The consequences for cops who draw public attention due to their extreme levels of brutality, in this new age of citizen journalism, is instructive. The people are more than happy to administer justice when the state’s courts refuse to. Despite his release from prison, Johannes Mehserle — the murderer of Oscar Grant in Oakland — is regularly recognized and ostracized, sometimes leaving public establishments in shame when noticed by the decent people around him. Lt. John Pike, infamous for pepper spraying peaceful UC Davis students as they sat quietly on the ground, wound up retiring on disability with a nervous breakdown from the public hostility he experienced daily.

As I wrote of Pike in 2011, Wilson will probably spend the rest of his life afraid to leave his house. He’s hardly begun to grasp the hell the rest of his life is going to be. His phone number, email address and street address soon will be (if they aren’t already) widely publicized. Even if he isn’t discharged from the Ferguson police force, whenever he encounters a citizen in the course of his duties he’ll wonder if that’s a sneer of contempt or just his imagination. Every time he deals with a server or cashier, or meets anyone new, he’ll see that brief look of recognition followed by a frozen mask of politely suppressed revulsion.

He can run, but he can’t hide.

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The protesters who utter such concerns about the validity of a state prosecution of a police officer have their finger on an issue that market anarchists have long recognized. Government checks and balances are a farce. In For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard notes that allegedly “separate” branches of government are just that — separate branches of the same government. A well-functioning government depends upon the mutual success of all branches. They are not in competition with one another, despite occasionally engaging in turf wars which might create the appearance that they are. To think that one government branch, bureau or department would carry out a truly oppositional battle against another is to ignore common sense.

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Una logica c’è: come può un pubblico ministero portare avanti con convinzione un’accusa penale contro un poliziotto, quando questo è tra i suoi più stretti alleati nel sistema giudiziario penale? La relazione simbiotica che esiste tra l’ufficio del pubblico ministero e il dipartimento di polizia è chiara. Se non c’è arresto, il pubblico ministero non può formulare accuse penali. Senza un pubblico ministero che persegue legalmente il presunto criminale, il lavoro della polizia non serve a nulla. Le due parti collaborano strettamente, e quasi sempre per questioni penali. Hanno un interesse in comune, e il successo dell’una parte dipende in gran parte dal successo dell’altra.

Nella maggior parte dei casi, questa collaborazione stretta tra pubblico ministero e agente di polizia non è considerata un problema. In genere le persone ne deducono che polizia e pubblico ministero formano una squadra; come due persone in due diversi punti di una catena di montaggio. Ma in un caso come quello di Darren Wilson la parte accusata di un crimine è un agente di polizia. Qual è il pubblico ministero, che dipende dalla collaborazione fattiva con la polizia, che vuole alienarsi le simpatie del dipartimento portando avanti un’accusa contro uno dei suoi uomini? Certo è possibile che ci siano ribelli, ma è logico supporre che non abbondino.

Chi protesta, e dà voce alle proprie preoccupazioni riguardo la credibilità dello stato quando persegue un agente di polizia, non fa altro che mettere un dito sulla piaga che gli anarchici di mercato da tempo riconoscono come tale. La separazione dei poteri è una farsa. Nel suo saggio Per una Nuova Libertà, Murray Rothbard nota come le presunte branche “separate” del potere sono proprio quello: branche separate dello stesso potere. Il buon funzionamento dello stato dipende dalla collaborazione tra le varie branche. Non sono in concorrenza tra loro, anche se a volte si buttano in dispute da pianerottolo per far credere il contrario. Pensare che una branca, un ufficio o un dipartimento dello stato possano combattere sinceramente contro un proprio simile significa rinunciare al buon senso.

