I don’t feel particularly bad about the fact that Ephraim Cruz lost his job with the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol should not exist at all, and the men and women who decide to join it are, whether they realize it or not, violently inflicting injustices on innocent people every day, as an essential part of their job duties. Cruz seems to me like a basically decent man with an acute conscience, and it will be better for him now that he has to find an honest line of work.

But Jenn’s interview with Cruz at reappropriate is still powerful, and important to read, because of what it tells us about the institutional culture of policing in general, and border policing in particular. It should be no surprise that the Blue Wall stays in place when the uniforms change from blue to green; if anything, it is worse, because abusive border cops can rely on getting away with even more than abusive ordinary cops can. Their usual victims have no formal standing as citizens, often cannot speak English well, have few advocates with high profiles in the media or the legal system, and are about to be forced out of the country, far away from anyone who might do anything about their mistreatment.

Ephraim Cruz, a former patrol agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, tried to do something about Border Patrol agents who abused captured and imprisoned immigrants. Here are some of the things that he saw while he was stationed in Arizona:

Ephraim was also amazed to find cells were frequently filled to two or three times their posted capacity, while neighbouring cells were not being utilized at all. Not only was this a clear violation of fire codes, but Ephraim feared this practice could pose a serious health risk for detainees.

… But, most heart-wrenching for Ephraim was the observation that detainees were frequently going twenty to thirty hours at a time without food. In his March 21, 2004 memo, Ephraim recounts how he watched a young ten-year-old boy — whom his mother described as in good health — break out into red bumps after going more than twenty hours without a meal. Later that same day, Ephraim remembers how a young girl went more than thirty hours without food, and complained of feeling faint. These were hardly isolated incidents: Ephraim remembers countless children and pregnant women who went without food for two or three shifts at a time.

According to Border Patrol spokesperson Andy Adame (quoted in archived Tucson Citizen article Border Agent Claims Detainees Mistreated in Douglas, written by Luke Turf, published May 22, 2004), Border Patrol policies state that all detainees should be fed at 6am, noon and 6pm and ... crackers and juice are always available for immigrants. However, Ephraim writes in an August 5, 2004 memo (Memo from E. Cruz to R. Bonner, SUBJECT: Ongoing Mistreatment of Illegal Aliens and Processing Issues):

The integrity of those meal times are habitually violated, and crackers and juice are not always available. Furthermore, when crackers and juice are indeed available, it is not readily provided to the detainees... It is station policy that we feed all illegal aliens held beyond six to eight hours. Many illegal aliens easily go two to three times beyond that time frame without one meal.

In that same memo, Ephraim recounts how on July 31, 2004, he approached the control room that 220 meals would be needed that day, only to be told that 70 meals would be ordered. Most likely, Ephraim opined, two-thirds of detainees at the facility went hungry that day. According to Ephraim, the Douglas station also went weeks at a time without replenishing their supply of juice and crackers, and even when such items were in stock, they were not always made available to detainees. In one incident, Ephraim left some juice and crackers near the door of a holding cell only to have a fellow Agent remove the food moments later, muttering to Ephraim that by leaving it within reach of detainees, they might assume the food was for them.

Ephraim further notes that there was a distinct lack of concern for detainees amongst Agents; an almost dehumanization of the UDAs [Undocumented Aliens –R.G.] that helped perpetuate the mistreatment. Ironically, the Agents — who were predominantly Mexican American — looked down on UDAs as if to say that they, as legal Mexican Americans, were better than the Mexican detainees. Many seemed to feel that detainees deserved their mistreatment; Ephraim recalls how in one instance, while denying food to a detainee, one agent remarked that [the illegal aliens] knew they were coming, they should have brought food with them.

The dehumanization extended in one case to abuse reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib scandal (which ironically occurred only a few months after Ephraim began writing his memos). On March 1, 2005, Ephraim wrote a memo that included a recount of an incident he observed(Memo from E. Cruz to M. Nicely, Chief Patrol Agent, Tucson Sector) :

[I] informed FOS Jeffrey Richards and FOS Ignacio Luevano, in the presence of SBPA Robert Marrufo that SBPFA Marrufo directed BPA Jon Gleber to put an undocumented alien in our custody in a stress position. The incident took place about two weeks ago on the north side of the processing floor and to the knowledge of other agents. The stress position consisted of the alien performing the chair which entails leaning against the wall with both legs at a 90 degree angle and both hands straight out. They had the alien remain in that position until he buckled and cried.

