Hello, we’re the cops, and we’re here to keep you safe!

Michael Pate has pointed out a blurb from L.A. Observed clarifying that the tanks (Marine Armored Personnel Carriers, actually, for what that’s worth) deployed at a peaceful anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles had just gotten lost on their way from Camp Pendleton to the nearby National Guard Armory in preparation for the Veteran’s Day parade the following day.

Fair enough; I don’t see any reason not to accept that this was a silly mistake on the part of the Marines coupled with a firestorm of hasty reaction from Internet cranks such as myself. But it is indicative of something–and that something is not (or, at least, not just) Leftist paranoia in these times. The fact is that using tanks would, at this point, be not at all out of character for L.A. riot cops. Nor would it be beyond the means of most large urban police departments. The combined effects of the War on Drugs, the increasingly militant police reaction to mass demonstrations, and now the mass recruitment of all civil police into paramilitary units for Homeland Security have meant that any vestiges of a notion of proportionality have been completely and systematically obliterated. I see no reason whatever to doubt that cops would have any principled objection to sending out tanks to help with crowd control at an anti-war demonstration. They exist in an institutional culture in which there is apparently no inhibition at all against using any kind of force whatever in order to maintain control and enforce obedience.

Don’t believe me? Here’s how a peace officer in Miami decided to handle a tipsy 12 year old girl trying to play hooky:

(Link nabbed from Austro-Athenian Empire 2004/11/13.)

MIAMI (AP) – Police have acknowledged using a stun gun to immobilize a 12-year-old girl just weeks after an officer jolted a six-year-old with 50,000 volts.

. . .

According to the incident report, officer William Nelson responded to a complaint that children were swimming in a pool, drinking alcohol and smoking cigars on the morning of Nov. 5.

Nelson said he noticed the girl was intoxicated and was walking her to his car to take her back to school when she ran away through a parking lot.

Nelson, 38, said he chased her and yelled several times for her to stop before firing the Taser when she began to run into traffic. The electric probes hit the girl in the neck and lower back, immobilizing her.

— CBC News 2004/11/13: Police reviewing use of stun guns after second child shocked with taser

Ah, but you see, it was necessary to electrocute the girl in order to save her:

Nelson said he fired for my safety along with (the girl’s) safety. Paramedics treated the girl, who went home with her mother.

Because, you know, she might have gotten away, and then not gone to school or something.

Police director Bobby Parker defended the decision to use a Taser stun gun on the six-year-old boy last month because he was threatening to injure himself with a shard of glass. But Parker said Friday he could not defend the decision to shock the fleeing girl, who was skipping school and apparently drunk.

So if the decision is indefensible, why isn’t Officer Nelson in jail on charges of assault and battery? Why isn’t there any official reaction at all other than some hand-wringing about whether officers should have tasers or not–as if the equipment were the problem here? The problem is not how police are equipped, but rather the lack of accountability for disproportionate force and the belligerent posture that permeates cops’ training and daily working lives. You know, the sort of attitude that would make someone think it’s okay to respond to the incredibly dangerous immediate threat of a tipsy 12 year old disobeying orders by using an extremely painful electric shock that necessitates immediate medical attention. Or the kind of attitude that would make someone think of the incident as a P.R. problem instead of a criminal assault. Most major American cities effectively no longer have civil policing; they are occupied by federally-trained and supported paramilitary forces. The free-wheeling use of electrocution on anyone and everyone in Miami is a case in point (and this ain’t exactly the first time they’ve have problems there, either).

Is this as bad as, say, martial law in Iraq? No, of course it’s not. But it is brutal, and it’s becoming more clear every day that the difference in posture and attitude is only one of degree, not of kind. That goes to show how important differences of degree can be–but also how alarming and unreliable.

Further reading

• GT 2002-02-13: More police brutality in Montgomery
• GT 2002-01-30: Corporate elites meet & greet; New York Times makes shit up

(Link from jeblog 2004/11/10 and Human Iterations 2004/11/10.)

