Fighting Back in the New Civil War

COMMENTARY by Col. John Mills — USMC (Ret.)

Many assert there is a “coming” civil war. News flash—we’re in it.  Pure and simple, we are in a modern, information-age civil war for the future of the United States.

War and societal conflict come in many forms. It doesn’t have to be lines of Blue and Gray soldiers with bayonets lined up against each other, and it doesn’t have to be rifle or cannon fire.

Right now, the primary fields of conflict in the modern American civil war are political histrionics, social media perversions of truth, litigation, street mobbery, and financial warfare to interdict revenue streams. Plus, we have foreign players, primarily the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that are actively stoking our chaos for their own desired outcomes.

We must understand the panorama of the chaos unfolding in front of us so we can decisively take action in the right direction for the good of our republic. Our classically liberal, democratic republic based on a written constitution is the most incredible thing ever created by man (and woman).

Never before has a governance system done so much good for so many people. It’s not perfect, but that’s the beauty of our system, we have processes and methods to address injustices and our warts. This system has never existed before, and never will again if we allow the street chaos to intellectually shut us down, intimidate us, and force us to sit idly by while our incredible Constitution is placed by radical elements in the dustbin of history.

The modern information-age American Civil War is in progress. It’s fundamentally a struggle between a Constitutionalist view of America and globalist elites who despise individual countries, who desire to control societies and populations on a worldwide scale, and prefer to dismiss our Constitution as an asterisk in history to be expediently used or ignored as needed. The domestic branch of the globalist elites has no problem aligning itself with the CCP if it means taking the American White House.  Very disturbing indeed.

‘Somewheres’ Versus ‘Anywheres’

Taking a cue from Prager U’s incredible video presented by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there are the “Somewheres”—those whose lives are tied to a particular place—and there are the “Anywheres”—those who can live comfortably in any of several of the world’s great cities.

While there are many “Anywheres” in the globalist camp, there are more of us who are in the “Somewheres” camp, anchored by family, faith, job, community, or other factors. Globalists seem to have control over much of the media, our institutions, academia, and even some local and state governments, and parts of our federal government. Somewheres, though, represent most of the population.

Anywheres seek to replace family, faith, job, and community with a never ending stream of new ideas of how the utopian society should live or look. They’re never satisfied, never ceasing, never ending in driving how society should evolve or be recreated. Whether it’s immediate release with no bond from arrest for street crime, open borders, never ending depictions of new alternative lifestyles, expanding government, criminalization of any questioning of their agenda, or controlling the size of your soft drink—they will never rest.

What does their ceaseless change create? Chaos—exactly what we’re seeing now. A very important caveat on this construct of “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”—this is a very important point—in almost all conflicts, most of the population are “fence-sitters.” They’re just trying to survive and waiting to see which way the conflict trends.

It’s our job to pull enough of the fence-sitters onto our side to secure the victory.

Antifa, the Vanguard

Antifa didn’t come out of thin air. It traces to Baader-Meinhof and Soviet money from the 1980s. Now they’re the brownshirts of the globalists, doing their dirty work for them. Taking perverted and twisted advantage of the injustice of George Floyd’s killing, they’ve seized the momentum.

And a huge accelerant to their momentum is CCP “walking around money” used to incite street mobs. “Walking around money” is an old-school term of tradecraft from the Intelligence community. Admittedly, it’s a page out of our own playbook from the 1950s, when the Dulles brothers strategically refined the organizing street counter-protest art form toward taking off the gloves when necessary against Soviet- and Marxist-inspired instability around the globe.

We’ve lost this art form and need to resurrect it to an extent. Unfortunately, all the little Charlies running around the hallways of the headquarters building at CIA are too busy doing other things—perhaps CNN and MSNBC have openings on either side of the Lisa Page time-slots for Charlie in his post-CIA career.

But the CCP has a limited amount of seed money for street violence in the United States. I would suggest they’ve already blown a lot of their cash reserves in this initial round of chaos. For every additional dollar they steer to Antifa to hand out on the street, that’s one less dollar to restart their economy, fund the Belt and Road Initiative, steal our intellectual property, or build their military. Their resources aren’t endless.

