A violent gang has recently been taken down in inner-city Chicago. Specifically, the city police recently decided to disband the Special Operations Section, a roaming squadron of over 100 cops which was created to fight inner-city gang crime and drug dealing. Problem is that the narcs themselves ended up running the most tightly organized, heavily armed, corrupt, and powerful racket in the neighborhood.

After weeks of worsening revelations about the Chicago Police Department’s elite Special Operations Section, a beleaguered interim superintendent finally pulled the plug Tuesday, disbanding the scandal-plagued unit and sending most of its officers back to more strictly supervised assignments.

The recent incidents of police misconduct, which include charges that SOS officers robbed and kidnapped people, and that one accused officer plotted to murder another, have been disheartening and demoralizing, especially for officers who serve honorably every day, interim Supt. Dana Starks said Tuesday at a news conference called to announce the abrupt disbanding of SOS.

… Once touted as one of the department’s most nimble and aggressive weapons for fighting street gangs, SOS has produced one black eye after another for the city and Daley’s administration over the last year, and especially in the last several weeks.

The units at the heart of the scandal were involved in street policing, rooting out gang and drug crimes in the roughest parts of Chicago.

… In August the Tribune revealed that the U.S. attorney’s office had joined the ongoing state probe that already had led to charges of robbery and kidnapping against seven officers in the unit.

Just weeks later, the FBI raided the home of Officer Jerome Finnigan, the alleged leader of the accused cops who was free on bail, and charged him with plotting to murder a former SOS officer who had begun aiding investigators.

Two days after the charges were announced, the Tribune published a video of SOS officers—including Finnigan— raiding a Southwest Side bar in 2004 and searching its patrons. The video contradicted the arrest reports and raised constitutional issues about the legality of the raid, in which arrest reports allegedly were falsified and victims said police robbed their homes while they were in custody.

At the end of last week, the department stripped three more officers of their police powers over the incident, and others were under investigation.

In joining the probe, federal investigators have focused not on the original alleged crimes, but on what commanders in SOS, and higher up in the department, may have known about the rogue activities. The Office of Professional Standards and the Internal Affairs Division had fielded numerous complaints about Finnigan and the other officers over the years but they were still on the street before prosecutors concluded their own investigation and brought charges.

… The SOS scandal has brought a growing chorus of questions about the quality of police oversight in the city. The scandal was part of the impetus behind Daley reorganizing the Office of Professional Standards during the summer. And aldermen are fighting the city over documents showing which officers have the most excessive force complaints, a list that is top-heavy with SOS officers.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

But wait, there’s more.

This isn’t the first time that an elite anti-gang unit in the Chicago police force turned out to be engaged in organized crime as much as the gangs it was supposedly combating. The same damn thing happened only seven years ago:

It is not the first time in recent history that a corruption scandal has led to the disbanding of a special unit. In 2000 the Gang Crimes Section was disbanded after federal authorities charged Officer Joseph Miedzianowski with using gang members to run his own drug distribution ring. The FBI called Miedzianowski, now serving life in prison, the most corrupt cop in Chicago history.

When Gang Crimes was disbanded many of the officers in the unit, including Finnigan, were assigned to SOS.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

So what do you suppose they are going to do now that SOS has been busted up?

Well, this is the government that we are talking about, and these are cops. Nobody in government ever gets fired, and nobody on the police force ever even gets blamed, unless and until they get indicted. So what’s going to happen is that are going to do the same goddamned thing that they did in 2000 and transfer the thugs from SOS over to yet another elite unit that does the same goddamned thing:

Some of the more than 100 SOS officers to be reassigned will join the Targeted Response Unit, which does similar work hunting guns and drugs in gang-infested areas. …

But SOS also included other specialized teams, including the SWAT team, marine, K-9, animal abuse and critical response units. Mounted patrol, a helicopter unit and officers trained to protect visiting dignitaries also were part of SOS. Those units are being reorganized into the newly named Special Functions Group, Starks said.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

Somehow I expect that in about seven years or so the city government will once again be shocked! shocked! to learn that corruption and violence have pervaded the Targeted Response Unit or the Special Functions Group, which will be disbanded forthwith in favor of yet another identical unit under a different name.

