1. Common ground. Chicago, Illinois; London, England; Tehran, Iran; and Ramat Gan, Israel. It turns out there’s one thing the governments in Iran, Israel, the U.K., and the U.S.A. can all agree on: massive police brutality against political protesters.

2. Lausanne, Switzerland. World Radio Switzerland (2009-06-09): Perjury claim reopens police brutality case. A cop in the Swiss city of Lausanne stopped a 16 year old Eritrean immigrant twice on New Year’s eve; the second time, they decided to douse him with pepper spray and leave him out in the woods. He tried to lodge a complaint, but the local police wouldn’t accept the complaint. When the case finally got investigated and went to trial, the cop was acquitted in court because his gang-brothers lied for him on the stand. The case is back in the news because it’s been re-opened after a former cop accused them of perjuring themselves in order to cover up police brutality.

3. Sergeant Naofumi Nomura. Okayama, Japan. A 75 year old woman recently got Served and Protected by Police Sergeant Naofumi Nomura when he stole her purse and about 10,000 yen inside it. He was arrested after two high school boys chased him down on their bicycles. (Via Reason Daily Brickbats.)

4. Northern Territory police. Darwin, Australia. Tara Ravens, Brisbane Times (2009-06-10): Coroner slams NT police over man’s death. Northern Territory police pulled a former journalist named Greg Plasto off the street and forced him into the hospital for a mental health assessment because they thought he was acting strangely, in their arbitrary judgment, which apparently is good enough to put you in a psychoprison these days; after he had been forced to wait nearly two hours in an ambulance, he got up and said he wanted to go outside. Rather than asking him why he wanted to go outside, or just letting him get up and walk around, a gang of up to six cops tackled Plasto, who, again, had not been accused of any crime at all, then wrestled him to the ground, smashed his head into the ground, and held him down on the ground for four minutes while he turned blue and smothered to death. The coroner who reviewed the case says that the problem is that police need better training.

5. Officer Joseph J. Rios III. Passaic, New Jersey. (Cont’d.) I previously mentioned the case of Officer Joseph J. Rios III, who was videotaped beating the hell out of a defenseless black man, over and over again, for not having zipped up his jacket on command. (Rios, formerly a counter-insurgency soldier in occupied Iraq, remained on active patrol duty while the incident was being Internally Investigated, right up until after the video evidence was released to the public, at which point the city government’s police department let him keep his job, but put him on a desk job. Then, in response to public protest, Mayor Alex Blanco had the city government’s police department give Rios a [paid vacation](http://www.northjersey.com/breakingnews/Officeraccusedofexcessiveforce_suspended.html instead. Later, in response to ongoing protests, he had it changed to an unpaid vacation.

   Officer Joseph J. Rios III has since come out with a public statement for the press, insisting that he stands by his actions; saying (through his lawyer) that There were communications by Mr. Holloway and the officer as well as an earlier encounter during the day between the men that wasn’t on the tape (apparently thinking that verbal communications might somehow — how? — justify this relentless beat-down); he asserts that he did what was proper and (what he wrongly believes to be the same thing) he did what I was trained to do. Supposing that’s true, what does that tell you about the training?

6. Well, if you say so …. Botched SWAT raid. Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department. Prince George’s County, Maryland. Radley Balko, Hit & Run (2009-06-20): Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department Declares Itself Blame-Free in Cheye Calvo Raid In which the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department issues a report in which it is reported that the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department did nothing wrong in the no-knock, no-evidence SWAT raid on Cheye Calvo’s family home. (This is more or less what passes for investigation when cops commit violence against mere civilians.) Sheriff Michael Jackson says the Internal Investigation’s results are consistent with what I've felt all along: My deputies did their job to the fullest extent of their abilities. No doubt.

7. Oops. Our bad. (Cont’d.) Botched SWAT raid. Mustang, Oklahoma. Six heavily-armed strangers in black bullet-proof vests stormed Terry Speck’s house back in March and, without telling her who the hell they were or what they were doing in her house, told her they were looking for her 20-year-old nephew, Cory Davis. Terrified, she tried to tell them he was in prison. They didn’t believe her, so they ransacked her house for 20 minutes before they left, without ever identifying themselves. The Specks were later able to figure out that they were police by reviewing the tapes from their home security cameras. Cory Davis had in fact been in state prison since November, but apparently when an arrest warrant on new charges was issued, none of the narcs bothered to check where he was, instead of storming first and asking questions later. Of course, for being terrorized at the hands of six heavily-armed strangers for absolutely no reason, Terry Speck got an Oops, our bad from the state. (Via Reason Daily Brickbats 2009-06-14.)

8. Murderers and batterers on patrol. Officer Jason Thomas Anderson. Big Lake, Minnesota. I’ve remarked before on the connections between paramilitary policing and violent hypermasculinity. So I’ll just mention, here, that it turns out that when Officer Jason Thomas Anderson is not busy shooting teenage Hmong bike-riders in the back (or shooting them five more times in the chest after they’re already bleeding on the ground), he also likes to get himself arrested on domestic violence charges.

