IF YOU AREN'T PARANOID THEN YOU AREN'T PAYING ATENTION.

Massive amounts of Federal money, our money, is being poured in to arm and equip local police and paramilitary forces.  I have stood and seen them used against us.  We are under surveillance by hundreds of sophisticated HALO cameras funded by, again, Federal Funds.   

 Federal money=Federal Police.

We are----rapidly--- headed to having a National Police Force.  By allusion, illusion, collusion and deception.  If you think the local cops are bad, ----you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Check out the National Defense Security Act of 2012.  I believe some ‘law and order’ folks think this would be a good thing.  But they haven’t been arrested-----yet.  There seems to be an expanding insinuation of men and women in military garb on our streets ‘assisting’ or ‘advising’ local law enforcement..  Remember when we had advisers in Vietnam.  After a while we accept them as being friendly, helpful,  young people.  Is this what we want? 

Even as I write the government is magnanimously reducing our Army.  An Army exhausted, battered, worn and dehumanized by years of steady redeployment in wars that make no sense.  Come to think about of it, no war ever did.  “Hey, thanks guys, but we don’t need you anymore.”  People with all kinds of combat related mental disorders will be released with little support system into a civilian population already burdened with no job market and an economy several years into a depression.   Many of them will join the growing number of unwelcome homeless Travis Bickles’ who are being shuttled from street to park to street.  And, I suspect, a number will be absorbed into our police forces and prison systems paid for with federal funds.  Someone has to keep dissent down.  I am already seeing the police wear more khaki than blue, and with riot gear, they look like storm troopers.   You do not want to see these guys running through your backyard toward your back door.

Barney Fife is certainly gone but with him went Gary Cooper in High Noon.  

The Shadow--------Who guards the guardians?

THE POLICE ARE THE PRODUCT OF THEIR ENVIRONMENT.

They follow orders.  They serve their masters.  (Some of them seem to serve with a malicious, sadistic glee.)  They let testosterone participate in overkill.   The police are afraid of the people they are hired to protect.  Interestingly the Power Elite are afraid of everyone else.  That’s a hell of a note.  Therefore they respond with overwhelming force.  Not coincidentally, this is the same mindset as the military.  This explains the massive police presence in an attempt to quell a lawful peaceful protest.  Lately the Occupy movement encampment across from the capitol.  About 200 well equipped cops and photographers and reporters against maybe 40 cold and hungry kids.  Protesters that apparently struck a cold and unnamed fear into the hearts of the Downtown Businessmen.         

If Mountain City would spend the money they pay out in lawsuits involving police misconduct, for better training and higher salaries, we would all be better off.  Many cops have a control thing.  The perfectly pressed blues, shiny brass buttons and cartridges, and gleaming leather lend an atmosphere of authority.   It is the Top Sgt. in the Army calling me “Sir” with just the amount of pause before the “Sir” to show utter contempt.  Some find it easier to make the law rather than uphold it.  It becomes easy to beat some punk senseless in a dark corner.  Your partner will not rat you out because you may be the one to cover him when he gets into a tight spot,

It is my perception that Mountain City and other municipalities are picking people who have a tendency to take a sadistic pleasure in their jobs and putting them in SWAT and other like teams.

One should avoid the police at all costs.  But when you are in trouble who are you going to call?

THE POLICE ARE THE POLICE, WHETHER HERE OR IN GERMANY

                        ------------She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to be menaced by one.  Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman----for she had never thought of them as being very bright----seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it.  Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own.  For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless. / Another Country / James Baldwin

You learn to become a policeman by attending the police academy.  Then you learn to become a policeman by riding as a rookie in a patrol car with a veteran.

 And this is where the police culture steps in.  Many people would like to forget that 50 years ago the Mountain City Police ran the biggest burglary ring in the country.  And, true, those times and those men are long gone.  But I have to wonder if this attitude and these legends have not permeated the cop culture, changing it for the worse.       

It is the police culture that is engrained.  The police operate under an us or them, good guys and bad guys, siege mentality.  Mountain City and Englewood police departments want to be like LA cops.   Might makes right and right makes might. 

   The last chief of Mountain City police played politics and kept his job for 12 years while his department ran wild.  The new chief is an import from the mid South who is here to change the police culture.  If you think this will happen, there is a cruise ship in Italy that I will sell you cheap. 

The Mayor is new and is already compromised.   The Chief is so new he still has to ask where the toilet is.  The Governor, while I am sure is still quite involved in Mountain City is standing on the East steps of the Statehouse listening for the call of the Great (Kinda’) White Father.  I have personal experience on coming in from the outside and trying to change Jack.  If I were Chief White I wouldn’t unpack my bags.

This will be continued and picked up on my next post.

                                                                           

                                                                                 The Shadow Knows------Oh, How Very Well!