Marrufo then suggested that the alien be placed in the forward leaning rest position, a push-up position, to give him some exercise, however I don't know if Agent Gelber followed through with the suggestion.

— Jenn @ reappropriate (2007-11-05): The Price of Conscience: An Interview with U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz

In 2004, Cruz, believing that a man's conscience is God's voice, began to write memos and letters to try to make his supervisors, politicians, and the media aware of violations of policies, training, state laws, fire and health codes, and illegal aliens' civil and human rights within [the Douglas, Arizona] processing facility. Here is what happened:

Ephraim writes in his March 21, 2004 memo (Memo from E. Cruz to supervisors, 2004):

This culture... reflects a disturbing level of complacency and lack of accountability and is coupled with responses... that this is the way things are done.

Ephraim describes this culture of complacency as fostering the sentiment that, management condoned [the mistreatment] and Agents knew that management knew and [were] not correcting it. Therefore, Ephraim says, Agents asked themselves why should I rock the boat?

… Despite his 117 letters, Ephraim received little support from the Senators and Congressmen he contacted. Andy Adame, Border Patrol spokesperson, told the media that the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) would conduct a generic investigation of Ephraim's accusations, but a recent article by the Tucson Weekly reports that this investigation — though supposedly having found Ephraim's claims to be unsubstantiated — may never have actually taken place.

— Jenn @ reappropriate (2007-11-05): The Price of Conscience: An Interview with U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ephraim Cruz

After he began speaking out, Cruz found that his employee review scores suddenly plummeted. One supervisor encouraged his co-workers to take care of him for the accusations. Then, in 2005, he was brought up on federal charges for transporting an illegal alien across the border. He and some friends had gone across the border into Agua Prieta after work, and on his way back he gave Maria Terrazas — a waitress who lived in Douglas and who was dating one of his colleagues at the Border Patrol — a ride back across the border to her home in Douglas. Later, in an unrelated criminal investigation against her boyfriend, it turned up that she didn’t have her papers. Cruz, who had no way of knowing this at the time, was brought up on federal charges. Nobody else involved in giving Terrazas the ride was charged. If he had been convicted, Cruz could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in a federal prison for this non-crime. As it turns out, the jury found the prosecution baseless and acquitted him on all charges. But that didn’t stop the retaliation. Last month, he received a letter from the U.S. Border Patrol stating that he would be fired on administrative charges — the same charges that a federal jury had already acquitted him of. He has been forced to resign so that he could avoid having this baseless smear go on his record; he could not afford a lawyer to fight the dismissal in court.

When it comes to cases of corruption or abuse, it’s often said that cops will protect their own. That’s close to the truth, but it misses the mark in one important respect. Cops — and this manifestly includes border cops, too — will try as hard as they can to intimidate, harass, defame, abandon, hurt, fire, imprison, or even kill any of their own who speak out against their colleagues’ crimes.

That isn’t cops protecting their own. It’s cops protecting their power. And they’ll do just about anything to absolutely anybody who endangers it. Ephraim Cruz is the latest of many victims to get the long knife treatment.

We are often told that immigration is a complex policy issue, with a lot of competing interests to sort out, finicky bureaucratic details to adjust, and a desperate need for civility and compromise. We’re told that it’s complicated because we need to balance complicated economic and humanitarian needs, on the one hand, with the varying interests of U.S. workers, the social welfare system, the education system, our culture and heritage, law and order, and national security. Hand-wringers, both liberal and conservative, like this line, because it allows them to portray themselves as sensible middle-of-the-roaders without actually committing themselves to any serious challenge to the immigration system as it currently stands. Taking a principled stand on immigration policy will likely get you involved in emotional fights; fiddling with the system to tweak it here and there, but leaving it essentially as it stands, allows you to dismiss opponents as unrealistic zealots and try to move on to something that you feel more comfortable talking about, like Social Security or the upcoming Presidential election.

