If you don’t believe it, look around yourself wherever you are sitting or standing, whether in a building or in your car or on the street. I’ll bet you can find a CCTV camera somewhere within your field of view. Even if you can’t see it, it can almost certainly see you. If not a camera or a microphone, you’re already being monitored by your own cell phone or the black box in your car. GPS is great when you’re looking for the nearest Starbucks, but also works spectacularly well when Big Brother is looking for you. It’s also damned effective when your wife’s divorce attorney wants to document where you actually were last Tuesday night when you told the missus that you had a “late meeting”.
But the police state goes well beyond our complete lack of any expectation of privacy. The police state is about…well…police. It’s about racial profiling and police brutality and the arrogance of power. It’s about young black men being routinely stopped, harassed, searched, and often arrested in major American cities every day for little more than the crime of “walking while black”. It’s about innocent citizens being brutalized and terrified as their homes are invaded at 4am by squads of heavily armed special forces executing “no-knock” warrants for drug possession. It’s about towns no bigger than my home of Bloomington being equipped with military surplus tanks and Humvees and armored troop carriers from Iraq and Afghanistan, filled with guys in camo and full body armor who look a lot more like Rambo than Muldoon.
Here’s a quote from an anonymous op-ed written by a cop in today’s Washington Post:
Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.
That’s the kind of power American police believe they have in 2014. Constitutional rights? We don’t have no constitutional rights. We don’t need no stinking constitutional rights. Do exactly as the man in blue tells you or he has every right to shoot your disobedient ass post haste. That’s exactly what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it’s what happens in uncounted other unpublicized incidents of murder by police every week in this country. And in all too many of these cases, the cop who pulled the trigger walks away.
That shouldn’t happen with Darren Wilson. If the authorities in Ferguson want to stop the nightly protests and simmering anger, they can do it quite easily. Simply arrest Darren Wilson and charge him with murder. It’s what would happen to any one of us under similar circumstances, and had the shooter been black and male and young, he’d have been in shackles and orange coveralls since five minutes after the shooting. Darren Wilson may, in fact, have committed no crime whatsoever. Maybe, by some stretch of the limits of credulity, he was justified in shooting Brown at least six times. But if it was you or me or anyone without a badge, it would be a judge and jury making that determination.
That’s not the likely outcome in Ferguson. The case is being investigated by the local DA, who is the son and grandson of cops. He’s taking the case to a grand jury today. One has to wonder what case will be presented, and just who will be on that grand jury. Will it be like the police department in Ferguson, with three black officers out of fifty-two cops?
Welcome to the police state. You’ll do just fine…as long as you do exactly as you’re told.
BW
Kibbitz Corner 
I respectfully disagree we are no more in a ‘Police state’ then any other time in history. In actuality , I feel we are better off then any time in our history on that front. It was not that long ago that a policeman could ‘ rough up’ a subject with no consequences.Now with those same cameras you bemuse about are on the police cars and numerous mobile cameras are ubiquitous . ‘Getting away’ with that shit isn’t tolerated any more.
Does it happen, sure it does. Always has, alway will. If you come at me in a flurry and I feel it’s my life or yours, we’ll, I’ll try my best to make it yours.
Have been out of the country recently? In Italy the army was on the streets with guns and humvees. In the Caribbean there were soldiers at every entrance to every plane, loaded with assault rifles. THAT My friend is a police state.
By the by, mentioning that there were so few blacks on the police force, I wonder what the count was for Hispanics, Jews, women, Arabs, tall, short, fat and what other minorities.
I like to see the numbers on whether having a goodly number of a minority actually makes any difference at all. I look to Cincinnati who does have a ‘representative’ number and wonder.
I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. Big Brother would happily agree with your assessment that we are all safer because we are under constant surveillance, just as the police state would be happy that you feel more secure with armored personnel carriers and kevlar-sheilded-M-16-wielding-camo-clad “police” facing you as you hold your sign on a stick. And if you happen to be so impolitic to approach a policeman “in a flurry”, I’d be willing to bet your pension and mine that your chances of survival would be exponentially higher if you happened to be a sixty year-old white guy in a polo shirt than a black kid in sagging jeans.