Antifa is simply the next round in the game of the globalists to unseat President Donald Trump. They tried Russiagate, Impeachmentgate, exploited the CCP virus, and now mobs are tearing down statues.

What’s next? We see the adjunct of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) run by Antifa, and we also see the haughty retired generals and admirals harrumphing over the president.

Two quick observations on both (I do have some firsthand knowledge of both). I grew up just north of Capitol Hill—this place was “lost” 50 years ago. Nothing is new or surprising to me about what’s going on there.

And about the generals and admirals, if there’s one thing retired general and flag officers do, they pander, jockey, and compete for board positions and think tank seats. And the way they do it in this town—they do their own version of “virtue-signaling.” Victor Davis Hanson’s piece on this topic is a must-read. There is a craven, self-serving motive behind their choreographed cadence. It’s no coincidence.

Now or Nothing for the CCP

“Statue tearing down” shows good for the cameras and plays well back in Beijing, but don’t be distracted. Focus on imploding the CCP. This “tearing down” is contrived and scripted out of the Maoist playbook—mainly to make them feel good about themselves.

I have never been a fan of Confederate symbology—but street “mobbery” is not the way our democratic society takes care of things. Ultimately, this radical behavior will turn most of the fence-sitters toward our side. The chaos in the Democrat cities is also driving an exodus of lawful citizens.

The tipping point may have been reached already in the Antifa street party. The feckless mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, is now asserting that Seattle will retake control of the Capitol Hill Zone. I would suggest the litigation liability of the mayor and the city has now reached a point where they have no choice.

But the climax is beginning—the CCP is under immense pressure as dedicated forces relentlessly pursue it out of the world capital markets. Although not well understood, this is the true battle and increases the panic of the CCP and its globalist allies who know they have six months of oxygen left (oxygen being the capital the CCP needs to fund their collapsed economy).

They know they must do two things: outmaneuver the strategy to cut their access to capital, and beat Trump in November. The CCP knows its economy has flatlined, and the globalists see their Democrat-run urban areas collapsing and creating a flood of departures that is depopulating their centers of power. All they will have left are Antifa members and those who are in the country unlawfully. Not a good combination.

A Battle of Wills

Despite the vivid images of chaos, don’t be deterred, this is a battle of wills. All conflicts are ultimately a battle of wills. Countermoves are being conducted, watch these closely.

Get the groups to turn on each other. There is much evidence that Antifa is in great friction with others—this is the ultimate counter-insurgency strategy. The stage is not big enough for the CCP, the globalists, and their brownshirts, Antifa—they will turn on each other.

Focus on pushing the CCP out of the U.S., London, and Tokyo exchanges.

Break up the power of social media. Turning Google and the others into baby Googles by application of antitrust and RICO statutes and remove Section 230 protection so they can be sued. 

Ensure the integrity of the U.S. election process by removing those intent on fraud.

Hold governors and mayors accountable for the rational and constitutional behavior of their areas. Make them own their chaos.

Assert Federal intervention only when there is a compelling case for federal action and clear statute supporting the action.

Deter the CCP from military adventurism, such as on the border with India.

Keep calm and carry on—stay focused on the real goal and outcome—imploding the CCP.

_______________________________________________ 

Col. John Mills (USMC-Ret.) is a national security professional with service in five eras: Cold War, Peace Dividend, War on Terror, World in Chaos, and now—Great Power Competition. He is the former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs at the U.S. Department of Defense.

____________________________________________________________

The Great American Police State: A System Enabling Racism, Brutality and Protection of BAD COPS

COMMENTARY By Steven K. Haught, Editor

Splashed across every television in the free world, viewers witnessed the images of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed in the head of George Floyd, 46, as he lay on the ground screaming “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!” until he became motionless. 