Oh, but there’s more still!

A lot of the other former SOS cops are going back onto street patrols. But guess where an undisclosed number of them are getting transferred:

Although he declined to give numbers, Starks also said he was moving some officers into the Internal Affairs Division to beef the department’s ability to investigate its own officers.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

I guess it takes a thief….

Meanwhile, the cops’ press flack, Monique Bond, is out to handle the PR problem. Look! It’s Yet Another Isolated Incident!

Officials also were trying to control the damage done to the department’s reputation.

… Not everyone in SOS is a bad officer. You can’t paint this with a broad stroke, she said.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

You could say exactly the same thing about the Bloods or the Crips. But so the fuck what?

(Story thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise 2007-10-10.)

Earlier this year I showed off a new geegaw for my websites, first at Rad Geek People’s Daily, and then at Feminist Blogs. That’s the Humanized History feature that provides the magic endless scrollbars for Geekery Today and Feminist blogs. I used some WordPress template kludges and a bit of unobtrusive JavaScript to magically fetch older posts for you as you get close to the end of the current page, thus allowing you to keep on scrolling as far back as you want to scroll, without having to stop and click through on older posts / newer posts page links.

The way I implemented the feature, at first, was through some ugly spit-and-bailing wire kludges in the WordPress templates, which would be messy and complicated to replicate elsewhere, and which would fall apart if one ever switched to a different theme from the one they were currently using.

But I’m happy to announce that if you have a WordPress weblog, you, too, can now add a Humanized History magic scroller, with only minimal spit and bailing wire. I’ve packaged as much of the magic as I can into a new WordPress plugin, which I’ve unimaginatively dubbed Humanized History for WordPress, and which is now available for download through my projects website.

The plugin does still require some minimal template hacking, due to unavoidable limitations in WordPress, but the hacking you’ll have to d is nice and contained, and if you’re unfamiliar with WordPress templates, you just follow the step-by-step copy-and-paste instructions provided in the documentation. You should also feel free to contact me if anything is unclear or not working properly for you.

Enjoy, and scroll on!

(Via Women of Color Blog 2007-10-07 and Anthony Gregory @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-10-10.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who are not posing any serious threat to anyone, in order to make sure that they 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 students who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers–while they are already lying helpless on the ground. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up 15 year old girls for daring to give them lip over whether to clean up spilled cake. They routinely use intimidation, threats, and violence whenever they get tired enough of being talked back to and if their bellowed orders are no longer sufficient to end an argument–even without any plausible reason whatsoever for fearing any physical threat to themselves or others. When they are caught in the act police administrators will wring their hands, make up some lies to try to excuse the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all; meanwhile a chorus of sado-fascists can be counted on to cheer the pigs and smear the victim in print media, talk shows, and the Internet. Both administrators and freelance sycophants 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.

In Fort Pierce, Florida, a white male cop named Dan Gilroy recently stopped a 15 year old black girl named Shelwanda Riley, and then placed her under arrest, for walking outside at 1:50 in the morning. (City ordinances forbid anyone under 18 from being on city streets without an adult minder between 11:00pm and 6:00am.) Here is the police video of Gilroy twisting her arm, telling her that he is going to hurt her to make her comply, wrenching her arm behind her back, punching her in the face, and then pepper-spraying her right after that, just for good measure.

Note that after he shoved her into the car, this grown man later proceeded to charge the 15 year old girl that he forced down, beat up, and pepper-sprayed, with felony battery. The Authorities at the police department are Investigating, but Gilroy is still on active duty, and the local police chief, Sean Baldwin, says that Initial review of the incident concluded that the police officer acted legally and within bounds.

For the time being, I want to set aside the obvious, stupid tyranny of the law that Dan Gilroy was so diligently trying to enforce. City governments have no business at all keeping tabs on where or when teenagers happen to be out, and cops have no business enforcing laws that city governments have no business making. But even if they did, this kind of thuggery from the police would still be inexcusable.

