With the new regulations for the TSA, the passing of the law violating the 4th amendment in Indiana, and the many many example videos of police abuses being posted online, it’s becoming unavoidably clear that we live in a police state.
Here are some examples:
A man is detained for photographing a railroad station in Baltomore. The police incorrectly cite the patriot act, and illegally detain him for over 40 min.
A man legally open carries his gun and is illegally detained by the police. While walking to the store a police officer draws and aims his gun at this law abiding citizen. After about an hour the police officer finds that he is in the wrong and lets this guy go. Now they are trying to charge him with crimes for not responding correctly to a police officer who was breaking the law.
This article contains several examples of people being abused by the police and then charged for recording it.
A woman at the air port has a meltdown after going through a pat down that includes sexual assault. Her son catches it on video and is repeatedly told by the TSA that he is breaking the law by filming their abuses. This of course is not true, but they still threaten to not let him fly and to steal his luggage.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390398/Shocking-moment-police-throw-disabled-man-wheelchair-slam-ground.html
Here the police arrest a man in a wheel chair by picking him up and throwing him to the ground. In their report they say that he fell out of the chair while resisting arrest, and threw in charges of assault for good measure.
In this case, to be fair, a law was passed outlawing dancing in certain public areas including the Jefferson Memorial, but that does not excuse the abuse committed by the police in conducting their arrests. When you watch the video there is clearly excessive violence and force used against people who are not resisting. They do continue to dance when told to stop, but the next step for the officers is not to throw them to the ground, choke them etc.
Now I could see how you might think that I'm just cheery picking a few cases here. You might think that this is similar to how people started to get terrified of their children being kidnapped, not because kidnappings were on the rise but because they started to get covered more and more by the news. I believe that this is different because I hear about such police abuse from more than just news stories. I don't personally know anyone who has been wrongfully detained or charged with assaulting an officer who was acting inappropriately, but second hand I do. And not second hand from some person I met on the street, but from people that I know well. I'm aware of two such cases where the person was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. They both spent time incarcerated without committing a crime aside from interacting with the police.
There seem to be two major problems. The first is that there is not proper prosecution of police officers. For example, the office that drew his gun on and ordered a citizen to get on his knees when the citizen was doing nothing wrong, was not suspended or fired or jailed, even though any of those would be appropriate. Police officers are subject to the law same as anyone else. There is no reason that this case should be handled any different than if I pulled a gun on someone and ordered them to get on their knees.
The other problem is incredible incompetence. These law enforcers don't seem to have a clue as to what the actual specifics of the law are. When laymen are quoting the directive numbers to the police to justify the legality of their behavior and the police still don't get it, we have a problem. And beyond that, for such laws as the video tapping of police, it's like the public is running the same sting operation on them over and over again, and they fall for it every time. How many videos like the ones that I've linked to have to come out before they start to realize that yes it is legal to record them. Not only is it legal, it seems that its very necessary because they have a habit of breaking the law and then lying about it in court in order to get their victims thrown in prison. And the double standard is glaring. When they get away with their lies, an innocent serves time which really wreaks their lives. When they are conclusively caught in the lie due to someone video taping their abuses, they attempt to prosecute the video tapper, or just call the whole thing off. Rarely is the officer punished, and if they are its normally just a suspension.
In order to have a civilized, law abiding society, we need better from our law enforcement. When they enforce laws that don't exist, they need to be fired. When they commit crimes they need to be prosecuted.