Bystanders pleaded for Chauvin to stop but he did not.  It was as if he was ruthlessly defeating a helpless enemy and the only solution was to silence him to death. All of this violence resulted from a white cop verses a black man over a possible counterfeit $20 bill?   

The footage sparked widespread condemnation and massive protests marked by rubber bullets and teargas. Minneapolis’ mayor, Jacob Frey, has said the “officer failed in the most basic human sense”.   That would be a gross understatement of the event and outcome.

Floyd’s family called for murder charges, though in the US prosecution and conviction of officers is rare, since the law gives officers wide latitude to kill, and prosecutors often have close ties with police.

However, the system of policing in America is very adept at pandering to the media.  The four Minneapolis officers involved in the killing of George Floyd were swiftly fired after the footage of his death went viral.  Imagine what might have happened had the event not become national and international news… would there have been any terminations?  Would any charges of second degree murder been filed against Chauvin?

That’s the question… what really happens to bad cops, when they are caught, fired and maybe even criminally charged? 

Let me get right to the crux of the issue… despite the decision to fire the policeman who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, along with three other officers at the scene, it’s uncertain if the officers will face long-term repercussions for the crime and complicity. 

“The officers are afforded every opportunity to clear their name and regain everything they lost – their reputation, their status and their jobs,” said Adanté Pointer, a California lawyer who represents police brutality victims. “The family has to endure disappointment after disappointment.”  

Ultimately, the police system paints the dead victim as guilty of being in the wrong, not cooperating, resisting arrest, any number of things are thrown at the wall and what sticks becomes the unfair and unjust legacy of the dead person.  In this case the biggest issue for George Floyd was being a Black American on that day and coming into contact with a mean spirited and violent white racist cop.

Here’s what going on behind the scenes right now in Minneapolis and every other city where the police unions fight for their brothers in blue.

• Prompt termination is being challenged with intent to overturn the decision of the mayor and civil authorities.  In the Floyd case the terminations were swift, but that is uncommon and often doesn’t last. 

• Officers can appeal firings, typically supported by powerful police unions. The outcome is frequently decided by arbiters in secretive hearings that never get public review.

• These men have rights too. Some civil rights advocates warn that the men could ultimately avoid legal and financial consequences, leaving the city and Floyd family on the hook for legal defense costs. 

• It is entirely possible that one, two or more of these bad cops will continue working in “other police departments” or even win back their positions with the Minneapolis department.  Officers in the US are frequently rehired after their termination for misconduct, a problem that experts say increases the likelihood of continued abuse and killings in other jurisdictions.

A recent analysis by a local Minnesota paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, found arbitrations reversed 46% of police terminations in the last five years. Police chiefs across the US have publicly complained that the process forces them to put officers back on the street after firing them for egregious conduct such as unjustified killings, sexual abuse and lying.

When officers are rehired, “it says they have a license to kill”, says Cat Brooks, an activist in Oakland CA, where transit police killed Oscar Grant in 2009. “If they killed this time, they’ve often killed before or have a history of problematic use of force.” In one Bay Area city with high rates of police violence, there are numerous officers who have been involved in more than one fatal shooting of a civilian. 

If the fired officers in Minneapolis don’t win their jobs back, “I think they’ll quietly be invited to work in other law enforcement departments”, Brooks predicted. 

Some police departments also knowingly hire officers who were fired in other jurisdictions, says Roger Goldman, an emeritus law professor at Saint Louis University and expert on police licensing. That’s often because the departments are located in smaller cities with tight budgets and can pay a lower salary to an officer who was terminated. 

The Cleveland officer who was fired after fatally shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 was hired by a small Ohio village police department four years later. His new employer defended the decision, noting the officer was never charged.

The Louisiana officer who killed Alton Sterling in 2016 as he was selling CDs outside a convenience store was eventually fired in 2018. But last year, the city reached a settlement with the officer that retracted the firing and allowed him to resign. 

