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Article posted 23 January 2010 Siege mentality posted 1pm / revised 11am 19 August 2014

Last month, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine published another ill-tempered tirade by retired L.A. cop Dean Scoville in the magazine’s Patrol Tactics section. (You may recall Sergeant Scoville from his previous ill-tempered tirade in which he openly praised police brutality against captive prisoners.) This most recent tirade, Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage? launches into this subject with the following claims of imminent and growing danger that people (non-police) pose to government police:

Shortly before I retired, I openly speculated that we were on the cusp of a new era where people would increasingly bring the fight to us. Moreover, I said they would prove to be greater threats, less predisposed to gangsta-style shooting and actually recognize the significance of sight alignment and trigger control.

I also noted that technology has helped the people who want to kill us develop better eye-hand coordination and tactics via video games and other poor man’s combat simulators, …. They have also become more sophisticated in their choice of weaponry, and are fast becoming better armed than us, accessorizing with everything from laser sights to cop-killer bullets.

… More recently, economic stress, racial strife, a resurrection of militia types, and spillover from Mexican cartel activity have made this toxic cocktail even deadlier.

— Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine: Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?

He closes the article with the following credo:

Yes, I believe that the job is increasingly dangerous. And it is made more so by what is put out there about it.

(This is used as a springboard for a couple pages’ worth of rambling complaints against society at large for our willingness to embrace anti-cop sentiments and stereotypes, with a special focus on the alleged anti-cop drum beating of Hollywood, rap music, and those segments of society who have fundamentally failed to hold their own [sic] accountable — and, just so we’re clear, by those segments of society, Scoville means black people.^[1] Also, I guess he’s pissed off that Dick Wolf decided to cast Ice-T as a cop in Law and Order: SVU.)

Scoville’s claim that being a government cop is increasingly dangerous is not an isolated claim. For example, down in the comments section on the article, another retired government cop, mtarte, writes:

I’m retired now and still wish I could do the job, but today’s cops are in much more dangerous situations than ever before.

— mtarte, in re: Sergeant Dean Scoville (2009-12-01), POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine: Four More Cops Killed: Where Is The Outrage?

In Milwaukee, by way of explanation for why Milwaukee Police Department had begun arming regular patrol cops with semiautomatic rifles:

It’s obvious that our officers are facing an increasingly dangerous threat to their safety as well as the safety of the community as represented by these weapons ….

— Police Chief Ed Flynn, quoted in Officer.com (2009-04-24): Milwaukee Police Increase Firepower

CRIPT Academy, a tactical training outfit for government cops, says that it:

… provides cutting edge training, information, and service that is continually updated to adapt to today’s fluid environment which is becoming increasingly dangerous for those professionals that must operate in harm’s way.

— Officer.com Directory: CRIPT Academy Mobile Training Teams

If you spend much time at all reading articles and public statements by government police, you’re likely to see this received factoid over and over again. Time never alters it; things only get more and more dangerous. No matter what year it is, it’s always this year that’s poised to become the most dangerous year for police ever; in 2007, in an article on how government cops can better confuse detained Suspect Individuals about their rights to refuse searches, former government cop and government prosecutor Devallis Rutledge offered the following:

So far, 2007 is the deadliest year for law enforcement officers in nearly three decades.

— Devallis Rutledge, POLICE: The Law Enforcement Magazine (October 2007): How to Justify Officer Safety Searches

The thing is that all these claims are false. Both in factual detail and in overarching narrative. They could easily have been discovered to be false by taking even a cursory glance at statistics about police deaths in the line of duty. In fact, 2009, when Dean Scoville declared the job to be increasingly dangerous, was the safest year for government police in the U.S. since 1959, in terms of absolute numbers of police officers killed while on duty. With only a few exceptions, the number of government police killed on the job had been decreasing steadily for the past 35 years. Here’s the annual data for the past 35 years, as reported by the Officer Down Memorial Page yearly reports.^[2]