But immigration is not a complex policy issue. It is a simple moral issue: peaceful people should never be physically attacked just for trying to move from one place to another. Innocent people should not be at the mercy of the State just because they have moved into a home where they are welcome and gotten a job with a willing employer, in a desire to make a better life for themselves.

Nativist bullies often like to pretend to be friends of labor; so they whine about the effects that immigrant workers have on wages, forgetting, or deliberately ignoring, the fact that the immigrant workers’ wages go up when they come to the U.S. — that is, after all, why they do it — and therefore their proposal boils down to using government violence to prop up one set of workers’ wages, by physically forcing another, poorer set of workers out of the country. That’s outrageously immoral.

Nativists who complain endlessly about the alleged burden that undocumented immigrants place on the welfare state or the educational system wilfully disregard the fact that undocumented immigrants pay most state and local taxes (as well as federal taxes, if they’re working with forged documents), while having no access to most federal benefits and many state benefits. When confronted with the fact that, even in those cases where undocumented immigrants are net tax recipients, they are no different from any suburban brat, elderly pensioner, or subsidized plantation-owner in the ever-expanding welfare state, they will routinely state that, since the welfare system is unlikely to be abolished in the near term, they prefer to get the government to attack immigrants, because undocumented immigrants are more politically vulnerable than native-born welfare recipients, or the welfare system as such. Targeting the weakest people, even though they are not to blame for the existence of the political system at the root of your complaint, because it’s easier to take it out on them than it is to challenge that system, is grossly immoral.

When challenged, nativists are often unwilling to cop to the fact that they are, in fact, proposing for force to be used towards these ends — as if deportation consisted of a nice crossing guard escorting you home, rather than forcible exile from your current home at the hands of armed men who will restrain, beat, or shoot you if you don’t comply with their orders. A while ago, when I dared to explain to a commenter at Vox Populi that his proposal of ending massive unskilled immigration necessarily entailed being willing to forcibly restrain, beat, shoot, confine, and exile from their current homes those unskilled immigrants who did not volunteer to leave at your command, my interlocutor was outraged that I’d go around telling me I’m willing to do hitler like things and that even deportation does not mean forcibly restrain, beat, shoot,. [sic] If you think the US government would do that, and if you think white americans would countenance that, you are deluded. Well, what do the mass deportation and mass interdiction plans mean, then? A polite request that the immigrant can ignore and remain in the country unmolested? If so, I have no real quarrel with it, but it’s not a deportation policy. If you do intend to back it up, then forcible exile is indeed what you intend to do, and forcible restraint and confinement, with beating or shooting as necessary to make it happen, are the necessary means. If you’re not actually willing to cop to that, you’re not actually willing to enforce an immigration policy. If you’re willing for it to be done, but prefer to cover the fact over with bullshit euphemisms, then you are no less immoral; you’re just insisting on immorality with a P.R. campaign to cover it up and spin it beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, the efforts that professional-class Sensible Liberals make to intervene in the debate rarely amount to anything more than minor fiddling. While they rightly condemn the violent racism of the most bellicose nativist factions, their concrete proposals would almost never make any large-scale or systematic changes to the existing system of international apartheid and internal anti-immigrant surveillance. At most they would like to carve out a few new exceptions — perhaps for the same-sex partners of gay immigrants — or lift a few caps here and there — perhaps allowing a handful more political refugees per year. Mostly what passes for pro-immigrant rhetoric from liberals and Progressives is calling for increases to the funding or scope of government welfare and social work agencies, perhaps with some bilingual application forms. As worthwhile as it would be to liberalize immigration policy wherever and to whatever extent it can be liberalized, it must never be forgotten that all these proposals invariably leave La Migra, the border cops, the immigration courts, the detention centers, the Ihre Papiere, bitte treatment for new employees, and all the rest of the sprawling system of government command and control still in place. Millions of peaceful, productive people will still be stopped, screened, harassed, restrained, confined, or exiled by the government based solely on their nationality. Millions of undocumented workers will continue to live with the looming threat of losing their livelihoods, their homes, and even their families to a forced deportation. Millions of refugees will continue to languish, to starve, and to die in concentration camp hellholes because the wealthy nations of the world continue to stop them, at bayonet-point, from moving on to a new home and a new life.