9. Roughing up and arresting an innocent woman for filming the police. Richmond, Virginia. Richmond police were dealing with a lot of drunks down in Shockoe Bottom at 2:00am last September. Joanne Jefferson decided to observe and film how the cops were handling people in the crowd; so the cops responded by ordering her to leave, then grabbing her arm, slamming her into a wall, and then forcing her down onto the ground and arresting her for impeding traffic. The story is now in the news because the Richmond D.A. has decided to drop the charges against Ms. Jefferson. Even though filming the police on public property is not a crime, and even though the D.A. has determined that the police had absolutely no basis for arresting Ms. Jefferson, let alone grabbing her, slamming her into a wall, and forcing her down onto the ground in order to do so, he thinks that the officers did not act with excessive force. If the appropriate level of force is zero, how is this not excessive force? Nevertheless, the D.A. has stated that he sees no evidence that would support a criminal investigation of a police officer.

10. Arresting an innocent priest for filming the police. Officer David Cari. East Haven, Connecticut. East Haven cop David Cari arrested a Roman Catholic priest, James Manship, for filming police treatment of Latino immigrants in East Haven. The police report claims that he had to be arrested for disorderly conduct and interfering with an officer because he was holding an unknown shiny silver object in his hand (with the obvious intent to suggest that the cop thought it might have been a gun) and struggled with a cop who tried to take it from him. Turns out that the video footage from the camera shows Officer David Cari asking the priest Is there a reason you have a camera on me? Manship replying I’m taking a video of what’s going on here, and Cari approaching Manship and saying, Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with that camera. The police department’s lawyer says You’ve got to conclude that he was out there with a video camera in an attempt, in my view, to provoke the police to do something. (Well, whatever you want; but if cops just can’t help but do something like arrest an innocent man for a non-crime when provoked by the public they allegedly serve trying to record their behavior, then why should such dangerous thugs continue being cops?) (Via Reason Daily Brickbats 2009-06-01: Caught on Tape.)

11. Roughing up and arresting an innocent woman for raising her voice at a police officer. Officer Bobby Wright and New Mexico State Police. Espa?@c3;b1;ola, New Mexico. In New Mexico, a couple of State Police, responding to reports of shots fired in the area, rolled up on Dolores Jacquez, a 17 year old pregnant girl, and her boyfriend, who were sitting in a car minding their own business. They pointed automatic rifles at the two of them and ordered them to stand outside the car with their hands in the air. Her boyfriend has only one leg, which made it hard for him to do what they were ordering. Rather than acting like human beings, and in spite of the fact that neither of these kids had committed any crime, the State Police shoved the 17 year old pregnant girl and her one-legged boyfriend down to the ground. During this absolutely pointless manhandling, Jacquez spoke angrily to the officers, raising her voice while talking to them, using profanity at times; for which the State Police decided that she and her boyfriend ought to be arrested. So they shoved her into their patrol car and called up a city government cop, Officer Bobby Wright, to take her to jail. When she asked what would happen to her boyfriend, he replied Shut up, [expletive]. Then he handcuffed her to a bench at the State Police station, making the cuff so tight that it cut into the skin and left a mark on her wrist for days, refused to let her use the bathroom, and threatened to make the cuffs even tighter if she did not shut up. This complaint makes at least the fourth complaint for brutality or unlawful arrests against Officer Bobby Wright. The State Police never bothered to file any charges, because, of course, cussing at cops is not a crime. But while you can beat the rap, you can’t beat the ride, so they arrested the kids anyway, because they could. The State Public Safety Department has settled the separate lawsuit that Jacquez filed against the two State Police cops for terrorizing her, roughing her up and arresting her for speaking angrily; public servants that they are, the State Public Safety Department will be sending the bill for the settlement to a bunch of innocent taxpayers who had nothing to do with the assault or the false arrest.

12. Four broken ribs for approaching a police officer. Modesto, California. Back in January 2007, Margaret Shepherd went out to a Modesto bar with her son to celebrate his 21st birthday. One of her son’s friends got thrown out of the bar and a scuffle appeared to break out between the bar’s security guards and some other people in the party. Ms. Shepherd, who had nothing to do with any of this, tried to approach some cops who were in the club to ask them what the hell was going on. So they broke four of her ribs, arrested her for resisting arrest, and then threw her in a paddy-wagon and refused to get her medical attention while she struggled to breathe in the back of the wagon. The story is in the news again because a jury just cleared the cops of any civil liability for this hyperviolent assault on an innocent woman who had done nothing other than try to ask the cops what was going on.