When a white kills a black person that say it’s racism but what is it when a black kills at white person ?
Whites overwhelmingly kill other whites and blacks overwhelmingly kill other blacks. That’s neither racism nor reverse racism. It’s proximity and opportunity. When a white policeman kills an unarmed black teenager, it’s racism if the police are more likely to profile black teenagers as a threat than white teenagers…which they do. When that policeman is not charged with a crime, it’s not necessarily racism, but it’s almost certainly cronyism and corruption.
It is a dad and difficult situation.
The cameras at stop lights added in the process of being judges if they are Constitutional here in Chicago.
I am not saying the Officer was right but there was a video or a witness that is lost that Brown was resisting arrest a d since he was 6’4″ maybe the Officer lost it. I am sure we will never know. But this incident has given some people a felting of the RIGHT to throw urume filled bottles at the Police among other things. (Shades of ’68 in Grant Park in Chicago) and looting and burning stores if their own people. I have been watching this escalate day by day. Is it scary? YES. I now not what can be done. 1984 is nothing coated to this and then ISIS beheads an American reporter but that is probably a column for another day.
The chaos all over the World is out of control. I cannot think of an answer but I am a Pawn in this game.
Typo again – sad
Susan, there was no such witness. The woman giving the account of Brown’s “resisting arrest” was a friend of Darren Wilson’s and was parroting his story.
Oh, I did not know that. I think you are right about the Cronyism.
The shoe situation had escalated into a furor and usually after midnight. (I was up late and watching it unfurl live) it was hortible.) and yes, the Police are in SWAT TEAM garb. This is scary.
I think the point of a SWAT team if full garb is spupposed to be scary. Many times a show of overwhelming force actually prevents a situation from escalating out of control. But crowds are a curious thing. A true police state would just shoot everyone down or arrest everyone, put them in ahold and forget about them.
OK, so we do have a few ‘enemy combatants’ stuck in hole, and I think that is shameful after all this time. It certainly isn’t a deterrent. But preventing violence with an overwhelming show of force can work. Alas, it is usually the crowd that is in the drivers seat, thinking with so many people, THEY certainly can behave badly and won’t have to suffer the consequences.
Opinion columns and blogs are meant to provoke discussion, not validation. If you want validation, talk to your shrink.
I personally enjoy your comments. I always thought of myself as a liberal, but you my friend are way left of me.
Having a discussion is what is all about. Speak your mind. Don’t censor yourself. Strongly opinionated columns get more readers, says the guy w/o a blog. But don’t be so damn sensitive!
Bob, I agree with what you say about Blogs. We can not always agree but open forums with opposing opinions can spark a thought or an idea that was never thought of.
Now with this other shooting of the person who allegedly had some emotional problems is going to create more unrest. I keep hoping this will stop and then there is another Police shooting and the person is not equipped with the weapons of the Police. Like I said, I am not versed on how these situations “go down” and what Police have to deal with every day. It is just sad any way you look at it.
In Chicago, a 9 yr old boy was shot numerous times in Gang crossfire. I suppose this happens every day and now we have the means to report it every day, all day. That is why I do not watch the news at times.
Bob, good points as always, but not strictly right on the money. I’d be happy to quote you incident after incident of SWAT teams executing no-knock warrants on completely innocent households, sometimes with horrifying consequences, up to and including the deaths of some occupants. The police aren’t in business to keep the police safe. They are supposed to keep us safe. If that means knocking on a door with a warrant in hand, as demanded by the Constitution, and if that results in rare instances of police ending up injured or dead, that’s the job they signed up to do. If you insist on being safe at work, flip burgers, although even there you might get burned.
And police states do not necessarily quash protests by killing all the protesters. If that was true, Tianammen Square would have been cleared with 50mm machine guns. Granted, guys like Stalin built up numbers in the millions when it came to silencing dissent, but I suppose my point is that it’s a slippery slope to get to a Stalin. It starts by sitting by quietly as liberty after liberty is taken away, all because we’re told it’s necessary in order to remain “secure”.