Year	Total line-of-duty deaths	Deaths from violent attacks (Excluding terrorist attacks.)	Total violent deaths adjusted to 2009 population
1974	279	149	215.48
1975	240	148	211.93
1976	202	117	165.92
1977	189	108	151.63
1978	215	109	151.42
1979	214	120	164.87
1980	210	113	153.44
1981	201	105	141.18
1982	194	100	133.18
1983	193	92	121.41
1984	184	83	108.59
1985	179	85	110.23
1986	178	80	102.79
1987	182	84	106.97
1988	194	85	107.26
1989	196	79	98.75
1990	162	71	87.76
1991	148	75	91.47
1992	170	72	86.60
1993	163	83	98.53
1994	180	86	100.84
1995	185	77	89.22
1996	143	64	73.30
1997	177	76	86.00
1998	176	66	73.82
1999	151	49	54.18
2000	163	55	60.13
2001	242	67	72.45
2002	159	63	67.41
2003	147	51	54.22
2004	164	56	58.99
2005	164	54	56.37
2006	156	54	55.84
2007	193	65	66.56
2008	138	42	42.62
2009	120	49	49.00

Or, if you prefer, here’s the chart. The blue line represents the absolute number of cops killed that year in the line of duty; the yellow line best represents the overall danger to cops from violent attacks (specifically, the number killed in violent attacks against police, adjusted to the U.S. population at the end of 2009).

It shows three lines, each sinking steadily with occasional upticks, for the total number of police deaths, the total number due to violent attacks, and the total number of violent deaths adjusted for 2009 population.

Coming back to Devallis Rutledge’s deadliest year in nearly three decades, it’s true that 2007 saw a sudden jump in the number of police killed, compared to 2006. (The next two years saw a sudden drop back to the trend of decreasing police deaths.) But the main reason for that was a jump in deaths due to automobile accidents and other accidental deaths; the number of cops killed in violent attacks — 65 total — was less than the total number killed in 2001, let alone the much higher rates of violent deaths in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. And in fact, if you adjust for the increases in the total population, and the absolute number of police on the streets, it turns out that the increasing safety of government police over the past 35 years is only the tail end of a general trend that has been going on since 1921. (The temporary uptick in violent police deaths from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s never ended up producing more per-capita violent deaths than there had been in 1935.) Following the yellow line, you can see that 2008 and 2009, at the tail end of this trend were the safest years to be a police officer in over 110 years.

Here's a chart showing three lines, each sinking steadily with occasional upticks, for the total number of police deaths, the total number due to violent attacks, and the total number of violent deaths adjusted for 2009 population. The yellow line, representing the number of violent deaths of cops adjusted for U.S. resident population, shows the steepest and most consistent decline, with 2008 and 2009 lower than any other years else on the chart.

In other words, it’s never been safer to be a cop in America than it has been over the past 2 years. Yet boss cops, spokespeople for the government police, and articles written by cops and for cops, constantly repeat the demonstrably false claims that criminals are more violent than ever before, and that government cops somehow face more danger on their patrols now than they ever have before. That this is a complete lie would be obvious to anyone who had spent 15 minutes perusing the police’s own institutions and resources for honoring their fallen comrades. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose the constant refrain of this unfact from government police serves — what it means when ever-more-heavily-armed government cops keep insisting on a completely mythical ever-present, ever-increasing danger to their politically-sacred persons, in spite of the evidence of the senses and the consistent trends over the last century of historical reality. When you see heavily-armed, well-protected men trying so very hard to psych themselves up to believe in a growing danger that does not actually exist — and when this constantly repeated Big Lie is used to slam pop-culture for any attempt to portray any abuse of police power; to swat down real-life complaints about police belligerence or invasions against civil liberties; to explain the alleged need for assault rifles, tanks, cordoning off strategic hamlets in inner cities, and a niche industry in warrior mindset trainings — I couldn’t much blame you if you did see some real danger in this concerted effort to inculcate and reinforce a consciously-constructed, fact-resistant permanent siege mentality among patrol cops. But not danger for the cops.