13. Beating and pepper-spraying a man after he’s been handcuffed for arguing with a police officer. Lieutenant Chuck McBrayer and Officer Danny Williams. Valley, Alabama. Amy Weaver, Opelika-Auburn News (2009-06-09): Third claim filed against Valley, police. Valley cops Lieutenant Chuck McBrayer and Officer Danny Williams forced their way into 64 year old Joseph E. Coker’s home. Joseph E. Coker wasn’t accused of any crime; they were looking for his son, Brandon Coker. Joseph Coker and Lieutenant Chuck McBrayer got into a verbal argument, so McBrayer threatened to pepper spray him for arguing with a cop who was intruding into his own home. So McBrayer ordered Officer Danny Williams to handcuff this 64-year-old man; then, after he was already being handcuffed, Lieutenant Chuck McBrayer pepper-sprayed him in the face; then he pried open Coker’s right eye and pepper-sprayed him again, directly in the eye. Then they forced him down onto the ground and, while he was still cuffed and physically restrained, smashed his nose so hard he passed out and had to be hospitalized. After going on this unprovoked hyperviolent rampage against a 64-year-old man in his own home, McBrayer and Williams arrested Coker in the emergency room for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. This is the third claim of police brutality filed against the Valley police department in the last three months. The boss cops in Valley refuse to comment on any disciplinary actions because the incident is being Internally Investigated. (Via @InjusticeNews.)

14. Bludgeoning a stabbing victim after he was already handcuffed to a wheelchair. Officer William Cozzi. Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, Officer William Cozzi, a 15-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was caught on video handcuffing a stabbing victim to a wheelchair, in the hospital emergency room, and beating him with a sap. He was called into the emergency room help the man out after he had been stabbed by a female companion. But his victim was drunk, and Cozzi was busy Investigating, so he got frustrated at the alleged beneficiary of this investigation, and decided to deal with his frustration by shackling the man to a wheelchair and beating him with a sap. Then he made up some complete lies for his police report about his victim having attacked him and hospital workers. After the video came out, Cozzi plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and got 18 months of probation.

    Later, a series of scandals over repeated and unchecked police brutality and corruption within the Chicago Police Department forced Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis to refer the case to the FBI for a federal civil rights investigation. Cozzi was just recently convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison. In response, the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago has made a public complaint about the fact that Cozzi will go to prison for beating the hell out of an innocent, wounded assault victim who was shackled to a wheelchair at the time, and who Cozzi was supposedly called in to Protect and Serve. Terence Gillespie, Cozzi’s defense lawyer, says that This is a message to all those officers in blue out there that after 15 years on the job you’ll get thrown under the bus.

    (See also the case of Hope Steffey for cops beating the hell out of an assault victim who gets too frustrating while the cop is doing his Investigating.)

15. Gang-beating a man after he’s been handcuffed. Officer Brian Quilici, Officer Ronald Pilati, and Officer Jerome Volstad. Fox Lake, Illinois. Three off-duty cops — one on the Richmond city government’s police force, and two on the Spring Grove city government’s police force — went to a bar in Fox Lake to get drunk back in April 2005. Along the way they got into a verbal argument with a man named Ryan Hallett. When he tried to leave, the three cops followed him out of the bar, handcuffed him, and then beat him down to the ground while he was cuffed. Then, while Hallet was lying on the ground, one of the cops, Officer Brian Quilici, kicked him in the face so hard that he Hallett suffered a broken facial bone and later had to get multiple surgeries. Fox Lake police who responded to this mob beat-down by their gang brothers recommended that their victim, Ryan Hallet, be prosecuted, until a series of newspaper reports revealed that Officer Brian Quilici had already racked up multiple complaints for harassment, battery and disorderly conduct, somehow without charges ever having been filed against him or his job prospects having been hurt in the least. After the newspaper stories forced their hand, the State Police eventually started their own investigation, and Qulici was eventually charged and convicted of mob action, official misconduct, and obstructing justice, which got him a two-year prison sentence. His comrades-in-arms, Officer Ronald Pilati and Officer Jerome Volstad, plead guilty on misdemeanor charges. The story is in the news again for two reasons. First, because a federal jury recently imposed a $450,000 judgment against Quilici and the city government of Richmond for the beating. (The Richmond city government will, of course, force innocent taxpayers to pay for the government’s decision to keep an out-of-control hyperviolent cop on their police force after multiple complaints.) Secondly, because a state appeals court just threw out Officer Brian Quilici’s conviction, on the grounds that the judge in the original criminal trial should not have confused the jury by telling them that A police officer executing an arrest outside of his jurisdiction has no greater arrest powers than a private citizen executing a citizens' arrest. Because arrest powers would have made it O.K. to pick a start fight, handcuff your victim, and then kick him in the face while he’s lying on the ground?