“It’s really devastating. You took someone’s life,” Quinyetta McMillon, the mother of Sterling’s son, said in a recent interview. The long process of trying to get justice “impacted us really badly – emotionally, physically, mentally, it was draining”, she said, adding that it was painful to think of the obstacles Floyd’s family will face moving forward, even with the terminations. If fired officers were barred from serving as police, “it would help save a lot of lives”, McMillon said.

Sometimes police chiefs unknowingly hire officers with misconduct histories because of laws that allow officers to keep disciplinary records secret. Other times, they aren’t running thorough background checks, or they determine an officer’s record would not be a liability, said Ben Grunwald, a Duke University law professor.

In a study Grunwald co-authored for the Yale Law Journal, he and another researcher found that an average of roughly 1,100 officers working in Florida each year have previously been fired. They tended to move to agencies with fewer resources and slightly larger communities of color. The fired officers were also twice as likely to be fired a second time compared to officers who have never been fired. 

The consequences of this rehiring are severe, said L Chris Stewart, a civil rights attorney based in Atlanta. “If you don’t fear losing your job and you know you have all these different immunities that will protect you, you know you will get away with [misconduct].” He said it was hard not to think of this dynamic when watching the video of the Minneapolis killing as the officer ignored Floyd’s cries for help. An attorney for Chauvin did not respond to a request for comment, and the other officers could not be reached. 

Some advocates have pushed for a publicly accessible national database that documents officers’ disciplinary histories, which could help prevent re-hirings that endanger the public. “You can look up what a doctor has done, what a realtor has done, what you and I have done as members of the public, but you have no way to look into the background of a person with a badge and a gun,” according to Pointer.

Marc McCoy, whose brother Willie McCoy was killed by police in Vallejo, California last year, said it was hard when the family learned that the officers involved had previously killed other civilians and been the subject of excessive force complaints. “These laws that you think will lead to the officers’ arrest are actually there to protect them,” he said. 

That’s how policing works across America, researchers and activists say, and it’s a process that can drag victims’ families through years of court proceedings and media attention, with minimal relief at the end. 

Floyd’s death now under FBI investigation is horrific, but just another example of a black American’s dying at the hands of a white police officer protected by a system that perpetuates violence.

All of this harsh reality begs the question… can anything be done to change the conditions that keep bad cops working as policemen?

This is a crucially important question, not just because bad cops potentially endanger every single one of us, black or white, but also because the best thing we can do to protect good cops is to get rid of the bad ones, so the good ones don’t suffer guilt by association.

South Carolina is one state trying to change the system, hopefully for the better.  Their system for dealing with bad cops was about as backwards as you can get.  It was way too lenient on bad cops. It was also unfair to good cops who were often wrongly accused of misconduct by proximity and association on the job.

Under the old law, South Carolina police officers fired for misconduct were automatically stripped of their state law enforcement certification. They had no way of appealing unless another police agency hired them. This wasn’t fair to the officers who didn’t actually do anything wrong.

But if another police agency did hire them, the fired-for-misconduct cops were afforded the full power of regular police officers for up to a year, while they appealed their decertification. This meant that officers who should not be officers got to keep on being officers.

The only thing the “old” system had going for it was efficiency: It relieved state officials of having to spend time and money on the appeals process for someone who didn’t want to be a cop anymore.

Compounding the problem was the fact that police agencies sometimes fired officers for misconduct without saying so, which meant those officers were never decertified, and they could be hired by agencies that had no idea about their problems. Which is also incredibly dangerous, and could give honest police agencies a black eye.

All of that changed on May 31, 2018 when Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law H.4479, which flips the old system on its head. 

Under the new law, police who lose their South Carolina certification can appeal that decision to the state Law Enforcement Training Council, without having to first convince another agency to hire them — which one hopes would be difficult to do anyway. And they can’t act as police officers again unless or until the council agrees to reinstate their certification.

Critically, it also takes away police agencies’ discretion to decide for themselves whether to let others know they fired a cop for misconduct. 

That may to some degree unravel the “good ol’ boy network” of protection and favors passed back and forth between police departments, the prosecutors office and union leadership.