The sado-fascist police enablers will, no doubt, mutter something about The Law and about keeping public order. They will no doubt point out the fact that the girl was resisting arrest by not submitting to the cop’s bellowed orders to let him handcuff her. They will no doubt point out the fact that, after he told her he was going to hurt her and then wrenched her arm behind her back, she bit at his wrist. They will no doubt claim that a grown man punching a 15-year-old girl in the face and then pepper-spraying her after he had punched her, in spite of the fact that she had done nothing else at that point to indicate that she posed any further threat, was necessary for the officer to successfully complete the arrest. But suppose that this were all true. Then so what?

Even supposing that this cop had any kind of business arresting Shelwanda Riley, so what if he could not complete the arrest without doing these things? So what if he would otherwise have had to stand around waiting until she was willing to submit to arrest, or if he would otherwise have had to give up and let her get away when it became clear that beating her up was the only way to get her cuffed, or if he would have had to let go and back off in order to avoid getting hit by her or bit by her or whatever the hell it is he was so worked up about? So what if she even–perish the thought!–happened to get away from him?

Even if you have a right to do something, that does not mean that you have the right to do it by any means necessary; sometimes there’s no way that you can get it done without using a levels of force that are disproportionate to the case, and in that case you simply have to give up on it; even if you were in the right, using force beyond what’s proportional to the situation turns you into a criminal and turns your enforcement into nothing more than an assault. If the cops cruising around our city streets think that the violence Dan Gilroy used here is worthwhile and within bounds of the proportional use of force — beating up teenaged girls and hurting them with pepper-spray just to make sure they don’t get away with the dreadful crime of wandering around outside too late at night, then that may tell you all that you need to know about the institutional culture of policing in America today.

Today’s lesson comes to us (thanks to Feminist Law Professors) from a recent trend-story from Ananova on gun stores’ efforts to draw women in as customers:

Firearms shops in the US are stocking pink rifles and shotguns to encourage girls to get into shooting.

A report in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says the Gander Mountain hunting store in Waukesha stocks several pink guns.

They include a Remington 20-gauge shotgun with a pink and black stock emblazoned with the slogan: Shoot like a girl if you can!

Store manager Chris Hanson said the guns were aimed, so to speak, at girls and women interested in hunting.

He said the shotgun, and a Crickett rifle with a bright pink stock, were both selling well.

In Baraboo, Jim Astle, owner of Jim’s Gun Supply in Baraboo, has been coating guns in pink and other colours for four years. His 12-year-old daughter owns a pink camouflage shotgun.

Females want to shoot guns, but they want them to look pretty, too, he said. Guys could give a rat’s butt what their gun looks like.

Now, if it were true that guys emphatically don’t care what their gun looks like, then you would expect that a guy would be just as happy to carry a gun that looks like this:

… as he would a gun that looks like this:

I encourage you to give any gun-loving male that you happen to know the choice between the two, and see whether he is really indifferent to how his gun looks.

Most men actually have very strong preferences respecting fashion, appearance, color, and so on. Male society enforces these preferences as prevailing norms for masculinity, vigorously and often violently. Anyone who pays a few second’s worth of attention to branding in pop culture can find this out, if he or she did not already know it. But because men and their preferences are treated as the default case, especially when it comes to echt-male pursuits such as shooting, these strong preferences are rendered invisible, whereas women’s are marked out for special observation and remark. This has the further effect of allowing men to pose as especially pragmatic, as if they are coolly unconcerned with pursuits and preferences that they characterize as both feminine and frivolous. Even though, in fact, they have similar pursuits and similar preferences with which they are no less concerned.

I’m pleased to announce that Part III of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead of a Book is now available in full in the Fair Use Repository’s online edition. The section, entitled Land and Rent, may just as well have been called Tucker Against the Georgists, without much distortion of the contents. (There are some good exchanges toward the front that cover basic principles and make the case for an occupancy-and-use standard for land tenure. After that, the rest is occupied with piling on Henry George and some long debates with defenders of the Georgist theory.)

Read, cite, and enjoy!