16. Highway robbery. Officer Jonathan Lutman. Slidell, Louisiana. In Louisiana, Slidell Police Officer Jonathan Lutman repeatedly used his police car to pull over Latino drivers (whom he targeted because he thought they’d be less likely to report the stick-up) and then demanded that they hand over their wallets. When he had the wallet, he would rip out the cash and pocket it. Officer Jonathan Lutman stole about $3,000 on these highwayman traffic stops before two of his victims reported him. The story is in the news again because he plead guilty to 12 counts of malfeasance in office in May. If you or I or any other non-cop were convicted of practicing highway robbery (in the most literal sense) while armed with a dangerous weapon, we would be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than ten years and not more than ninety-nine years, without benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. But since Officer Jonathan Lutman robbed people using a government-issued weapon and under color of government authority, he plead guilty to a crime that normally carries a 5 year prison sentence. And then the judge suspended the sentence, and gave Lutman probation instead, and ordered him to complete 200 hours of community service. (Via Reason Daily Brickbats: Copping a Plead.)

17. Corporal Jason King. South Bend, Indiana. After a high-speed chase, Corporal Jason King was filmed on his dash cam beating up the Suspect Individual he was arresting, even though his victim posed no threat and was not resisting arrest. The Chief of Police in South Bend punished Corporal King by giving him a 30-day unpaid vacation and dropping his rank to patrolman.. When even the Chief of Police concedes that he was needlessly assaulting and battering a man who posed no physical threat, why isn’t Corporal Jason King going to jail?

18. Officer John Mailander and Officer Mersed Dautovic. Des Moines, Iowa. Two Des Moines city government cops were responding to an unrelated emergency call back in September; a car with a black couple in it failed to immediately yield, so instead of driving on to the emergency, the cops stopped the car, screamed orders and pulled the driver, Erin Evans, out of the car, and, when her boyfriend, Octavius Bonds, tried to get them to stop assaulting her, blinded him with pepper spray, and then beat him black and blue with batons, breaking his left hand and his right arm, and cracking his head open with a gash so big it took eight staples to close. Then they lied about it in their police report to try and cover up their brutality. The story is in the news again now because Des Moines Police Chief Judy Bradshaw just recently fired the two cops responsible for this out-of-control assault on helpless victims who had not committed any crime. So, great, they lost their jobs. Why aren’t these dangerous assailants in jail?

19. Quid custodiet…? Officer Paul Abel. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh cop Paul Abel was an eight year veteran of the police force, and also a former counter-insurgency soldier in the U.S. government’s war on Iraq. He had already racked up three outstanding complaints against him for brutality and filing false police reports on the night he went out to celebrate his wife’s birthday. He decided to drive drunk — after four beers and two shots. Some dude came by and punched him in the face while he sat in his car at the stoplight. So Officer Paul Abel got out, grabbed his government-issued gun, and drove after the suspect. Then, with a blood alcohol level over 0.111, he rolled up on a young man from the neighborhood named Kaleb Miller. Miller says he wasn’t the man who punched Abel; two tow-truck drivers, who were in the area and saw the punching happen, say that Miller looks nothing like the man who did punch Abel. But Officer Paul Abel, drunk off his ass, decided that he had his man, so (out of uniform, at 2 in the morning) he charged up on Miller, waving his gun around, and bellowing arbitrary commands to get down on the ground. Miller didn’t get down quickly enough, so Officer Paul Abel grabbed Miller, pistol-whipped him five times, and then accidentally shot him in the hand. Even the Pittsburgh Police Chief had to publicly announce that The gentleman who was in the physical altercation [sic] is an innocent victim as far as we can tell. The story is in the news now because, when Abel was brought up on aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and DUI charges, he opted for a trial before a government judge (because government cops know that they are much more likely to be acquitted by a government judge than by a jury), and Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning has just recently acquitted him on all charges, even the DUI. Manning himself called the beat-down, pistol-whipping, and shooting inappropriate, imprudent and ill-advised. But Manning chose to dismiss all the charges because Officer Paul Abel is a cop, and therefore (according to Manning) he cannot be held legally responsible for his admittedly inappropriate, imprudent, and ill-advised hyperviolent beat-down against an admittedly innocent man. Because, according to Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning, cops are a class apart, who cannot be held to account for their unrestrained violence in mere civilian courts; or, in his own words, It is not the obligation of this court to police the police department.

    So if the courts don’t police the police, who does?

    The answer is, of course, that most of the time, nobody does. Other arms of the government hardly ever hold government police accountable for abuse because they fob off responsibility to the discretion of their legally-privileged-and-immunized enforcers. The government police hardly ever hold other government police accountable for abuse because they have no incentive to restrain the conduct of their fellow government cops, and a distinct professional interest in giving their colleagues as much latitude as possible in the exercise of unchecked power over their chosen targets. And nobody outside of government can hold police accountable for abuse, because government refuses to recognize the right of any independent person or association to sit in judgment of its own actions, and so has legally declared the State and all its agents accountable to none save God alone. And if you want to know why, week after week, you see the same pattern of rampant, relentless, unchecked, unaccountable, unrepentant, overwhelming and intense violence, committed by government cops against people who are obviously harmless, helpless, or defenseless, in the defense of police prerogatives and inflicted against the very people who they are allegedly being privileged and paid to Serve and Protect — well, that’s pretty much why.

    Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

20. Because the cops we have are already doing so much… Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Departments, North Las Vegas Police Department, and Henderson Police Department. Carson City, Nevada. Meanwhile, in the capital of Nevada, the bosses of several Nevada police departments — which currently pay the second-highest average police salaries of any state in the U.S. — rolled into the state legislature in the state of Nevada demanding the second half of a quote-unquote More Cops tax, a special tax increase to be inflicted on Nevada taxpayers, in the midst of the state’s worst economic crisis in three generations, solely for the purpose of hiring even more police to go on saturating Nevada city streets and doing all the things that cops do with their time, on our dime, and supposedly in our names.

See also:

• GT 2009-06-11: The Police Beat
• GT 2009-06-02: The Police Beat
• GT 2009-02-23: The Metro Police Beat
• GT 2009-04-19: Men In Uniform #3
• GT 2009-05-08: Cops are here to protect you. (#9)
• GT 2009-01-12: Cops are here to protect you. (#8)
• GT 2008-09-09: Cops are here to protect you. (#7)
• GT 2008-06-03: Cops are here to protect you. (#6)
• GT 2008-05-20: Cops are here to protect you. (#5)
• GT 2008-05-11: Cops are here to protect you. (#4)
• GT 2008-05-10: Cops are here to protect you. (#3)
• GT 2008-02-26: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2008-02-18: Cops are here to protect you.
• GT 2007-11-09: You got served and protected.

OMAHA, Neb. — When Danielle Nitzel found her three-year-old marriage drawing its last breath in 2004, she couldn’t afford the minimum of $1,000 she was told she would need to hire a divorce lawyer.

So she did what more and more Americans are doing: She represented herself in court.

I looked online and just tried to figure out how to write out the paperwork, said Nitzel, a nursing student who at the time had little money and a pile of education loans. I think it cost us $100 to file it ourselves.

The number of people serving as their own lawyers is on the rise across the country, and the cases are no longer limited to uncontested divorces and small claims. Even people embroiled in child custody cases, potentially devastating lawsuits and bankruptcies are representing themselves, legal experts say.

It’s not just that poor people can’t afford lawyers. This is really a middle-class phenomenon, said Sue Talia, a judge from Danville, Calif., and author of Unbundling Your Divorce: How to Find a Lawyer to Help You Help Yourself.

The trend has resulted in court systems clogged with filings from people unfamiliar with legal procedure. Moreover, some of these pro se litigants, as they are known, are making mistakes with expensive and long-lasting consequences — perhaps confirming the old saying that he who represents himself has a fool for a client.

Paul Merritt, a district judge in Lancaster County, Neb., said he knows of cases in which parents lost custody disputes because they were too unfamiliar with such legal standards as burden of proof.

There is a lot on the line when you have a custody case, Merritt said. There are a lot of things that judges take into consideration in determining what’s in the best interest of the child, and if you’re a pro se litigant, the chances that you will know what those things are, and that you will present evidence of all those issues, are really small.

While the fees lawyers charge vary widely, the average hourly rate ranges from around $180 to $285 in the Midwest, and from $260 to more than $400 on the West Coast, according to legal consultant Altman Weil Inc.

Tim Eckley of the American Judicature Society in Des Moines, Iowa, said no national figures are kept on how many people represent themselves, but I don’t think anybody who’s involved in the courts would deny that this is a growing trend in the last 10 to 15 years.

In California, about 80 percent represent themselves in civil family law cases — such as divorce, custody and domestic violence cases — according to the Self-Represented Litigation Network. In San Diego alone, the number of divorce filings involving at least one person not represented by a lawyer rose from 46 percent in 1992 to 77 percent in 2000.

In Nebraska in 2003, 13,295 people represented themselves in civil cases in state district courts. By 2007, the number had risen to 32,016, or 45 percent.

The result?

Courts are absolutely inundated with people who do not understand the procedures, Talia said. It is a disaster for high-volume courts, because an inordinate amount of their clerks’ time is spent trying to make sure that the procedures are correctly followed.

Talia has traveled to nearly every state to speak to lawyers, judges and court workers about measures to handle the growing number of people representing themselves.

— Margery A. Gibbs, Associated Press (2008-11-24): More Americans serving as their own lawyers

Why not just make the procedures simpler?

Do courts really need to stand on ceremony at the expense of justice?

See also:

• GT 2008-06-09: 10,000 ways to lose your freedom
• GT 2008-09-08: Stop the State-mandated murder of Troy Davis

Meanwhile, among the state Leftists….