Do you feel safer now?

^[1] These cop haters are often composed of those segments of society who have fundamentally failed to hold their own accountable, the likes of whom celebrated the King riots, the O.J. acquittal, and the Oakland shootings. This is followed up by out-of-left-field references to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

^[2] If you’re interested in getting the dataset in spreadsheet format, just drop me a line and I’ll send it along. For what it’s worth, if you compare thse figures with figures from other sources, like the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund annual statistics, the numbers are typically very similar, but differ by a few. I presume that this is from differences over which agencies to count as law enforcement officers (Officer Down, for example, counts MPs deployed on overseas assignments.) In any case, the numbers tend to reveal the same trends over time. I used Officer Down’s numbers because they provided an easily-accessible breakdown on causes of death over the years they covered.

Article posted 22 January 2010 Friday Lazy Linking posted 3pm

CNN’s Plea from Haiti: Send Cops to Contain This Peaceful Crowd! Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-01-21). Those tales of mass violence in Haiti are looking increasingly dubious by the day. Here's Sasha Kramer, director of the Haitian nonprofit SOIL, describing the conditions she's seen after the quake: Since we arrived in Port au Prince, everyone has told us that you cannot go into the area around… (Linked Friday 2010-01-22.)
MARV's Next Destination: The Auction Block. Pete Eyre, the Motorhome Diaries (2010-01-19). ARLINGTON, VA – Last March Jason Talley and myself split the cost of a 2000 Four Winds Hurricane. As many of you know, that RV was soon dubbed MARV and became the fourth and best-looking member of the Motorhome Diaires (especially after his transformation into a rolling billboard for liberty)…. (Linked Friday 2010-01-22.)
WE ARE AT WAR! Why Are They Fighting Back? Gene Callahan, Crash Landing (2010-01-09). Glenn Greenwald:’So we’ve spent the last decade screaming to the world that WE ARE AT WAR!, that we’re a War Nation, that we’re led by a War President. That we are “at war” — not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but generally against Islamic extremists — is an absolute bipartisan… (Linked Friday 2010-01-22.)

Article posted 22 January 2010 Somebody’s gotta say it. posted 12am / revised 12am

In the Wednesday link round-up, I mentioned Roderick’s fantastic contribution to the recent Cato Unbound roundtable on Ayn Rand. One of the things he talks about is Rand’s embrace of capitalism not only in the sense of a free market, but also in the sense of something like the actually-existing system of class power over production (bosses, employees, the pyramid of ability, etc.; for the yada yada, see Roderick’s article, and perhaps also my What’s in a name?, which Roderick kindly took notice of in the footnotes).

Anyway. Bryan Caplan takes notice of Roderick’s article and offers (what I take to be) a rather ill-thought-out critique of the economic stuff in it over at EconLog. (Search down for Roderick’s spot-on reply in the comments.) Meanwhile, Brian Doherty takes notice of the article over at Hit & Run, where the comments thread is its usual fascinating self.

While it can’t top that thread in which the very first entry consisted entirely of Fuck you Roderick Long, I have to say that my current favorite is this one:

¢ | 1.20.10 @ 9:12PM | #

I haven’t kept up with Long’s quest to be the David Brooks of (increasingly nominal) libertarianism lately. His establishment-toadying got too embarrassing to watch a couple years back. Looks like it’s even worse now.

Let us know when he gives up the pose and busts his McGovern gear out of storage.

— Re: Ayn Rand: Radical for Something Other Than Capitalism

You may not have known that there was an establishment that could be toadied by arguments for unfettered laissez-faire, open borders, cooperativism, radical feminism, anti-electoralist strategies based on deliberate criminality to advance the cause of individualist anarchism.

