We have forgotten the lessons of World War II and great leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. - From Eisenhower’s Farewell Address 1961.
”We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” We have collectively forgotten the whole point behind this statement. In part, it led us down the wrong path.
We even forgot the warnings presented by writings, art, and song. The turbulent times of the past sent us some great reminders of the unacknowledged truth. From two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket to Edwin Starr’s War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
As a country, America believes all problems are solved by “war.”. Remember Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty? Did we win that war? Ah, no, poverty is not only entrenched in our society, but it is also cemented in by policy and the tax code. The war turned into a very purposeful stratification of the economy that leaves the poor further behind every fiscal year. War on Drugs? Whether you are talking about Henry Ansligher, a right-wing Republican who saw heroin not as an addiction (read: medical) problem but as a Chinese war against America, or Bill Bennet and Ronald Reagan, they pretended to be great victorious war leaders of virtue (signaling) to the Evangelical Right (The Moral Majority, remember? Or as I called it The Immoral Minority). Meanwhile, drugs and drug gangs won that war every year, year after year.
The drug war funded the street gangs with riches beyond their wildest dreams, armed them to the teeth (complete with the gun lobby’s blessing), and the prison system went from punishment and sometimes rehabilitation to graduate school for assholes. Yet the evening news, with a pile of cocaine on the table for the cameras and the fake PR of it all, declared a false victory in the war on a regular basis.
The national philosophy is to declare war first, and think second. If we are failing miserably (crack cocaine, opioids, et al), proselytize a victory somewhere in the future, somewhere down the primrose path of morality and righteousness. Why? We are America, we love declaring wars. Winning them? Not so much.
Remember, the last war we actually won was on 28 April 1952 at the Treaty of San Francisco (the official end of World War II). Yes, 71 years ago was our last victory. No, Mission Accomplished does not count.
We declared the War on Terror and terrorism still exists. That’s the level of delirium in our de facto yet quasi war declarations: We declared war on a tactic of warfare. That makes as much sense as declaring war on the L-shaped ambush. If I read the government analysts and their public briefing statements correctly, the risk of terrorism has never been greater than now. Or right …now. And of course twenty minutes or ten years in the future, then, “now”, [or now() if coding it] will be our greatest time of risk. It is a never-ending scenario, the proverbial and maxed-out Orwellian endless war. A quite convenient policy of Wag The Dog. As soon as we figure out what rhymes with Albania, besides Albania, we will win this thing, right?!? RIGHT?!?
This brings me to the debate point of “Should we see law enforcement as just another war?” I have a unique perspective on that very topic. I have a rare background in our society: I served in both the Military Police and later as a civilian peace officer. At the age of 17 years, I joined the U.S. Army’s Inactive Reserve (you got service credit if you entered early back then). A few days after my 18th birthday, I went into active duty and I was off to basic training and then on to AIT (Advanced Individual Training) readying me to become a member of the U.S. Army’s Military Police Corps. I did everything every other MP did for a couple of years: guarding HQ, training days, firing range, PT, and IG inspections. Typical everyday stuff in the Army.
Then I was suddenly thrust into other not-so-usual duties due to my security clearance. It was in a unique program called the Personal Reliability Program (PRP). Only a certain few MPs, MI, and Green Berets (my father-in-law, a retired Command Sergeant Major Airborne Ranger and a Special Forces weapons officer in the Green Berets was also PRP). High-security rail missions. VIP security. And other missions that seemingly were always under a moniker like Special Material Ingress into the European Theater. Those HAWKS et al were not going to move into Western Europe and piss off the Swiss all by themselves. Seriously, a Swiss national got in my face at the Bruce Springsteen concert in Frankfurt over the equipment being moved into Europe. All I did was say I didn’t know what he was talking about (OpSec!) and said I worked an office job at HQ. Then offered him a beer to get him to STFU.