Freedom is on the march, and it’s headed straight for Los Angeles:

Yeah. Those are peaceful anti-war protestors, in a flash demonstration against the massacre in Fallujah, facing a tank. In the streets of Los Angeles. Apparently in the last four years, the L.A. riot cops have moved up from dragoon attacks to mechanized assaults. No-one was attacked, but this is the kind of intimidation that the increasingly militarized civil police think is appropriate for crowd control in politically volatile times. Trust the cops to keep you safe? You may as well trust a military occupation to make you free–the two are looking more alike every day.

What part of mandate aren’t you getting? There’s nothing wrong with sending tanks to break up peaceful protests in LA. This here’s a Red country afterall. There’s a tradition to uphold.

–William Gillis, Human Iterations 2004/11/10

Mark Dilley recently passed along a link to a good open letter by Dan Spalding with some great advice for boys in social justice movements: Shut the Fuck Up, or, How to act better in meetings. It’s something for every boy who wants to support the feminist struggle needs to read. Probably several times. I know that it’s something I need to remind myself of every day. Here’s Spalding:

What’s to be done? I’ve come up with a little idea I like to call, Shut the fuck up. It goes as follows: Every time someone…

• Says something you think is irrelevant,

• Asks a (seemingly) obvious question,

• Criticizes your proposal or makes a contradictory observation,

• Makes a proposal

• Asks a question, or

• Asks for more input because there’s a brief lull in the discussion. . .

Shut the fuck up. It’s a radical process, but I think you’ll like it.

Of course, nobody is saying that you can’t say anything or do anything in meetings. The point is that you don’t need to say or do everything–even if you’re absolutely sure that you’re full of Great Ideas. Trust people to have some good ideas of their own, and leave them some space to bring them up:

What does that mean for us? First, we shut the fuck up. This was easy for me in school — I just made a rule that I never spoke more than twice in a 50 minute class. Surprise! Almost every time I would have spoken, someone else eventually said the exact same thing, or something smarter. It was frustrating when it was another obnoxious man doing the answering, but a lot of times it wasn’t one of the two guys in class who spoke most often.

Read the whole thing. If the meeting stalls and folks aren’t saying anything, there is probably a problem with the process not with the people at the meeting. And of course this goes triply when the movement in question is the women’s movement. I remember having a conversation with some friends–both women and men–about the term pro-feminist man (terminology that I don’t like, but that I respect the reasons behind, as I’ve said here before). After I’d mentioned it, one of my male friends said that it sounded like something from the sort of feminists who’d rather men just stayed home and baked cookies rather than being part of the movement. Now, I don’t think that’s actually true–I’ve never found a feminist group that had the resources, in time or in people, to even consider the luxury of turning away volunteers. But supposing it were true–what would be so bad about helping out by baking cookies? Cookies, at least, are useful, whereas half of what I might have to say if I droned on all the time at feminist meetings wouldn’t be. There’s a lot of shit-work to do in organizing, and it wouldn’t kill us boys to do it every now and again. Props to Dan Spalding for pointing this out and for citing Jo Freeman’s excellent The Tyranny of Structurelessness as an inspiration for some of what he said; in addition to Spalding’s open letter and Freeman’s essay, I’d also like to finish with a recommendation for another paper: What Men Can Do for Women’s Liberation by Gainesville Women’s Liberation (you can find it in Dear Sisters). Here’s some of the things that they suggest–all important things to do, and none of them are insist on sharing all your great ideas for how women can free themselves at a meeting:

Set up a day-care center at the shop or place of work so that more women can be free to work. …

If you can’t cook, learn. …

Provide babysitting and transportation for WL meetings. …

Listen to a woman’s ideas. Hers are as good as a man’s or better. …

Don’t be super critical of a woman’s behavior because she is in Women’s Liberation. Don’t expect her to act like a liberated woman until you become a liberated man.

Don’t try and make points with women by bragging what a non-male supremacist you are. Admit your chauvinism and we can try and help you get out of it.

Don’t make jokes about WL. It’s a serious thing. Women die from male supremacy every year.