Accentuando l’arretratezza del sistema giuridico penale, inoltre, il pubblico ministero porta avanti il caso contro il presunto criminale non nel nome della vittima, ma al contrario nel nome del “popolo”. Questo “popolo” senza nome viene presentato come parte lesa in un processo penale, e anche qui dovremmo chiederci che senso abbia. Nel caso di Michael Brown, la vera vittima è ovviamente Michael Brown. Ogni volta che viene commesso un crimine, dovrebbe essere la vera vittima a portare avanti l’accusa. L’unica parte interessata è la vittima. Nel caso di Michael Brown, se la sua famiglia avesse avuto la possibilità di scegliere, il pubblico ministero sarebbe stata l’ultima persona che avrebbero scelto per essere rappresentati in tribunale.

L’uccisione di Michael Brown, anzi l’uccisione di qualunque cittadino per mano della polizia, serve ad evidenziare alcuni degli enormi difetti congeniti del sistema penale americano (e non solo quello americano, es). Che, fin dal principio, è schierato a favore dello stato.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Sappiamo già che la “giustizia” di stato è a favore degli sbirri, ai quali non si applicano gli standard di giustizia e ingiustizia. Le giurie sono selezionate sulla base della disponibilità a credere le dichiarazioni della polizia e del pubblico ministero. Se la polizia, inseguendo un delinquente non violento uccide qualche passante innocente, l’accusa ricade sul sospetto. Se un poliziotto si sbuccia le nocche picchiando la vittima svenuta, alla lunga lista di accuse gettate per costringerla al patteggiamento si aggiunge quella di “aggressione e percosse”. Un poliziotto che dice “sentivo che la mia vita era in pericolo” riceve il beneficio del dubbio, che abbia sparato il chihuahua di famiglia davanti ai bambini o un ragazzino disarmato alle spalle. Se qualcuno viene pestato a morte per “resistenza a pubblico ufficiale” mentre è in coma diabetico o ha un attacco epilettico, o “si suicida” con i polsi ammanettati dietro le spalle, anche in questi casi lo sbirro riceve il beneficio del dubbio.

Perciò sapevamo che il rinvio a giudizio era improbabile. Un cambiamento della cultura poliziesca assassina e senza legge verrà da fuori, non da dentro il sistema.

Il sistema giudiziario criminale ha sempre protetto gli sbirri dalla giustizia. Fino a qualche tempo fa, non esisteva alcuna versione alternativa dei fatti se non nella stampa radicale clandestina e Indymedia. Le cose cominciarono a cambiare con la ripresa di Rodney King, in posizione fetale, preso a calci e manganellate da una mezza dozzina di sbirri. Ma dati i costi e le dimensioni delle videocamere e il ruolo di guardiano dei media, un vero e proprio cambiamento è arrivato solo con la possibilità di registrare di nascosto con strumenti disponibili a tutti, e con sistemi indipendenti per la diffusione dei video.

Oggi che praticamente tutti possiedono uno smartphone e possono pubblicare i filmati sul web, il momento è arrivato. La sfida alla versione dei fatti della polizia, condotta con controprove convincenti, ha raggiunto la maturità con il movimento Occupy. Grazie a YouTube e alle riprese delle violenze della polizia a Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Tulsa e altrove, è più facile dimostrare che le versioni della polizia non sono altro che bugie.

Per un poliziotto che attira l’attenzione di tutti con la sua brutalità, le conseguenze, in questa epoca di giornalismo individuale, sono istruttive. La gente è più che contenta di fare giustizia quando i giudici si rifiutano di farlo. Johannes Mehserle, l’uomo che ha ucciso Oscar Gran a Oakland, nonostante la scarcerazione, non può evitare di essere riconosciuto ed emarginato. Capita che debba lasciare in fretta un luogo pubblico, rosso in viso, perché gli altri, le persone normali, hanno cominciato ad additarlo. Il sottotenente John Pike, tristemente famoso per aver spruzzato con uno spray al peperoncino gli studenti della Università di Davis seduti pacificamente per terra, dopo aver sperimentato giorno dopo giorno l’ostilità del pubblico, ha ottenuto la pensione d’invalidità per esaurimento nervoso.