I eventually realized there was a more interesting set of duties within the MPs, deep investigations, undercover, and getting to do things many people only get to read about or see a pop culture version thereof in a Hollywood movie. So one day, I drove to another base and interviewed for a job working undercover with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). The agents who interviewed me liked my go-for-it attitude and my very youthful appearance. Who would suspect this “kid” as an undercover operative for essentially the Army’s FBI? The assistant Provost Marshall, a Major acting as the operational area’s Assistant Chief of Police, shot down my transfer, citing local staffing issues. Fortunately, the Provost Marshall, a Lt. Colonel, overrode that decision in part due to the staffing for the UC teams coming first in his command priorities. I was now driving down a very different road in life, a road few have traveled.
So, I spent the next few years working undercover in two countries. I worked with everyone from German Polizei and the German Military Police (Feldjager) to the U.S. Marshalls, the FBI (including the anti-terrorism unit), and the ATF. I even worked with a multi-agency DEA task force. I understand the drug war thoroughly and how it really operates on the ground.
This is my much younger self (right) undercover in Rüsselsheim, West Germany buying kilos of drugs from a group of international trafficking suspects (left, the Turkish man who facilitated the delivery in concert with several African immigrants living in West Germany). My protection is two UC German Poliezi agents just off camera sitting on the bench in front of the train station, the Bahnhof. The gal on that team is carrying a fully automatic MP-5 9mm submachine gun in her shoulder bag. If it goes down and goes wrong, my life is in her hands as I am unarmed. Unarmed with $12,000 in show money from the Army Finance department hidden in my belt line.
One of my UC team chiefs was a CW3 and Special Agent with more than 20 years of experience, and one of the original Tuft [pronounced Tough] Boys, or what the original agents called themselves while cleaning up the Khaki Mafia of post-Vietnam. He repeated something often I still carry with me today: We are not the gang members. We are cops, we are soldiers, we are not them, we are not the bad guys. Don’t dishonor yourselves.
That stuck. Big time.
I spent six+ years in the Army. I enjoyed my time in the military and look back at my military years fondly. I would not change that for anything. From the experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and friendships, to meeting my wife of 35 years, I look back appreciatively at those times. Those are the times and those were the people who made me who I am today. But after six years, I made a decision to leave the military and go into civilian law enforcement. I had plenty of opportunities to stay in the military. My company First Sergeant tried hard to get me to re-up for another six years, putting every option on the table. My father-in-law, the Green Beret who was then the CSM of the Military District of Washington, offered to set me up with Airborne and air assault schools (yeah, if I were to stay in, I needed those promotion points to make Staff Sergeant ASAP) and path to Ranger school and the teams if I so chose that path. The CSM of Army’s CID, in his living room in Washington D.C., a close friend to my old team chief and my father-in-law, wanted me to reenlist and go directly to CID school (after Airborne and air assault training) and become a fully credentialed Special Agent (I was an enlisted investigator attached to CID to be specific in my previous duties). I chose to leave the military. I felt I had done my time and wanted to move on with my life. I did not see 20 years to retirement in the Army as “my path.” So I applied to several civilian agencies, always scoring at the top of candidates, and was hired by a California muni as a peace officer.
So I become a civilian cop. I did everything a civilian cop has ever done, except deliver a baby in an emergency. I always wanted to do that. Wow, help a life arrive in this dimension. So cool. A Field Training Officer (FTO) in my old department did it. That was a good day.
Proudly, I did save lives. That’s the most important thing. I talked a guy down from a 12th-story balcony who wanted to jump to his death after a fatal traffic collision …that wasn’t his fault. I stopped a suicidal woman in a traffic stop after she came flying out of the parking lot and over a center divider. She had just broken up with her boyfriend (trust me, he ain’t worth it!), had just bought razor blades at Safeway and was heading to the beach to slit her wrists. I performed CPR on a cardiac arrest victim, along with a member of the Coast Guard, and he made it to the ER and a recovery room. Wow, again, so cool. I remember when members of our department ran into a burning building up the street from the station, and an inferno, and rescued two elderly civilians from certain death. That is what it really means to be a cop.