Meanwhile, any extended debate or controversy over immigration policy is usually waved off by Sensible Liberals as unimportant, or as a distraction from issues that white liberals are more comfortable talking about. In the few cases where they do say a few words about the need for a substantially new approach to immigration, their proposed moderate reforms end up dressing up crude nativism in reformist language. While calling for a mild liberalization of immigration policy, they scrupulously avoid the unforgivable sin of supporting an extremist or unrealistic idea by reiterating and reinforcing echt-Nativist nonsense about assimilation or American jobs. Occasionally this is followed up by suggestions for creating new programs, or escalating existing programs, that are actively harmful to the lives and livelihoods of undocumented workers, such as so-called demand-side policies to penalize Americans who offer work, loans, homes, or other goods and services to undocumented immigrants. The idea is to forcibly drive down the demand for immigrant labor, which means forcing willing immigrant workers into unemployment, and whitewashing this anti-worker legislation with pseudo-populist rhetoric about greedy corporations–sometimes on the implicit claim that American workers are more deserving than other workers, simply on the basis of their nationality, and sometimes on the even more outrageous claim that forced pauperism is for the immigrants’ own good.

Perhaps the only consolation is that Sensible Liberals’ attempts to intervene in the debate and shift the rhetoric towards moderation have been so completely ineffectual. This controversy, like the debate over slavery, like the debate over abortion, and like all other controversies over simple moral issues, is and should be a debate between extremists, not a case for middle-of-the-roader rhetoric or halfway-house solutions. It is immoral for the government to stop, harass, restrain, confine, and exile peaceful people from their current homes, solely on the basis of their nationality. It is criminal that even one refugee cannot immediately escape from danger, or must live even one day longer penned up in a refugee concentration camp, simply because governments in the U.S. and Western Europe continue to enforce the SS St. Louis immigration policy. It is inexcusable that even one undocumented worker should have to live in fear of emergency workers, neighbors, or her boss, simply because she failed to get a signed permission slip from the federal government before she set out to make a living.

And it is ridiculous that these facts continue to be obscured by nativist bullying, by national security mysticism, or by pseudo-reformist wonkery-wankery. Goodbye to all that. The demand for open borders and immediate amnesty is simplistic, naïve, starry-eyed, unrealistic, extremist, uncompromising, radical, and also obviously correct. It is your job, reader, to live up to the best part of yourself and make that demand loudly, courageously, without compromise and without apology. Mumbling dismissal and pseudo-reformist compromise mean not prudence, but complicity.

Smash international apartheid, now and forever.

Tasers were originally introduced for police use as an alternative to using lethal force; the hope was that, in many situations where cops might otherwise feel forced to go for their guns, they might be able to use the taser instead, to immobilize a person who posed a threat to them or to others, without killing anybody in the process.

In practice, of course, cops and police culture being what they are, any notion of limiting tasers to those situations very quickly went out the window. Cops armed with tasers now freely use them to end arguments by intimidation or actual violence, to coerce people who pose no real threat to anyone into complying with their bellowed orders, and to hurt uppity civilians who dare to give them lip. They often do so even when the supposed offense that they’re responding to is completely trivial; they often start tasering, or keep on tasering, after their victims have already been rendered helpless by the circumstances or by an earlier use of force. Since any complaints of excessive force are always handled by their fellow cops, the investigations almost always end up concluding that Official Procedures were followed, as if that made everything O.K., and throwing the complaint into the rubbish bin without doing anything at all. So shock-happy Peace Officers can now go around using their tasers as 50,000-volt human prods in just about any situation, with more or less complete impunity.

For example, here is how a gang of cops in Ozark, Alabama, handled the situation when they found an unconscious man slumped over behind the wheel of his car.

Police in Ozark, Alabama on Tuesday used a taser on a sober man who was having a diabetic seizure. A trio of police cruisers were called to the scene of a black Nissan truck and trailer pulled over on the side of the road near the intersection of Highway 231 and Marley Mill Road at around 4pm. James Bludsworth, 54, a man with no criminal record, was was slumped over behind the wheel. Because of his condition he was not responsive to police commands.

