.

No, laws are only for citizens. This is why the average guy is spied upon, stopped and frisked, and incarcerated in record numbers, especially if he is Black or political or both.

When a police officer violates the law, assaults or kills a citizen, commits violations of the Constitution (locking up journalists, preventing people from legal assembly, stopping and frisking for no reason, or insisting on a suspicion-less search) – they put themselves above the law. Unfortunately, there is actually very little meaningful community oversight of police departments. Most internal police misconduct investigations are done with little transparency, and the outcomes are predictable. Rogue cops often keep on abusing citizens.

If we truly want to be a nation of laws, we need to insist that those who make and uphold the laws and claim to be protecting us – follow the same laws. If not, they should be given orange jump suits like any other criminal.

We may be a nation of laws, but impunity engenders lawlessness when some of us are above the law.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 25, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140825/opinion/408250313

Every 28 hours police kill another Black man in the United States. In Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, stole cigars from a convenience store and may or may not have been stopped for this reason by a policeman who emptied his service revolver into Brown.

The Standard Time’s editorial on Brown’s killing correctly highlights the racial elements of police encounters in America today. The images of Ferguson’s police officers with their M16’s, MRAP (IED-resistant armed personnel carrier), and all the other Homeland Security-funded toys used against the community, shocked those who still remember Montgomery and Selma during Jim Crow.

Ferguson police acted as if they were at war with the Black community and journalists – acting as occupiers, not patrolmen. Armaments of war were employed. Journalists were arrested as they filed stories from a local McDonald’s. Police hauled an alderman from his car and roughed him up. They tear-gassed one group of journalists and dismantled their equipment. News helicopters were banned, journalists were bullied and prevented from covering the demonstrations, and police ignored the 72-hour requirement to publish a report of Michael Brown’s killing.

None of this is a surprise to any minority community. Police “serve” Whites differently than others. Recall the kid-gloves treatment that Cliven Bundy’s White supporters received from law enforcement – especially shocking since Bundy’s supporters had sniper rifles trained on them. But militarization of the police affects everyone, not just minorities. We saw it during the Boston Marathon bombing. We saw it during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when police throughout the country used tear gas, water cannons, TASERs, and concussion grenades against protestors, denying them rights of assembly and speech.

Radley Balko writes in his “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” that 30 years ago only about a quarter of small towns had SWAT teams. Today, even with lower crime rates, that number is close to 90%. But when you have a big hammer, you have to pound every nail with it. According to Pete Kraska, a professor of Justice Studies in Kentucky, SWAT teams are deployed 137 times a day in the US. SWAT raids are used for everything from delivering a summons to raiding a house where marijuana might be found. Many innocent people have been killed in these raids. And not once has a policemen been held accountable.

Police, including most of our local forces, are armed with TASERS, which send 50,000 volts of electricity via a dart into a human’s nervous system. TASERS have been associated with hundreds of deaths, particularly when repeatedly used on mentally ill, convulsing, non English-speaking, or drugged civilians who cannot “comply” with an officer’s command. YouTube is full of dashcam videos of mouthy White suburban moms who have been tased for basically their “attitude” at roadside stops. Where once an officer was forced to de-escalate an incident with an upset person, mainly by just listening, now he can just blast him with 50,000 volts and slap on the handcuffs.

Funding all this expensive gear (via your tax dollars) is the Law Enforcement Support Office, an obscure federal agency that outfits police forces with military surplus. Similarly, the Defense Logistics Agency has an office whose motto is “from warfighter to crimefighter” and which also provides police with state of the art war gear. The Justice Department, too, has a program to transition veterans, many of whom have PTSD, into positions as police officers. All this has cost taxpayers $35 billion but communities are further on the hook for costs of upgrades and maintenance of these systems, which also include spy gear like “Stingrays,” which gather information from people’s cellphones.

The net result is that we are no longer being served by police forces that look like us, grew up with us, or even necessarily live among us. Certainly this is the case in Ferguson, 70% Black with a police department 95% White. Nationally it is true as well.

That’s because the goal is no longer the protection, but something nearer the occupation of citizens – all of us – by a government that increasingly distrusts its own citizens.

And this is the very definition of a Police State.