Fast forward to today’s generation: Is protecting the public and saving lives the mission? Or is it the endless war? Is that the mission? The latter seems to be the case every time I look at it. Right now, it is the disaster and failures in Memphis, before that was the failure of leadership (read: to the level of unit disintegration) and the shameful cowardness of Uvalde, TX, and Parkland, FL. Somewhere in there, my local area is rife with misconduct and criminal activity within the ranks. My department locally managed to declare we are going to run the Social Security and Medicare recipients out of town [translated: poor people] with their new police tanks (sounds like a Geneva Convention violation of using military force against a civilian population) all while (not kidding) raping the police intern, embezzling thousands from the taxpayers in a crooked faked overtime slip scheme, gunning down a mentally ill guy at the Walmart (terrible use of force, just awful), and then also declaring they no longer work for the city, Mayor or Council, they work for DHS (because they daftly claim absolute federal qualified immunity as local police, outside California law by the way). Meanwhile, the former chief was reported, according to several lawsuits, to be an avowed anti-semite and homophobe, a real Nazi princess for the endless war Nationalist cause. The Sheriff in the next county got convicted of multiple crimes, including selling concealed weapons permits out the backdoor of the sheriff’s department while turning a blind eye to misconduct by her deputies including criminal homicides. What do they think their mission is today?? I haven’t a clue actually. It sounds confusingly more like a street gang than a department.
Crime can not, in any real terms, be solved by declaring war. Go back to the primer of modern law enforcement, Sir Robert Peel, and the Peelian Laws governing law enforcement. The first Peelain Law is obviously the opposite of today’s thinking:
Peelian Law #1: To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
So, today’s system of “policing” is the antonym of the very first goal of law enforcement. The method today, I guess written by the gnomes in South Park is to declare war first, “?”, and make profits.
And profit some do. Did you know that far too many police departments fund themselves by either ticketing and fine schemes or literal roadside robberies on any cash any civilian is carrying? Cops now steal more than burglars. All while claiming they are targeting drug lords when in fact, they are targeting two brothers looking to buy another 7-11 location or take the life savings from a guy looking to buy a truck for his scrapping business. How is that right?? More importantly, how is this law enforcement??
Peelain Law #2: To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
Today’s police departments do not care what the public thinks. My local PD did not care even what I thought and I did their job for years!! I even served on the Chief’s citizen committee where the details of their easily regurgitated propaganda came in startling light and dysfunctional clarity. In fact, I became so frustrated with my local PD, I ran for Mayor as a write-in candidate. I ran because I saw the Chief and the department for what it was: an increasingly out-of-control street gang being armed to the teeth by the politicians looking for a panacea. Red light cameras (a cash cow), surveillance systems, on and on and on yet no one seemed to be really responsible for any of its use or for what happens when things go wrong. A poorly trained street gang more akin to a Serbian militia/gang in the Yugoslavian War, a gang being armed for all the wrong reasons. The solve rate for felonies could be zero percent and the number of apprehensions could also be zero, and that’s fine, just keep sending in the tanks, the drones, the thermal imaging sites, and software that surveils social media but can almost never find a school spree shooter before the carnage. Don’t even get me started with the endless mistakes with cops in schools. The mentality landed at the tank will make the criminals so fearful, the crime itself will stop. So how did that work out, Sparky?!? Now they are complaining about the “high crime rate” while moving away from the methodology that actually addresses crime.
Even the Memphis Chief of Police could not deal with the obvious realities of her version of Stop and Frisk on the quasi-battlefield. She wanted to get, you guessed it, tough on crime. And the politicians fawned at her feet, it was the perfect American F!-up in progress, let’s get the professional and experienced black female chief to order the knowingly failed policy approach. Perfection. White people are now off-the-hook as black Chiefs and black patrol officers now perform Rodney King Part Deux in the endless and purposeless war. The Memphis Chief even defended Stop and Frisk, not NY but Memphis Style until all the officers in the horrendous video were arrested and charged with murder and kidnapping. Murder. Kidnapping. Let that sink in for a second. WTF! Stop and Frisk was always notable bullshit and NYPD's own data showed that. The data embarrassed the endless warriors of NY by showing that if the police had done more stopping and frisking [ala The Stasi] in white neighborhoods and business areas, they would have made vastly more arrests in Manhattan, etc. for pockets full of dope (and better cocaine for sure) and outstanding arrest warrants than in da hood. Does treating a city (wait, let’s be real here, treating black and brown neighborhoods…) like an occupied military zone and the Chief pretending to be the military viceroy of an occupied territory really solve crime?? The short answer is an overwhelmingly clear no. This all sounds like a Blue Mafia.