Come scrissi nel 2011 a proposito di Pike, Wilson probabilmente passerà il resto della sua vita con la paura di uscire di casa. Ancora non si rende conto dell’inferno che lo attende. Il suo numero di telefono, l’indirizzo email e l’indirizzo di casa diventeranno presto dominio pubblico, se non lo sono già. Magari resterà in servizio a Ferguson. Ma tutte le volte che, in servizio, incontrerà qualcuno, si chiederà se quella che vede è una smorfia di disgusto o solo la sua immaginazione. Ogni volta che avrà a che fare con un cameriere o un cassiere, ogni volta che incontrerà qualche persona nuova, vedrà nei suoi occhi quel breve lampo che indica riconoscimento seguito da una maschera di ghiaccio di repulsione educatamente repressa. Potrà scappare, ma non potrà nascondersi.

Dio disse a Caino: “La voce del sangue di tuo fratello grida a me dalla terra,” e lo condannò a vivere come un “vagabondo e fuggiasco… sulla terra.” Poiché Caino temeva la vendetta degli uomini offesi, “il Signore mise un segno su Caino, perché nessuno, trovandolo, lo uccidesse.”

Darren Wilson ha il marchio di Caino. I sicari di stato la fanno facile nel sistema “giudiziario” statale. Non altrettanto facile è per loro sfuggire alla giustizia popolare, ai nostri occhi, ai filmati, ad internet, all’ostracismo, alla vergogna.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Whether or not Wilson shot Brown unjustifiably, and whether or not Brown provoked the shooting by grabbing for Wilson’s gun, the police — and the government officials who employ and arm them — are a big problem in this country. (The Eric Garner chokehold killing has none of the ambiguity of the Brown case.)

Unfortunately, it takes a shooting such as the one in Ferguson to spotlight the problem. And that presents its own problem. The claim that the police are routinely dangerous to innocent people — mostly blacks and Hispanics — appears to stand or fall with the headline case of the week. But that can’t be the correct way to judge the bigger issue. As Jason Lee Byas writes,

The way people are talking about this case seems to imply that if Wilson’s use of force was not in necessary self-defense, the police are out of control — and if it was, everything’s fine.…

Even if Darren Wilson turns out to be a near-perfect moral exemplar, the police are out of control.

Reuben Fischer-Baum writes that the shooting in Ferguson has “drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police.”

The national government purports to keep count of “justifiable” police homicides, but that’s apparently all. “‘Unjustifiable homicide by police’ is not a classification,” Fischer-Baum notes.

Among the problems with the collection of data,” he writes, is that the “FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR [Supplementary Homicide Report], relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data.”

Thus, he concludes, “the SHR’s ‘justifiable police homicide’ number [400] is not a useful approximation of how many people are killed by the police.”

The Wall Street Journal agrees:

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105 of the country’s largest police agencies found more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.

The Journal quotes Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan: “When cops are killed, there is a very careful account and there’s a national database. Why not the other side of the ledger?”

Data do show that blacks are more likely than whites to fall into police clutches for drug and gunoffenses, even though whites are more likely to commit these victimless so-called crimes. Does anyone doubt that young black males walking down the street are more likely to have a police encounter than young white males are? If you doubt this, you’re not paying attention.

The ultimate cause of this problem is that the police are the domestic armed troops of America’s rulers — falsely called “representatives” — and the rest of us are the ruled. They know it, and we are increasingly coming to know it. Most of the “laws” they enforce against us violate our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The chasm between rulers and ruled exists everywhere in the country, but it exists on a spectrum from the barely noticeable to the extreme. Obviously, it’s most extreme in poorer black communities, where race and class prejudice sit atop the general disdain for the ruled. (St. Louis County, MO, has gone to outrageous lengths, as Radley Balko shows.)

Some critics of police brutality and racism assume that ending prohibitions on drugs and guns — both worthy ends, of course — would eliminate or reduce police abuse. I’m not convinced. Too many young blacks have been harassed or worse by cops claiming that the “suspects” appeared to be casing a store or engaging in some other suspicious activity having nothing to do with drugs or guns.

Repealing victimless-“crime” statutes is imperative, but we also must rethink the top-down model of policing. After all, London didn’t get a police force until 1829. We could declare the experiment a flop and move on.