But^[1] I, for one, welcome our new radical Left market anarchist overlords.

^[1] … All together now …

Article posted 20 January 2010 Wednesday Lazy Linking posted 3pm

Neither Sword Nor Shield: Full-Spectrum Civilian Disarmament. William N. Grigg, Pro Libertate (2010-01-03). The wages of civilian disarmament: U.S. troops shovel the mortal remains of disarmed Sioux into a mass grave at Wounded Knee, January 1891. “We need to make it clear,” fulminated Patrick Lynch of the New York City Policeman’s Benevolent Association, “that if someone lifts even a finger against a police… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
Google to Cease Censoring Search Results in China. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2010-01-12). Google senior vice president David Drummond: We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law,… (Linked Tuesday 2010-01-19.)
The Winnowing of Ayn Rand. Roderick Long, Cato Unbound (2010-01-20). Like many others, I discovered Ayn Rand around the age of 15; her writings were my introduction to the field of philosophy, thereby setting me on the path to my present career. And while my views over the years have increasingly diverged from hers in numerous details, the fact that… (Linked Wednesday 2010-01-20.)
Three Dead in Guantánamo. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-01-20). In June of 2006, three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay died. According to the official story, the trio committed suicide simultaneously in separate cells, an act which the camp's commander infamously declared a form of "asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Scott Horton at Harper's has a different tale to tell. From… (Linked Wednesday 2010-01-20.)

Article posted 19 January 2010 Pat Robertson Vs. The Past and Human Decency posted 5pm / revised 8am 8 December 2012

In which Pat Robertson reaches the bottom of his own personal barrel, and starts digging:

And you know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it, they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince, true story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. . . the Island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is, is, prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty, same Islands, uh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic something good may come, …

I know that it’s always easy to blame the victim, and that every mass grave has a silver lining and all, but fuckin’ A, dude, really?

If you’re curious as to when Napoleon III was ruling Haiti, well so am I. But more to point than this sort of dynastic pettifogging is that Pat Robertson believes that the current death and suffering in Haiti is the result of their being cursed, and interprets the second successful anti-imperialist revolution in the history of the Americas, the most successful slave uprising in the history of the world, and the establishment of the world’s first ideologically anti-slavery republic, as a Satanic conspiracy, consecrated in a pact between the Haitian people (collectively?) and the Devil himself.

(For the really curious, the true story that Robertson interprets as being the occasion on which Haitian Revolutionaries somehow sold the entire nation and their posterity to the Devil is probably the Bois Caïman ceremony in August 1791, an African religious ceremony traditionally held to have been led by Boukman Dutty at the beginning of the slave uprisings which became the dominant force in the Haitian Revolution. Of course, in 1791, this had nothing much to do with Napoleon I, let alone Napoleon III. In any case, the prayer traditionally attributed to Boukman actually invokes The god who created the earth; who created the sun that gives us light. The god who holds up the ocean; who makes the thunder roar. Our God who has ears to hear. You who are hidden in the clouds; who watch us from where you are. The notion that the ceremony was a pact with the Devil that promised to turn Haiti over to his domination for 200 years if he would grant worldly success to their rebellion, is a fabrication added by white historians after the fact, as part of their efforts to reinterpret the revolution against race slavery as literally the product of supernatural intervention by the forces of Hell unleashed. In any case, even if that were the deal, it’s supposed to have expired back in 1991.)

For some more lucid commentary on why Haiti faces the permanent state of emergency that it has faced for the past several decades, you might check out this historical overview from the Times of London; the short answer is that Haitian people have been forced, for two centuries now, to labor to pay off iniquitous reparations to their former enslavers and debts contracted, without their permission, by governments that oppressed and killed them. As important as solidarity and relief are in terrible times like these, the only real and lasting solution is not charity, but complete repudiation of these unpayable, nonconsensual, government-inflicted blood debts.

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