The new law requires the agencies to report misconduct; sheriffs and police chiefs can lose their own certification if they don’t report honestly and accurately.

The old law didn’t even define misconduct. The new does, and the definition contains 11 offenses, from lying to police or in court to “the repeated use of excessive force in dealing with the public or prisoners,” “dangerous or unsafe practices involving firearms, weapons, or vehicles which indicate either a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property” and “the physical or psychological abuse of members of the public or prisoners.”

The changes are offered as a means of reducing the likelihood that a law enforcement officer leaving one police department because of misconduct could be hired by another department without the allegations being addressed.

If “something like the South Carolina” law had been in force in Minnesota, and Officer Chauvin knowing the potential consequences of his personal actions, would that knowledge have deterred him from putting his knee on the neck of Mr. Floyd until he died?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

See, I firmly believe that most all cops feel a sense of empowerment from the gun on their hip and the fraternity of cops that protect one another.  Policing in America is a major part of systemic racism, there’s no way around that fact.  Too much evidence over too many years.  Too many black men have lost their lives to too many cops who simply don’t care about the “black man or woman” who suffers violence at their hand.

All cops live within a code of silence, protecting one another, knowing full well that one of their fraternity is a killer. Doing nothing to stop a fellow officer from acts of violence is silent approval of violence. That is racism.  If no one stops the bad cops, then those so called good cops are just as guilty before God as if they had caused the black man to die by their own hand.

Here we are in the year 2020, with technologies and data management systems including artificial intelligence, to do anything we can imagine.  Yet an integrated national, federal police tracking system does not exist.  

We federally track malpractice litigation and adverse licensing actions for physicians, lawyers, stock brokers and other professions, but no such system exists for law enforcement officers… who have the power to take a life and make arrests?  What does exist is fragmented, incomplete, lacks uniformity and details of an officer's misconduct.

Immediately, the U.S. Justice Department should be mandated to integrate all state and in some case large metropolitan databases so that the piecemeal network can be used to track police decertification records.  The database could then be used by local police departments to check applicants background.

A recent survey discovered that only about 20 percent of police agencies across America even know the database exists. The excuse is inexcusable… “We don’t have the money to advertise it,” said Mike Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, which maintains the database.  How much is a human life worth?

Lastly, but certainly not the least in this complex problem is the great divider… politics.

Police Unions and their collective bargaining power must change.  Just as teachers unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad teachers, police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops.

Black Lives Matter… YES they do.  But Democrats who court the black vote, especially in urban areas, have long opposed the very thing that could ensure changes in policing — reforming collective bargaining.

The Duke University Law Journal examined 178 police union contracts and found that "a substantial number … unreasonably interfere with or otherwise limit the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to hold police officers accountable for their actions.”

The contracts often “limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prevent anonymous civilian complaints, indemnify officers in the event of civil suits, and limit the length of internal investigations.” Another study found that “collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct.”

If we want to eliminate violent police misconduct, then we need to eliminate collective-bargaining protections that shield bad cops. If we want to stop police misconduct, the answer is not to defund the police. We need more good cops, not fewer. 

But for the left, (“left” here is spelled as Liberal Democrat) it is much easier to go after the police as an institution — or the president, who has no role in setting local police policies — than the local Democratic political leaders and union officials who enter into collective-bargaining agreements that shelter bad cops.

Can we come up with a concept of policing in America where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?

In a nation as resilient, creative and influential on the world stage as America is, one would certainly think the problem can be fixed.  

Would more and better training solve the problem? No. Better training alone will not reduce police brutality. Police departments across the country have required their officers to attend classes on racial sensitivity and on limiting the use of force.  Evidence says those sessions have not worked.

The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. The number of officers in uniform who will knowingly and maliciously violate your rights is huge. These officers violate human rights with impunity and they don't care who they hurt. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and for the police.

The “law and order” mentality is so entrenched in the psychology of policing that most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men falls to indifference. There is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to “protect and serve” the population, but that has never been their true mission, at least not all the population.. 