Open source software hit another big milestone yesterday–Mozilla Firefox is officially out of beta and released in version 1.0. Better yet, it’s taking off like a rocket–with over 1,000,000 downloads on the first day of release (!) and widespread coverage in the mainstream media, from CNN to the BBC to Al-Jazeera (!!).

If you’re not already familiar with Firefox, you can find out more about the project and its goals, see Ben Goodger’s Firefox 1.0 – Signed, sealed, and delivered. This milestone is especially exciting because Firefox is far and away one of the best FLOSS projects aimed at consumers. Not only does it successfully serve as a replacement for its leading competitor (also known as evil), but exceeds it in both features and user interface design. Whereas Internet Exploder became a merely competant browser (albeit one with broken style sheet support) by version 6.0 and then simply stopped, Firefox continues to make small, important, and delightful improvements. A small but pleasant case in point: Firefox 1.0 ditches the big, clunky Find dialogue–you know, the one that pops up when you press Ctrl-F and that you have to keep moving with your mouse in order to see the text you’re searching for. To find text on a webpage in Firefox 1.0, you can just start typing and a small, unobtrusive toolbar appears at the bottom of your screen with the text you are searching for in it. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-F and the same toolbar will pop up, ready for you to type in it.

I cite that not because it’s really a huge deal–it’s not, although trimming the amount of time wasted on unnecessary dialogue boxes means a much more pleasant computing experience than you might guess off the top of your head–but rather because it’s one of a million improvements, some of them small (like ditching the Find dialogue or support for RSS/Atom based Live Bookmarks) and others much larger (such as tabbed browsing and ad blocking) that make the web so much more of a joy to use with Mozilla Firefox than with Internet Exploder. So go get Firefox if you haven’t already. (If you’ve already got 1.0 preview release, you should still pick up the official 1.0; there are a few minor tweaks and improvements worth having.)

As far as software reviews go, this has been something of a fluff piece; I don’t have any real detailed comments on the release that haven’t already been said better elsewhere. (I do have some thoughts on the companion almost-out-of-beta 0.9 release of Mozilla Thunderbird–but that’s another geek-out for another day.) But I would like to take a moment to say how exciting it is to see how much effort is going into producing a really good piece of software in the open source world, and to see CNN or the Beeb discussing the organization and motivations behind a FLOSS product. Firefox is rapidly taking territory in a battle that everyone thought was over; it’s applying solid user interface design principles and showing that open source software can not only replace proprietary desktop applications, but exceed them in every respect. As Firefox moves forward–promoting web standards as it goes, incidentally–we are moving further towards building free tools for a free culture. Every download is another support voluntarily kicked out from under the bloated Behemoth of government-protected intellectual monopolists–a blow against Behemoth without setting Leviathan to battle against it. So give it a download, and keep on rocking in the free world.

The bad news is that John Ashcroft is delusional. And I mean absolutely fucking bonkers:

The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved, Mr. Ashcroft wrote in a five-page, handwritten letter to Mr. Bush, The A.P. said.

The good news, though, is that whatever he happens to believe, he is no longer the Attorney General of the United States:

Yet I believe that the Department of Justice would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration, Mr. Ashcroft said. I believe that my energies and talents should be directed toward other challenging horizons.

The departure of Mr. Ashcroft was not a big surprise since the attorney general, who is 62, had a severe gallstone ailment earlier this year and has had a sometimes bumpy relationship with the White House.

— New York Times 2004/11/09: Attorney General and Commerce Secretary Resign from Cabinet

After four years, no more of the Crisco Messiah‘s efforts to secure our safety and liberties from those who hate freedom. No more Ashcroft subpoenas on the private medical records of women’s abortions, and no more rousing refrains of Let the Eagle Soar. Of course, you have to worry that his replacement could always be worse; but it’s hard to imagine how, exactly, and so far, most of the possibilities that have been floated–Alberto Gonzalez, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Thompson–are, for all their faults, far more moderate, better on civil liberties, and far less representative of the Death Cult wing of the Republican machine. So here’s a toast to old Johnny A–it’s been fun, we won’t miss you at all, and God speed you–straight out of Washington!