It seems logical: how could a state prosecutor possibly carry out a truly adversarial criminal prosecution of one of his closest allies in the state criminal justice system — a police officer? The symbiotic relationship between the prosecutor’s office and the police department is clear. Without arrests, the prosecutor has no criminal charges to press. Without a prosecutor to pursue the legal case against the alleged criminal, the police officer’s work is all for nought. The two offices work closely together, almost always collaborating in criminal matters. They have mutual interests, the one’s success depending largely on the success of the other.

This close working relationship between prosecutor and police officer is not viewed as controversial in most cases. People generally understand that police officers and prosecutors are a team — much like two members at different points in a factory assembly line. But in a prosecution like that of Darren Wilson, the criminal defendant is the police officer. What prosecutor, who depends upon a good working relationship with his local police department, wants to alienate the department by zealously prosecuting one of its members? It’s certainly possible, but one would have to think that such rebel prosecutors are few and far between.

The protesters who utter such concerns about the validity of a state prosecution of a police officer have their finger on an issue that market anarchists have long recognized. Government checks and balances are a farce. In For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard notes that allegedly “separate” branches of government are just that — separate branches of the same government. A well-functioning government depends upon the mutual success of all branches. They are not in competition with one another, despite occasionally engaging in turf wars which might create the appearance that they are. To think that one government branch, bureau or department would carry out a truly oppositional battle against another is to ignore common sense.

Further compounding the backwardness of the state criminal justice system, the prosecutor carries out a legal case against the alleged criminal, not on behalf of the victim, but instead, on behalf of “the people.” These unidentified “people” are presented as the aggrieved party in a state criminal prosecution, but again, common sense leads us to question the wisdom of this setup. The real victim in Michael Brown’s case was clearly Michael Brown. In all crimes, it is the actual victim who ought to be carrying out the prosecution of the criminal. The victim alone is the interested party in the matter. In Michael Brown’s case, had Brown’s surviving family members had a choice, a state prosecutor would likely have been the last attorney they would have selected to represent them in the courtroom.

Michael Brown’s killing, indeed all police killings of citizens, serve to highlight some of the enormous procedural flaws inherent within the American criminal justice system. It is skewed in favor of the state from the get-go.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Il Difetto Congenito della Giustizia Penale

We already know the state’s “justice” system is stacked in favor of cops, who enjoy immunity from ordinary standards of right and wrong. Juries are selected for credulous acceptance of police and prosecutorial claims. If police in pursuit of a non-violent offender kill innocent bystanders, the suspect is held criminally liable. If a cop gets bloody knuckles from beating an unconscious victim, “assault and battery” are added to the long list of charges flung at the accused to blackmail her into a plea deal. A cop who says “I felt my life was in danger” receives the benefit of doubt — whether for shooting a family’s chihuahua in front of the children, or an unarmed teenager in the back. If someone is beaten to death for “resisting arrest” while in a diabetic coma or an epileptic seizure, or “committing suicide” with hands cuffed behind his back, cops still get that benefit of doubt.

So we already knew an indictment was unlikely. Any change to lawless, killer police culture will come from outside, not within, the system.

The criminal justice system has always protected cops from justice. Until recently, there was no publicly available counter-narrative outside radical underground newspapers and Indymedia. Things began to change with the video footage of Rodney King, curled into a fetal position, kicked and bludgeoned by half a dozen cops. But given the expensive and cumbersome nature of camcorders and the broadcast media’s gatekeeping role, real change awaited cheap, ubiquitous, easily concealed video recording capability and independent means of reaching the public.

With near-universal smart phone ownership and the easy streaming of video to the Web, that day has come. Challenges to the official police framing of events with compelling counter-narratives came into their own with the Occupy movement. Thanks to YouTube and streaming video links of police violence in Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Tulsa and elsewhere, it was easy to prove that police accounts were flat-out lies.

The consequences for cops who draw public attention due to their extreme levels of brutality, in this new age of citizen journalism, is instructive. The people are more than happy to administer justice when the state’s courts refuse to. Despite his release from prison, Johannes Mehserle — the murderer of Oscar Grant in Oakland — is regularly recognized and ostracized, sometimes leaving public establishments in shame when noticed by the decent people around him. Lt. John Pike, infamous for pepper spraying peaceful UC Davis students as they sat quietly on the ground, wound up retiring on disability with a nervous breakdown from the public hostility he experienced daily.

As I wrote of Pike in 2011, Wilson will probably spend the rest of his life afraid to leave his house. He’s hardly begun to grasp the hell the rest of his life is going to be. His phone number, email address and street address soon will be (if they aren’t already) widely publicized. Even if he isn’t discharged from the Ferguson police force, whenever he encounters a citizen in the course of his duties he’ll wonder if that’s a sneer of contempt or just his imagination. Every time he deals with a server or cashier, or meets anyone new, he’ll see that brief look of recognition followed by a frozen mask of politely suppressed revulsion. He can run, but he can’t hide.

God told Cain, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground,” sentencing him to live as “a fugitive and a vagabond … in the earth.” Because Cain feared the vengeance of outraged humanity, “the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”

Darren Wilson bears the mark of Cain. The state’s own hired killers skate through the state’s “justice” system. But the people’s justice system — our eyes, video, doxxing, ostracism and shaming — can never be evaded.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Nessuna Giustizia dallo Stato per Michael Brown. Ma la Giustizia Popolare è Appena Iniziata.

I lived near Ferguson for 12 years. I drove an ice cream truck up and down its streets for two summers. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Canfield Green, the complex Michael Brown lived in, in 2012. So I can say, on reasonable personal authority, that media portrayals of Ferguson as some kind of crime-plagued racial ghetto are baloney. Ferguson is, or at least was, an eminently peaceful community.

American “police forces” of today, on the other hand, are de facto military organizations, occupying the communities they claim to “protect and serve.” They are part and parcel of a political system which, by its very nature, evolves continuously toward complete control of everyone and everything – the exact opposite of anything having to do with “peace.”

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The most obvious statement to make at the outset is that neither jaywalking nor suspicion of petty theft nor running away from cops are crimes punishable by death anywhere in the United States. The fact that Mike Brown was killed for one of those three things is outrageous, and people were rightfully angry about it. But that isn’t everything at work in Ferguson. The demography of the town is telling.

According to data taken from the US Census Bureau and a handful of news reports, roughly 64 percent of Ferguson’s population of 21,203 – 14,290 people – are black, yet its mayor, James Knowles, is white; five members of its six-person City Council are white; six of its seven school board officials are white; and out of the 53 sworn officers on the Ferguson Police Department, three – three! – are black.

There’s more. According to the Missouri Attorney General’s office, even though white people in Ferguson are statistically more likely to be found carrying “contraband” on their persons during police searches than black people, the latter are six times more likely to be stopped in their vehicles by local PD, 11 times more likely to be searched and 12 times more likely to be arrested.

Mike Brown’s murder served as a catalyst for an extensively racially profiled, harassed and disenfranchised population to attempt to fight back.

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Historian and political scientist Mark Neocleous explains that the “term Polizeistaat, usually translated as ‘police state,’ came into general English usage in the 1930s,” increasingly used at that time to describe totalitarian governments such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Still, Neocleous is quick to clarify that, notwithstanding this popular twentieth century usage, it presents a “historical problem” to the extent that it suggests a certain inappropriate picture of “the original ‘police states.’” Those original police states were, rather than brutal, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, early predecessors to the modern welfare state, or Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Given these historical connections between the welfare state and the police state, we might revise our understanding beyond the twentieth century definition, broadening the concept to include not only the most extreme and draconian twentieth century tyrannies, but most, if not all, contemporary “administrative” states. Once we begin to understand these connections and the growth and development of the total state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phenomena such as the murder of Michael Brown become easier to understand. Whether we call it the welfare state or the police state, the reality is that we live in an environment completely dominated by regimentation — coercive control over and regulation of almost every aspect of our lives

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