The "law and order" way of viewing policing is a major part of why solutions elude those who want desperately to see change.  Our view of law enforcement in America rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.

The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it.  And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid-to-late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.

The police were created to control the working class and poor people, particularly poor black people moving from the south to the cities of the north after the Civil War.

Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. 

In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force were the slave patrols, tasked with rounding up runaway slaves.

We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not.  They are instructed in the training academies and taught by field experience that their harsh treatment of “law breakers” is rewarded by superiors, peers and politicians — albeit, sustaining the system that ferments brutality and violence.

We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the “ruling class” of America to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.

Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.

America… has been a “police state" for more than 150 years.  You just didn’t know it.  Now you do.

___________________________________________________________________________

Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a sales and strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. He is an internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He wears the victories and battle scars of many business development campaigns, global product introductions and go-to-market initiatives.  He holds an MBA in strategic management and a Doctorate in Theological Studies. He can be reached by email at… encore2pt5@gmail.com

_____________________________________________________________________________

Policing in America: Good Cop… Bad Cop

COMMENTARY By Steven K. Haught, Editor

What can stop a bad cop from using excessive force? A good cop?  Their peers and colleagues in uniform?

In the United States, over the past 50 years, we’ve tried just about everything else — from teaching deescalation techniques at the police academy to creating departmental policies that prohibit excessive use of force to establishing review boards to assess cases where police officers are alleged to have gone too far. Nothing has worked. 

Even hardcore police apologists probably won’t defend the Minneapolis police officer’s actions. But they are likely to argue there was nothing his fellow officers could have done to stop him since he was the senior officer in command at the scene and that the less experienced officers are trained to follow the lead of a senior ranking officer.

After all, police departments often recruit from the U.S. military, where challenging a superior gets you in hot water. Think of Jack Nicholson playing Marine Col. Nathan Jessup in the 1992 movie “A Few Good Men" — “We follow orders or people die," he said. "It’s that simple.”

It's one of the most divisive topics in our society today: bad cops. To hear some people on the far left, that’s a redundancy: All cops are bad.

Their counterparts on the far right are equally certain that there’s no such thing as a bad cop; anybody who has a bad encounter with a police officer deserves it, whatever it is… whatever the outcome.

Americans have had enough, and are marching for justice in unprecedented numbers all across the country. In small towns and big cities, thousands of people are giving voice to the grief and anger that generations of black Americans have suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system. Young and old, black and white, family and friends have joined together to say… enough.

The unconscionable examples of racism over the last several weeks and months come as America's communities of color have been hit hardest by the coronavirus and catastrophic job losses. This is a perfect storm hitting black Americans.

The vast majority of police officers in America are honorable men and women who risk their lives every day to protect our communities. We need to “dismantle and rebuild” the policing system; we need to purge our police departments of bad cops, we need to remove the violence and the guns as the “go to” tools when police encounter situations they deem easily resolvable by forceful means.

While we may believe the previous statements, American citizens have never been given a choice in how policing is to be delivered to our communities. We have heard words and phrases like… “law and order”  and “protect and serve” but in that past 200 years as policing grew into the force it is today… citizens have never been allowed a say in how it was to be done.  It’s time for that to change.  Americans must get involved in demanding change, and that’s the reason why people have taken to the streets, in an attempt to make their voices heard.  Question is… who’s listening?

Other democratic countries around the world do not have policing systems like America.  Consider England.

Police in London (England) don’t carry guns.  How can they do their jobs without a firearm?

More than 90 percent of London’s police officers carry out their daily duties without a gun. Most rely on other tools to keep the city safe: mace, handcuffs, batons and occasionally stun-guns.  This is no accident.

The Metropolitan Police of London as it operates today, was founded in 1829 on the principle of "policing by consent" rather than by force.  "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.

For the Brits, giving everyday police officers guns sends the wrong message to its citizens, and can actually cause more problems than it solves.

Although there are higher numbers of armed police guarding Parliament, its less than 10% of the total police force,  and is essential to protect the royal family and members of the government. These police are more para-military security forces, very well trained to use a firearm.