Police then fired tasers at the sick man three times. A police officer now says that he smelled alcohol on Bludsworth, even though later testing showed no trace of alcohol in his system. Ozark Police Chief Myron Williams also claims the sick man was “combative.” Instead of taking Bludsworth to medical care he was booked at Dale County Jail and charged with resisting arrest and driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). Bludsworth has no recollection of the incident and is free on $1000 bond.

— theNewspaper.com (2007-11-09): Alabama: Sober Diabetic Man Tasered, Accused of DUI

Here is how their boss is holding these cops accountable for their needless use of force against an innocent man with a serious medical condition:

[Ozark Deputy Police Chief Myron] Williams said at least three officers responded to the scene. He defended the department's decision not to discipline any of the officers involved based on video and audio evidence of the incident.

— Ebony Horton, The Dothan Eagle (2007-11-09): Criminal charges remain against driver found unconscious

(Story via Lew Rockwell @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-11-09.)

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.
• GT 2007-10-11: Law and Orders #2: Florida cop was within bounds when he punched and pepper-sprayed a 15-year-old girl for breaking curfew
• GT 2006-11-16: Law and Orders: UCLA campus police found it necessary to repeatedly taser an Iranian student already lying helpless on the ground
• GT 2005-06-30: Bolts from the Blue
• GT 2005-05-05: Peace Officers, redux
• GT 2005-04-26: Peace Officers
• GT 2004-11-14: Civil defense

From Thursday’s Washington Times, Karl Rove’s advice for fuming bloggers:

Karl Rove teed off this afternoon on the liberal netroots, the coalition of far-left blogs and advocacy groups who are a new power bloc in the Democratic party.

The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse, said Mr. Rove, who served as one of President Bush’s top strategists until he resigned this past summer, and is a noted technology nut.

… I’m a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them, Mr. Rove said. But there also blogs written by angry kooks.

The normal response would be some kind of pat reference to pots and kettles or motes and beams. But really this goes so far beyond ordinary hypocrisy that it’s more like a kind of surrealist projective performance art.

(Via Echidne of the Snakes 2007-11-09.)

(Via Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-11-08, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-11-08, and The Agitator 2007-11-08.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely force their way into places they have no business being, use violence first and ask questions later, and pass off even the most egregious forms of violence against helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to stay in control of the situation, they have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women possibly guilty of a minor traffic violation, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up teenaged girls for daring to give them lip over cleaning up spilled cake or being out too late at night. Whenever they are caught using harsh enough violence against someone who is so obviously innocent or helpless that the media takes notice, police administrators will wring their hands, say something noncommittal, make up some lies as possible excuses for the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all. Meanwhile a chorus of sado-fascist bully boys will reliably cheer the pigs and smear the victim in print media, talk shows, and the Internet. Both administrators and freelance police enablers freely employ the most tortured sorts of necessity excuses, in what seems to be a deliberate effort to obliterate any notion of restraints on the use of force in securing police objectives. Then they will sanctimoniously explain how cops need to be able to beat the hell out of you with impunity so that they can protect you.

For example, when the cops in Chicago aren’t too busy running elite criminal rackets, they have found another way to serve and protect the public: by forcing their way into an 82-year-old black woman’s apartment, and then grabbing a taser and serving and protecting the hell out her.

As shocking as it is that a Chicago Police officer Tasered an 82-year-old grandmother during a wellness check, it’s even more disheartening that so many of our readers believe the police action was appropriate.

By late Tuesday, 7,967 people had responded to the Chicago Sun-Times Web site poll question:

Should cops have Tasered an 82-year-old?

Sixty-three percent responded no.

But 37 percent, or 2,940 people voted yes — Lillian Fletcher, the elderly and mentally-ill grandmother who was Tasered by police who burst into her home, should have been Tasered because she was wielding a hammer.

That’s scary.

Mind you, Fletcher had not broken any laws, police were not executing a search warrant, and the elderly woman had not been threatening neighbors with the hammer. In fact, she didn’t grab the hammer until officers forced their way into her garden apartment.