At Common Dreams, Progressives discover that party politics has mechanisms to favor insiders, and to make it difficult for candidates to get a nomination without the approval of the party aparat. Most react with horror, and decide to change this stifling state of affairs–by committing themselves even more fervently to partisan politicking. This time in the name of strengthening our democracy, which requires wresting control of the Party out of the hands of the very people who write the rules of engagement. See, if you can win, then you can change things so that the party establishment can’t keep you from winning anymore.

Elsewhere, Stanley Fish discovers that the government-appointed directors of politically-run Universities sometimes put partisanship and political cronyism above academics in appointing senior administrators. The way he reckons it, a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that. Nor is it necessary, even in the straitened circumstances (hardly unique to Colorado) the university faces. There is another way, and Michael Carrigan, one of the three (Democratic) regents to vote against Benson, pointed to it when he told me, I can't believe that there are no candidates out there with both business acumen and academic credentials. He is right. Those candidates were out there and they still are. Perhaps the next university tempted to go this route will take the trouble to look for them.

Playing the government game and taking the government’s patronage means playing by the government’s rules. The longer you keep walloping at it, the more stuck in it you get. Primary goals — like solidarity and social justice, or intellectual discovery and creation — have already been replaced by secondary goals — like winning elections or tugging on legislative purse-strings. Soon the secondary goals are swallowed up by tertiary goals — spending four-year election cycle after four-year election cycle bashing yourself against the hardened barricades of the Party establishment, or wrangling with political factions over the best process to find and bring in a boss combining the right balance of academic chops with the political connections needed to keep the university mainlining politically appropriated funds. This is no way to make a revolution. It’s not even a way to make small change.

In anarchy, there is another way. When the things that matter most in our lives are the things that we make for ourselves, each of us singly, or with many of us choosing to work together in voluntary associations, there will be no need to waste years of our lives and millions of dollars fighting wars of attrition with back-room king-makers–because we will not need to get any of the things that they are trying to hoard. There will be no need to fight battles between academic senates and Boards of Trustees over the right balance of academic competence and political savvy in a university President –because when universities’ funding rises from the people who participate in, or care about, the academic community, rather than being handed down by the State, the university has no need for political bodies like Boards of Trustees or smooth-operator self-styled Chief Executive Officers. We will not need to get any of the favors that they might be able to grant. When we go after the State’s patronage, politics makes prisoners of us all. But freedom means that when the powers that be try to rope you along for something stupid, or try to snuff out something brilliant, we can turn around, walk away, and do things for ourselves–whether they like it or not.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action and GT 2006-07-06: Direct Action comix #2
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform and GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading
• GT 2005-06-25: Shut up and put up and GT 2006-06-16: And around we go…
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!
• Randolph Bourne (1918): The State, Part II, on the structure and role of the party system

… But I repeat myself.

Last month The Nation had an excellent and infuriating article on the paramilitary assaults and round-ups staged by La Migra at a chain of meat-packing plants across the country.

Working on the meatpacking floor can be a grueling, monotonous, dangerous routine, making thousands of the same cuts or swipes every day, and annual injury and illness rates might run 25 percent or more, but a union job with a wage of $12-$13 an hour, enough to support a family, seems worth the pain and risk.

At least until December 12, the holiday celebrating the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. What materialized in front of the Swift gates that morning was more like a vision of hell. Shortly after 7 am a half-dozen buses rolled up with a small fleet of government vans, which unloaded dozens of heavily armed federal agents backed by riot-clad local police. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sealed off all entrances and exits and formed a perimeter around the factory. Then others barged inside and started rounding up the whole workforce.

Some of the frightened workers jumped into cattle pens; others hid behind machinery or in closets. Those who tried to run were wrestled to the ground. Sworn statements by some workers allege that the ICE agents used chemical sprays to subdue those who didn’t understand the orders barked at them in English. The plant’s entire workforce was herded into the cafeteria and separated into two groups: those who claimed to be US citizens or legal residents and those who didn’t.

While the Greeley plant was being locked down, more than 1,000 ICE agents simultaneously raided five other Swift factories in Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and Minnesota. By the end of the day, nearly 1,300 immigrant workers had been taken into custody–about 265 of them from Greeley. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff boasted that the combined raids amounted to the largest workplace enforcement action in history. ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers would later claim that Operation Wagon Train, as the raids were dubbed, dealt a major blow in the war against illegal immigration.

…

What nobody, including ICE, can answer is why, if the real targets were those people with stolen Social Security numbers, federal officials didn’t go quietly into the Swift factories and, armed with warrants, simply arrest the suspects. Why the brash paramilitary operation? …

… The aggressiveness of the arrests and what followed have startled many. I was amazed by the force used, by the heavy armament, says Democratic State Representative James Riesberg. Amazed that so many didn’t have the bond hearings they were owed, that so many were held without their location disclosed.