How do the Brits compare with America when it comes to the use of a firearm in policing? In the most recent measured year (2018), police in all of England and Wales only fired seven bullets. Officers fatally shot just 5 people during that period. It's a world apart from the United States, where cops killed 991 people in 2018… an average of 2.7 per day.

The Metropolitan Police of London carried out some 3,300 actions in 2018 where officers were armed. They didn't fire a single shot at a suspect.

British officials have long believed that intelligence-gathering and stronger links with the community, rather than gun-toting cops, will do more to keep their communities and cities safer than fomenting an atmosphere of fear among citizens by wielding the ultimate tools of force and violence… a gun.

In a free and democratic society, there is going to be a balance between democracy, freedom and openness.  The opposite starts with the the absence of “consent” — diminished public trust and systemic racism.  The underlying cancer of a police state is when the armed police force picks on a group of people who are deemed to be inferior, of lesser value to society and culture.  

In America, the focus of policing is on Black Americans and other racial minorities. People of color are perceived as causing all the problems that require policing and therefore the use of force to maintain law and order is justified.  While it may not be said out loud… “beating minority races into submission” is the creed of cops… good or bad.  

That is the essence of a police state and none of us want to live in a police state.

Admittedly, there are some bad people whose actions leave cops no choice but to wrestle them to the ground, sometimes painfully so, and in extreme circumstances even shoot, sometimes killing the person. 

But as is so evident from the actions of too many, there are bad cops — who bully people and take advantage of their positions, who wantonly use excessive force, even lethal force. What happens to these bad apples?  Obviously, they need to be fired, and in many cases prosecuted.

Is that really what happens?  The next installment in this series on Policing in America will examine how bad cops often endure the glare of media spotlight and then move on… keeping their jobs or finding another one.

_______________________________________________

Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a sales and strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. He is an internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He wears the victories and battle scars of many business development campaigns, global product introductions and go-to-market initiatives.  He holds an MBA in strategic management and a doctorate in theological studies. You can reach Steven by email at… encore2pt5@gmail.com

___________________________________________________________

Name Changing and Statue Toppling

COMMENTARY By Victor Davis Hanson

General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the Atlantic recently about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at West Point — points of reference he reminds us that have been central in his own experience and career.

His relevant points were two-fold and ostensibly rational: Commanders such as Bragg and Benning (Petraeus proposes the renaming of other eponymous bases as well) were not especially effective commanders worthy of such majestic base commemoration. In some cases, as Petraeus notes, they were not even highly regarded by their peers. No one, certainly, would wish to defend the worldview of a Braxton Bragg. 

And, as Petraeus put it, as “traitors” they fought for an ignoble cause that perpetuated slavery. (Of course, the logic of renaming should then apply to the northern California community of Fort Bragg, also named after the unattractive Braxton Bragg — an idea to which some in the Democratic California legislature failed to win over the town’s mayor in 2015).

I think Petraeus is in many ways correct about his anguish. Yet, the bases were named not so much to glorify overt racists as for a variety of more mundane, insidious reasons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — from concessions to local southerners where many of these bases were to be located, to obtain bipartisan congressional support for their funding, and to address the need in the decades-long and bitter aftermath of the Civil War to promote “healing” between the still hostile former opponents.

We should note that not all Confederates were quite the same in terms of our current moral reexaminations. General Longstreet differed from, say, a General Nathan Bedford Forrest, not necessarily on the basis of their undeniable respective competency or even clear culpability in perpetuating the war, but on their quite different efforts at postwar outreach and healing. But then again such assessments would be to assume that we are all mortals and not deities.

Again, is this moment really the proper time to begin renaming bases and removing statues? We are in a middle of a national frenzy and chaos, in which such major decisions won’t always be done systematically and carefully to heal rather than further to inflame the country. I have long questioned in print the deification of Robert E. Lee, but after 150 years I think we can wait a few more months for introspection and discussion before damning him from memory. This week Christopher Columbus was toppled — with the predictable response, why not some of those statues in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection? 

That idea has next only fueled further iconoclasm, which has quickly progressed to why not the slave-owning Washington and Jefferson and their eponymous D.C. landmark monuments, though perhaps cranes and woke engineers rather than mere ropes and hammers will be needed to topple an obelisk or crash a dome, purported testaments to slavery. Who is to say that one slave owner is any different from another, given mortal sin allows no compensation or calibration, no allowance for, or distinction of, a Jefferson from a Forrest?

In particular, on all fronts, military, educational, and governmental, if we are to engage in iconoclasm, Trotskyization, damnatio memoriae, and cancel culture, then we need some common standard to weigh good against bad, to calibrate modern versus long-distant moralities, and to be sure that replacement names meet these new exalted criteria. Recently our university community received an official letter from an administrator quoting the inspirational “loving refrain” of Ms. Assata Shakur, a terrorist and convicted murderer of a policeman and fugitive from justice residing in Cuba. There were no public repercussions for such an endorsement.

In terms of 19th- and early 20th-century racism, it would be hard to match the deleterious efforts of President Woodrow Wilson to poison race relations. He resisted integration in the armed forces, as well as the civil service, and thus set back those efforts for decades. Harry Truman did what Wilson might have done more than three decades earlier.

In 2015 the Atlantic itself ran an essay detailing the extent to which Wilson systematically institutionalized race-based prejudice. In some sense, he put back race relations far more as commander in chief than did the 19th-century overtly racist Confederate rebels who were defeated and their cause repudiated. Yet, Wilson remains a progressive icon as a prime mover of the League of Nations and author of the Fourteen Points. As president he was no rebel general, but in an all-powerful position to enact needed racial change. He also was the beneficiary of the moral evolution of some 50 years since the Civil War. But most perniciously, his racism was pseudoscientific, based on bankrupt progressive ideas of genetic purity and thus often exempt from liberal criticism of the age.

Leland Stanford in many ways went well beyond the racist orthodoxy of the late 19th century in his demonization of Asians, without whose labor his railroad empire and fortune that funded present-day Stanford University would have evaporated. So to what degree might we now in our time of self-introspection rectify the past by quickly renaming Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, of which Petraeus himself is a distinguished Ph.D. graduate, and thereby end our own compliance in perpetuating the wages of racism that now manifest in the streets? And after Princeton, why not rapidly Stanford and perhaps with dispatch Yale as well?

I remember not too long ago, in the furor of the Iraq War and the raging anger over the surge, at a time when the commander in chief was also unfairly labeled a racist, a Nazi and a traitor, that General Petraeus himself was subject to the sudden furor of contemporary resistance. 

The New York Times dropped its policies of avoiding ad hominem ads to print a full-page Moveon.org smear of “General Petraeus,” even as Senator Hillary Clinton in her fury to abort the surge and leave Iraq, in her congressional cross-examination of Petraeus, essentially and falsely accused him of lying under oath. As many of us wrote at the time, the nation was gripped by a sort of collective madness, to which Clinton herself contributed, by demonizing a heroic and gifted general tasked with carrying out an unpopular policy of a then widely ridiculed and disparaged president.

By all means let us reexamine the names of all military installations, the statues of all our supposed heroes, and extend such scrutiny to all institutions of government and higher learning, public and private, given that the latter depend on the taxpayer for massive tax exemptions on their endowments.

But let us wait until the fires in the streets, the occupations, the defacements, the looting, and the violence have dissipated, if only not to reward the bullhorn rather than the majority vote of elected or representative bodies. Let us make sure that the logic of our efforts is systemic and applicable in general rather than ad hoc and of the moment. And finally let us wonder why those who wish such prompt action had not spoken out earlier, in calmer times, a year, a decade, a generation ago, when the present histories of our counterfeit icons had been long well known, but at a time when the pushback to such independent and principled lone voices would have earned far different professional consequences than is true of this week.

___________________________________________

Nation Review contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie 

Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, 

most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

______________________________________________________