After the Tasering, Fletcher, who suffers from dementia and schizophrenia, was hospitalized for five days and may have to undergo surgery for fluid on the brain.

Instead of condemning the police action, many of the people who shot me an e-mail blamed the elderly woman’s family for the fiasco.

What about the family that left their mother home alone knowing she had all these issues, said Dave M. Put the blame where it really belongs: on the family. Why don’t you stop by and visit good old granny and when she starts swinging a hammer at you just take your beating and give her a hug.

Well, Dave M., I did visit Fletcher at her home on Monday night, and she didn’t pull out a hammer. You know why? I didn’t push my way into her home. I rang the doorbell. When she ushered me into her kitchen and invited me to sit, I sat. And when our chat was over, I put on my coat, said Good night and made sure she locked her door behind me.

In other words, I respected her space — something police didn’t do.

As for her family, they aren’t the triflin’ people some of you are depicting. In fact, if anyone is to blame for what’s happened, it would be the city’s Department of Aging.

Fletcher, who can be belligerent, told a caseworker to go away. But instead of leaving, the worker called the police, and officers treated Fletcher like she was a criminal.

— Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-07): Cops wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer

So Ms. Fletcher decides that she doesn’t want a nosy social worker in her apartment and tells her to go away. Said professional busybody calls the cops on her so that they can force their way into her apartment against her will. When these armed strangers come breaking through the door, she naturally tells them to get out and tries to protect herself. So they knock her down with an immobilizing and painful electric shock. and hurt her so badly that she has to spend five days in the hospital. Normally, if armed strangers went busting into an apartment against the tenant’s will and then protected themselves by tasering their outraged victim, it would be called breaking and entering and assault and battery. But because the armed strangers are cops, and because their victim could safely be dismissed by the powers that be as old and black and crazy, this is called a wellness check. Apparently, it was necessary to taser the old woman in order to save her.

Since this story first hit the Chicago media, Mayor Daley feels embarassed, but won’t say anything bad about the cops who did it. He assures us that The Matter Will Be Investigated. Meanwhile, Alderman Isaac Carothers, the chair of the city council committee dealing with police matters, has this to add:

It’s very unfortunate that it had to result to that, but I certainly understand. I’m pleased that they decided not to shoot her and they decided not to tackle her and that they didn’t use the night stick, which may have been options if someone is swinging a hammer at you.

–Quoted by Fran Spielman, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-08): Tasering grandma displeases Daley — But he avoids criticizing cops

Well, yes, at least the pigs didn’t shoot her while they were at it. That’s mighty white of them.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to these cops. The Fraternal Order of Pigs, as usual, has their back. There’s an investigation going on by the so-called Office for Professional Standards. But somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if not a damn thing comes of it.

Which is precisely what happened in another case over in Pittsburgh, where a black 29-year-old man was tasered while he slept in his own home. He got in late and forgot to disarm a security device on the house, which issued a silent alarm to the police department. The cops showed up, found him asleep on the couch, surrounded him, jabbed a taser into his back, and shocked him while he was still asleep.

I felt a lot of voltage going through my body, Mr. Hicks said recalling the events of that late July weekend. That’s what woke me up.

Jumping to his feet, Mr. Hicks was aware of an intense sensation between the shoulder blades of his 150-pound body. It didn’t stop there. His whole body felt as if it were on fire.

When his eyes finally adjusted to the light, his heart skipped yet another beat. Two North Braddock police officers, Gerard Kraly and Lukas Laeuricia, were standing in his living room. To this day, Mr. Hicks still doesn’t know which is Kraly and which Laeuricia.

The shorter of the two officers did most of the talking. His mustached partner was a burly over-6-footer in his late 30s or early 40s. He held the Taser, the prongs of which were sticking in Mr. Hicks’ back.

The polite family newspaper version of what Mr. Hicks said in response to being electrified translates roughly as What’s going on here?

The shorter cop, whom Mr. Hicks remembers as blond, asked him to calm down.

The officer said that North Braddock police received a call from the security company monitoring Mr. Hicks’ home. They believed a break-in was in progress.

The cops had entered the home, turned on the light and found Mr. Hicks asleep on the sofa. If they identified themselves or ordered him to get up, Mr. Hicks said he did not hear it. He said he wasn’t aware of their presence until he was shot in the back with a Taser.