I could go through each of the Peelian Laws but it would not matter. Sir Peel and his methodology have been abandoned with glee by today’s law enforcement. No matter how bad the data, keep the war going at all costs. The war has gone so badly, we now have a crime wave in law enforcement with, as said before, even Chiefs and Sheriffs ending up in prison. Example after example after example.
What can not go unmentioned is the real-world reality that our domestic policies arm gang members and all the crazies. I will repeat that: America openly and knowingly arms gangs across the country. Oh, and in Mexico. Why? It gives a great reason for politicians to whine at the podium while they solve nothing. They have been doing so since my time in the 80s and 90s. The paranoia is real when they really are out to get you. As long as the taxpayer is responsible for gun violence in the end, according to numerous tort cases, and the gun lobby holds zero percent liability even when it comes to simple consumer safety for malfunctioning products, there will be no change. Military arms to every murderer, rapist, gang member, parolee, stick-up artist, and each and every incel is the policy. It will not change. Especially with the current federal court and SCOTUS. Arm the nutters is our banner. It has been that way for decades. It is the root of the paranoia. Even though in 2020, COVID and job-related illnesses killed four and a half times more officers than gunfire, paranoia is there as the top cause of officers being killed in the line of duty, even when their own data shows that is not the proper understanding of the data. In my rookie year in civilian life, I looked it up, we lost 59 cops to gunfire. I did not have a tank or a bad attitude, and we definitely did not walk around thinking we were unanswerable or untouchable. Oh, boy did Rodney King prove that out. Big time.
I worked that night of the Rodney King riots. I had never been that worried for my safety, my fellow officers, random civilians/neighbors, and even the future of the country. It was a bad couple of nights. So much violence all over the country. It was so bad in Los Angeles, Reagan sent Army Airborne troops into LA. Fortunately, that calmed the situation down immediately. But in the end, LAPD screwed up. They made us all look like moronic goons. We were supposed to keep the peace, peace officers, get it? Not start a national riot costing billions of dollars and setting back the profession of law enforcement a couple of decades. Old LA Chief Gates sounded a lot like the Memphis Chief in the denial.
Can we prevent, with a high probability of a good outcome, the next Memphis or King incident? Yes. But it would require billions in retraining the entire police force on duty today. “Defund the police” is the dumbest crap I have heard lately, at multiple levels. It is not an easy undertaking to redirect the police, especially when they have gleeful political backing for some of the worst policies. In another dose of reality, there are always bad apples. I know people hate that (see it as an excuse), but we could make an honest effort, stop the drug war and policing-for-profit, etc., etc., etc. That does not mean a moron could not screw something up badly in the future. There are no utopias.
Will we prevent the next horrid episode? No.
As Sir Peel said in the last Peelian Law:
To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
The drug war won’t stop any time soon. It should. But it won’t. Why? Look busy, Jesus is coming… It looks like the government is doing something. It is. It is creating crime instead of managing it.
The tanks and military camo gear (what I sarcastically call battle jammies every I see it around here) are not there randomly. You see it on NextDoor, posts asking what is the military doing at the 1200 block of X Street. That’s the outcome the police and your city council want more than anything but they will never admit that.
Policing by fear. Just like Nicaragua or East Germany. Wonderful. Not.
Too many podonks use policing as a cash cow. That’s unethical. Remember, war is a racket.
Today’s stance is the Hollywood of it, the CSI-[Name A City] of it. Not the job. Politicians, Chiefs, and Sheriffs want to be at the podium being tough on crime. Sir Peel said most crime is socio-economic. A real path to lowering crime long-term is things like parents not having to work three jobs to afford to live indoors so they can actually have a chance at being a parent, better education where it is needed (school is cheaper than county jail and state prison, full stop), and eliminating as much poverty as possible (read: stopping the nonsense disconnect behind the bottom tier of wages and inflation-over-time). We delivered tanks and camo helmets, you know, so they could blend in with the foliage while dealing with the incel shooting up the Hot Topic at the mall.
Our priorities are wrong and that’s why law enforcement is not working.
Just some thoughts I hope you will critically think about.