When news of the raids broke, Rodriquez entered the plant but ICE officials prohibited him from getting personal information from the workers to pass on to their families. ICE treated the workers like animals, he says. Didn’t let people eat or drink anything. Didn’t let them go to the bathroom. Wouldn’t let workers use phones to make arrangements for kids in school or at home. He adds, This was something you think you might see on TV, but never did I imagine I would actually live through it.

The Greeley Latino community, about 35 percent of the population, was not totally unprepared for the disaster. Political events of the previous year had spurred community organization and generated vibrant new leadership. As word of the raid flashed on local Spanish-language radio, hundreds of worried family members and protesters converged on the factory gates. Local police mobilized to keep the crowd at bay as their loved ones were handcuffed and loaded by ICE into waiting buses. The militarized sweep hit the community like a hurricane, says 33-year-old Sylvia Martinez, one of Greeley’s most prominent new Latino activists. It’s frightening to see the power that the federal government has to blow through here and leave a shambles, she says as we eat lunch at one of the town’s many Mexican restaurants. This has been our Katrina, a man-made Katrina. There’s no information, no accountability.

–Marc Cooper, The Nation (2007-02-15): Lockdown in Greeley

And what, you might ask, can we find in the Letters section of the most recent issue (dated April 2, 2007), in response to the obvious injustice of this large-scale assault peaceful and productive workers, followed by shipping them off to holding pens en masse and holding them incommunicado without due process, solely on the basis of their nationality? A protest of the government’s practice of international apartheid, and the assault on immigrant workers by which that practice is enforced? Solidarity with the courageous stands against power taken by the union local and the families of the disappeared?

In a couple of letters, sure. In the numerical majority of letters, no. What we have instead is a gang of comfortable Progressives whose only thought is to escalate efforts to jail immigrant workers and/or those who offer them work. Here’s a sample:

The game until now has been an elaborate choreography among the employers who need the immigrant workers, the immigrants who want these jobs, the communities who need them, the cattlemen who depend on them and the government whose basic motto has been: Don’t ask, don’t tell, says an immigrant advocate. The employers don’t need the immigrant workers. The corporations profit from paying coolie wages [sic!] to the illegals. The communities certainly don’t need them. Many communities are hard-pressed to deal with the exploding immigrant population. The cattlemen depend on the immigrants the same way the corporations do. The cheap labor is a source to be exploited. Product prices would increase if corporations were forced to pay fair wages to US citizens to perform unsavory or labor-intensive jobs. I, for one, would gladly pay more for products made in this country, by citizen labor.

Philip Ratcliffe

Philip Ratcliffe is, of course, perfectly free right now to find sellers who will certify nativist hiring standards and to pay them more for their products. But he has no business trying to force that policy on the rest of the consumers in the country–let alone to force it on immigrant workers who have done nothing worse than do work for willing employers and customers. It’s also interesting to note the explicit effort to pry the nativist rhetoric of coolie wages out of Sam Gompers’ cold, dead hands and dust it off for re-use by early 21st century Progressives. (Also the revival of the rhetorical tactic of labeling entire ethnic groups of workers as coolie labor, even when the workers you’re proposing to exile from the country are in fact unionized and being paid a living wage). But anyway, in case the racism wasn’t explicit enough for you, though, there is always this one:

Re: Lockdown in Greeley, How Immigration Raids Terrorized a Colorado Town by Marc Cooper [Feb. 26]. Why is The Nation so intent on jamming Latino illegal aliens down the throats of their readers and ignoring the other side of the story? I don’t know anyone who is not in favor of sending these people back home and cracking down on corporate America for hiring them. They are costing taxpayers a fortune while enriching corporate America, and they are changing the fabric of American culture. America is importing poverty, something we have plenty of already, since the Republicans and corporations have been running the country. Immigration needs to be controlled, and we need a balance of people coming in from different countries. There are too many Hispanics and Latinos in the country, and they shouldn’t be rewarded for breaking the law.

Jeanne Picard

Well, then.

Immigrant workers are indeed among the most downtrodden and exploited workers in the country. But that’s not because there is anything wrong with moving from one place to another in order to find work. That’s something that working folks have done throughout all known history, and for very good reasons. It’s precisely because the know-nothing blowhard brigade has criminalized their existence and put them constantly at risk of being jailed or shot. Among the worst of the lot, because they are the most insidious, are those who propose walling off labor at national borders in the name of labor solidarity, and attempted to tie nativist policy in with pseudo-populist economics. But of course international apartheid does nothing to benefit workers as a whole; at the most, it only benefits the most privileged working folks–the American-born workers and those who had the resources or the good luck to secure a visa–at the expense of all those other working folks — dehumanized into an anonymous mass of poverty by the nativist rhetoric — stuck on the wrong side of the wall. Those who consider native-born American workers more important or more deserving of an opportunity to work without being shot or jailed, just for having been born here, would do well to shut the hell up about the working class and just admit that they are not Leftists but rather belligerent nationalists. The rest of us would do well to dissociate ourselves, as completely as possible, from the crypto-racism and occasionally overt racism of this unwelcome Progressive-era legacy.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-01: May Day 2006: A Day of Resistance
• GT 2006-04-22: Over My Shoulder #20: Damon W. Root (2006), review of David W. Southern's The Progressive Era and Race
• Stanford M. Lyman, New Politics, New Series 7.3 (Winter 2000): The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians

A while ago I was looking for some good pages to reference about some of psychiatry’s more barbaric procedures. Along the way, I stumbled across the Washington Post’s peculiar profile of Dr. Walter Freeman, the pioneer of the ice-pick lobotomy and one of the most controversial figures in the past few decades of clinical psychiatry.

For those who aren’t familiar, Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies on people suffering from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other disorders. Sublimely apathetic to the fact that there was no actual evidence that his treatment worked, he carried on mutilating people’s brains–knocking them out by electroshock or anesthesia, and then hammering an icepick through the tear duct and swinging it around in the frontal lobe to destroy the connection with the thalamus.

Freeman made his fame, and a great deal of money, by refining Egas Moniz’s techniques for human lobotomy and touring the country evangelizing its use to psychiatric hospitals. Because lobotomy succeeded in making some trouble-making patients more docile, it was widely adopted by psychiatric hospitals after presentations by Freeman. It didn’t seem to bother them that most patients suffered severe losses of functioning after the procedure, that adult patients ended up pissing on themselves and having to be re-taught how to eat. It didn’t even matter to them that Freeman had forcibly anesthetized patients in order to carry out his assault on their brain whether they wanted it or not. What mattered to them was that patients were docile and manageable, not whether their humanity was being respected or their underlying mental conditions improved. In the period of Freeman’s greatest activity, between 1936 and the late 1950s, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans were subjected to lobotomies.

Along the way, Freeman managed to kill several of his patients in surgery and to try bizarre experiments to refine his technique, such as a case where he followed the lobotomy of 14 patients with an injection of hot water into the brain, in which he was prepared to accept two fatalities. Prior to his career as a lobotomist, he had also personally introduced electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy to the hospital in which he worked.

A few of the incidents are recounted by the Post:

When the day arrived, Mrs. Hammatt tried to change her mind when she found out that her head had to be shaved. Freeman and Watts promised to spare as much of her hair as they could, before forcibly anesthetizing her. Later, Freeman recorded that her last words before surgery were, Who is that man? What does he want here? What’s he going to do to me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don’t want to see him, followed by a scream.

The Post doesn’t bother to point it out, but what Freeman and Watts had just done was to cut into a person’s brain against her will, committing a bizarre and wantonly cruel surgical assault. Later in his brain-slicing career, he committed what could only be called murder from depraved indifference to human life:

At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the leucotome to sink deep into the patient’s midbrain.

We’ll leave alone the question of why he was never put in prison for his crimes; so many atrocities against mental patients have gone unpunished. But why is it that the Washington Post has decided to portray Dr. Freeman, whose wanton disregard for human life and barbarous procedures should put his medical influence alongside that of Dr. Josef Mengele, as some kind of unheralded psychiatric innovator? They conclude their profile by writing:

Lobotomy also raised high hopes in its day. During the late 1950s, when the new tranquilizing drugs had grown popular in state hospitals, Freeman wrote letters to his psychosurgical colleagues around the world, praying for a time when brain operations would again gain wide favor in the battle against mental illness. It didn’t happen in his lifetime.

Now that it might happen in ours, Freeman’s presence is unwelcome. He flits around, a pesky spirit looking for the recognition he believes he is due, an unwanted ghost causing sighs and regret.

Poor Walter Freeman! As to the reason for these sighs and regret, the Post writes that The answer lies in the complex tangle of Freeman’s personality and motivations, and in the public’s fear of past abuses.

Perhaps the Post should reconsider the possibility that Freeman is discredited not only because of a grating personality and lingering public hysteria. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that he was an irresponsible, sadistic asshole who killed several people and ruined the lives of tens of thousands more with a procedure that was completely useless, cruel, and barbaric.

Of course, methods which are not much more refined are carried on today–the ice-pick lobotomy was replaced with the chemical lobotomy of tranquilizers and other disabling psychiatric medications. The article would have been no more responsible if it had stridently condemned Freeman but uncritically endorsed these modern methods. But I really have to wonder what could have blinded the Post to something so thoroughly obvious as the evil that Freeman perpetrated on innocent people. It’s a fucking ice-pick driven through the skull. Even some of his psychiatric contemporaries, who regularly used electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock, fainted at the sight of Freeman’s procedure. Can’t we expect at least that much sympathy out of those of us who have lived to have the benefit of hindsight on the horrors that Freeman wrought?