>Source:
>Counter Punch
>http://www.counterpunch.org/
>February 2, 2000
>
>CRAZED COPS; FALLEN "HEROES"
>A cop would probably say it's unfair, just coincidence, but the news
>stories are coming over the brow of the hill, shoulder to shoulder, and
>they do spell out a larger message.
>
>The police chief of Los Angeles, Bernard C.  Parks, announces his
>department's reckoning that 99 people were framed by disgraced
>ex-officer-turned-informant Rafael Perez and partners.  Parks is calling on
>DA Gil Garcetti to dismiss the cases "en masse".
>
>Illinois governor George Ryan suspends his state's imposaition of the death
>penalty, declaring that he "cannot support a system which.  has proven so
>fraught with error." Since l977 Illinois has executed twelve and freed
>thirteen from Death Row after their innocence had been conclusively
>established.
>
>In New York, four officers are going on trial for fatally riddling an
>unarmed man, Amadou Diallo, with 41 bullets.
>
>A generation's worth of "wars on crime" and of glorification of the men and
>women in blue have engendered a culture of law enforcement that is all too
>often viciously violent,contemptuous of the law, morally corrupt and
>confident of the credulity of the courts.  In Los Angeles prosecutors and
>judges chose to believe Perez and his partners as they perjured themselves
>in case after case, year after year.  In Chicago police ignored witnesses,
>discounted testimony, as they bustled the innocent onto Death Row.  In New
>York a plain-clothes posse of heavily armed cops roamed the streets,
>justifiably confident that that their lethal onslaught would receive
>offical protection, which it did until an unprecedented popular uproar
>brought the perpetrators to book.
>
>These aren't isolated cases.  There isn't a state in the union where cops
>aren't perjuring themselves, using excessive force, targeting minorities.
>Those endless wars on crime and drugs-a staple of 90 percent of America's
>politicians these last thirty years-have engendered not merely our 2
>million prisoners but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of
>homicide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers.  Time and
>again one hears stories attesting to the fact that they are ready, at a
>moment's notice or a slender pretext, to blow someone away, beat him to a
>pulp, throw him in the slammer, sew him up with police perjuries and
>snitch-driven charges, and try to toss him in a dungeon for a
>quarter-century or more.
>
>We're in regular touch these days with a Haitian in New Jersey called Max
>Antoine.  In 1996 Max had the misfortune to question the right of three
>Irvington cops to "act like the Ton Ton Macoutes." Max, a paralegal,
>remarked this to his sister Marie while the three cops were in the midst of
>a 2 am warrantless rampage through their house, yelling at partygoers to
>leave and shoving them around.
>
>Max, believing that he had come to the land of constitutional protections,
>told Marie to write down the cops' badge numbers so he could file an
>official complaint.  This was poor judgment on Max's part.  On the account
>of many witnesses the cops smashed Max with a nightstick, kicked and beat
>him, shoved his head through a glass door, sprayed him with burning
>chemicals, tossed him in a cell for two days and denied him medical
attention.
>Max was left with a fractured eye socket, a broken jaw, bowel and bladder
>damage, and spinal injuries.  He went through seventeen surgeries, is now
>paralyzed below the waist, depressed, suicidal and saddled with huge
>medical bills.
>
>Having thus effectively destroyed his life, the Irvington police charged
>him with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.  A few weeks
>ago, on the verge of a trial, the prosecutors dropped the charges.  Max's
>civil suit against the police is pending.  The Justice Department has
>declined to take an interest.
>
>Stuck in his wheelchair, Max takes an understandable interest in other
>episodes of cop mayhem.  Just the other day he faxed us a news clip with
>the headline Black Youth Dies in Police Custody.  On the account of
witnesses,
>20-year-old John Franklin Brown was repeatedly bashed on the head with a
>thirteen-inch flashlight by Atlanta police officer J.K.  Crenshaw.  Brown
>was face down in the dirt, and Crenshaw hit him so hard the flashlight
>broke.  He also kicked Brown repeatedly and left him bleeding on the
>ground, in which position Brown seems to have remained for some time before
>being taken Crenshaw claims he was answering a call about a trespass,
>chased Brown across several backyards and then beat him with his
>fists.  He's been placed on administrative leave.  Crenshaw has a career
>record of eight complaints of excessive force, though no known disciplinary
>measures have been taken against him.
>
>A lot of cops are walking time bombs.  Even soothing words spoken to them
>in a calm voice can spark a red gleam in their eyes.  God help you if
>you're black.  The other day a black man in LA described the time he spent
>each day figuring out routes across the city to reduce his chances of
>getting pulled over, maybe beaten, maybe framed, maybe imprisoned.
>
>Police work is far from being one of America's more dangerous occupations,
>but cops assiduously cultivate that impression.  Police funerals are
>getting to be on a par with the obsequies of European royalty fifty years
ago.
>Recently two San Francisco policemen crashed in their helicopter during a
>routine maintenance flight.  Their funeral was attended by a huge throng of
>police from across California, state officials and the Mayor of San
>Francisco.  Would a city engineer or maintenance woman get this kind of
>send-off, even if their jobs demonstrated a higher statistical risk?
>
>The press feeds obsessively on these "fallen hero" rituals.  On January 12
>in Unity, Maine, 6-year-old triplets died in a house fire.  County Sheriff
>Robert Jones, also a part-time fireman, was filling a tanker with water a
>couple of blocks from the blaze when he collapsed and died.
>It was his 48th birthday.  He got a hero's send-off, with massed ranks of
>state cops in attendance.  True, Sheriff Jones might have been on the brink
>of bold deeds, possibly even entailing the supreme sacrifice, but that
>seems a frail peg on which to hang a state funeral.  These ceremonies have
>always been demonstration rituals designed to protect the cops' budgetary
>appropriations and boost their overall image.
>
>We suppose at least some of this often lethal cop edginess comes from a
>fractured sense of class status and function.  After all, most police come
>from the working class and the vast majority shift class loyalty in the
>course of duty.  Historically, this switch was recognized and fostered,
>especially during the time of police union organizing.  In the early
>industrial period police wages began to run at about double those of
>similarly unskilled workers, and this doesn't even take into account
>bonuses for strikebreaking.
>Better working conditions meant greater allegiance to semimilitary
>organization.
>Yet despite such job perks for cops, morale often lagged.
>
>One of the grander ideas for the necessary morale boosting came from
>big-city mayors, elevating cop death to the status of near sainthood by
>flying the flag at half-mast and cajoling entire city staffs to turn out
>for a blue funeral.
>CP