According to Mr. Hicks, the cops were skeptical. How do we know that you’re who you say you are? the shorter of the two cops asked.

At that point, the cop holding the Taser squeezed the trigger, sending Mr. Hicks into paroxysm of agony. It was not a short jolt like the first one he received. He fell to the floor. His screams woke the neighbors.

What do you want? Mr. Hicks asked. Please stop [shooting] me. The shorter cop helped him to his feet. Swaying unsteadily, he offered to show them his identification. They searched him and found his wallet. After inspecting it, they threw the wallet on the coffee table.

I told you I lived here and that I’m the legal resident, he shouted, believing he finally had justice, common decency and the angels of heaven on his side. A staff member at the African-American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania, Mr. Hicks counts himself on the side of the law-abiding citizen.

The cop with the Taser squeezed the trigger again, anyway. Mr. Hicks flapped his arms wildly, but didn’t fall. All he could do was scream loud enough to be heard all over the Mon Valley.

After removing the pellets from his bloody back, the cops handcuffed Mr. Hicks and led him out his front door to a police van. They did not read him his rights, Mr. Hicks says. The back of his shirt was soaked with warm, sticky blood.

Meanwhile, cops from six neighboring boroughs searched the house for other burglars.

Mr. Hicks’ mother, Arlene, arrived just as her son was being escorted out the door. She had Mr. Hicks’ 11-year-old daughter and a niece in tow. Why are you arresting my son? she asked. The taller of the two cops answered that he didn’t have to tell her anything.

When Mrs. Hicks persisted, he said her son was being arrested for being belligerent.

In the van, Mr. Hicks said he told the cops he needed medical attention. He says they told him he would wind up in county lockup if he insisted on it. Never mind, Mr. Hicks said.

Mr. Hicks sat in a holding cell until 5 a.m. The cops returned. We’re not filing charges, they told him. You’re free to go, but if you get into trouble in the next year, we will file charges.

Mr. Hicks staggered into the parking lot and began walking the 10 minutes to the Braddock hospital, refusing another officer’s offer of a ride home. He was examined and released that morning. Mr. Hicks filed a detailed police complaint the following Monday, but the case didn’t come to public attention until the New Pittsburgh Courier’s front-page story last week.

— Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2007-09-11): Tasered at his own home: the Shawn Hicks story

So once again, a gang of armed strangers break into a house in the name of protecting the people living in it from a suspected burglar. They taser first and ask questions later. They blast a completely innocent man — one of the people who they were supposedly showing up to protect — with a painful shock electricity while he is sleeping. While outnumbered, physically overmatched, and with a taser still jabbed in his back, he gets a bit upset, demands to know what is going on, and explains that he lives in the house they are supposedly protecting; they call him a liar and shock him again. After they find his wallet and confirm that he is, in fact, a legal occupant, they shock him again, arrest him for getting uppity, refuse him medical attention, and then give him a sanctimonious lecture not to get into any trouble. And because this gang of thugs were uniformed cops, and because the man they were protecting the hell out of could be dismissed as black and belligerent, precisely nothing has happened. There was no investigation at all until the media publicized the story months later. Last week the local D.A. announced that no charges would be filed against Gerard Kraly or Lukas Laeuricia. Another bunch of area cops Investigated the Matter and decided that there was no criminal matter to be pursued.

Shawn Hicks is planning to file a civil suit over the abuse. I hope that he sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they’ve got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the city government will settle the case out of court, then send the bill to a bunch of innocent taxpayers, while the thugs Kraly and Laeuricia will keep on terrorizing innocent people in the name of public safety.

If you’re baffled that cops could get away with these kind of outrages, it may help to remember that in a lot of American cities, there is no such thing as a civil police force anymore. What we have would be better described as thuggish paramilitary units occupying what they regard as hostile territory. Here as elsewhere, they are going to serve and protect us, whether we want them to or not, and if we don’t like it then they’ve got plenty of guns and clubs and cuffs and 50,000 volt human prods in order to make sure we get good and protected anyway.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-04: In five words or fewer #2: Michael McHale on the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell
• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence