I don’t honestly know why more people aren’t outraged by this stuff. I think a good part of it is that the media doesn’t really act like they care. You don’t have anyone out there building elite opinion against no-knock raids, because they happen to other people.
I’m glad to see Obama taking some steps in regards to civil liberties, if he wants to help out his fellow Americans, particularly African-Americans, who I’m going to bet are disproportionately the victims of these police state tactics, he can raise some awareness for us.
The media don’t seem to care about this stuff because it implies that unionized government employees make mistakes, both of fact and judgment. If the police do this, why would the bureaucrats that control your health care be any better?
I had a friend who was pretty brutally beaten by Petaluma police officers some years back. (A little guy, about 5’6″, in the middle of the day.) He woke up in a hospital bed after they kneed him in the kidneys. This was a county where Republicans didn’t usually run serious candidates for Congress or state legislature anymore, because it was so overwhelmingly Democrat.
So I found an attorney who specialized in police brutality cases in Oakland–and he said that there was almost no chance of success in our county. Juries simply refused to believe that police did bad things.
I for one am outraged. What can we do to make this stop?
I don’t have any good ideas, Alex. To some degree, I think it’s a local issue. You have to make it painful for the politicians that allow it to happen. Most police forces are controlled at the local level, but there are certainly things that can be done on a national level to raise awareness.
“I think a good part of it is that the media doesn’t really act like they care.”
The only civil liberty the media stands behind is the First Amendment, and then only when it benefits them.
Several commenters above ask how to make this stop? One way is to get crime rates down so low that most people are not so much in terror of the criminals that they are prepared to accept “mistakes” this outrageous by the police.
I think it is no coincidence that many of these incidents happen in inner cities, where the police have a difficult job, and much of the population is rightfully scared of the criminals.