An Action at law (21CV0197) has been brought against you in the following venue. The presiding judge (Greer) granted Plaintiff permission to serve Heather L. Lund by alternative means or actual notice after the Thurston County Sheriff’s civil division was unable to do so.
WA State, Mason County District Court, John Smith vs. Heather L. Lund, case#: 21CV0192 Published Notice of: (CLICK on following links)
” I see you are planning on writing an article about me and you do not have my consent to use my name, or any other personal information on your blog. Remember, doxxing is a crime. I will respect your wishes of no contact as I would like us to part ways as well. Thank you” – Heather Lund Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
Heather L. Lund (35, fka: Conatser), her husband and 2 small children moved from Pierce to Thurston County a few short years ago. Neither liked the more rigorous rules of the DV game as practiced in Thurston by the authorities–especially when it came to DV involving loaded firearms, each threatening to kill the other, either by shooting or, as the Cupcake admitted, threatening to slit the husband’s throat in his sleep. Their indifference to the fact their children and even the Cupcake’s mother were present during these altercations was like water off a duck’s back. That the Cupcake placed on the autism spectrum was no surprise. Thus her husband’s argument she was a poster child of why wife beating should be made legal came across as insensitive at best. Neither the police, the husband’s defense counsel, nor Prosecutor Jennifer Lord were impressed–especially as the Cupcake attempted to recant her earlier sworn affidavit submitted to the Thurston County Superior (Family) Court seeking a DV protection order and the seizure of her husband’s firearms.
The judicial system, particularly in Thurston County, needs radical restructuring given its habit of relying on punishment and stigmatizing rather than reconciliation and treatment of the mentally ill and emotionally blind/unstable. Being the hammer, SJW’s like Jennifer Lord, esq. see every male as a nail. This is a grave error because even Lord realizes the complaining witness in many of these cases cannot be trusted to tell the truth. The Cupcake had admitted as much through her e-mail correspondence. She hoped to fine tune the prosecution and sentencing of her husband by recanting her earlier sworn statements submitted to the Court signed and written in her hand. Her initial declaration appeared extremely credible and was likely the truth, yet the Cupcake now alleges she was manipulated and under some form of mind control when the investigating officer (Kimball) questioned her. If such a convincing accuser challenges her own veracity, what are the odds of a search for the truth in a courtroom setting bearing fruit?
The Cupcake’s efforts to game the system were rejected, her spouse (Nicholas B. Lund) pled guilty to the armed assault in the presence of his attorney and a colloquy conducted by the judge to confirm he understood what he was doing and that it was voluntary. He was sentenced to only 1 month for the class C Felony along with a probationary period, but prohibited from having any contact with his wife for 5 years, something that clearly irritated the Cupcake. She found fault with prosecutor Jennifer Lord, the husband’s defense counsel, and the judge for it not turning out precisely the way she wanted it. Given her glib rationale and insistence on destroying any/all credibility she might have otherwise had, a quick read through the following documents should demonstrate why a radical shift in the courts’ approach to these cases is called for. This couple doesn’t need a jail cell so much as a mental ward. The prohibition of weapons was a no brainer but should have been applied to both of them. Chalk that lapse up to Jennifer Lord, esq. who now, unfortunately, is even assigned to murder cases in Thurston County. Nevertheless, Jennifer did the Cupcake a favor by not providing her a platform for perjury.
The Cupcake’s Sworn Petition for a DV protection order signed and written in her own hand:
Note: As a result of her continued months long campaign of criminal harassment and cyber stalking filed in a complaint (Rpt #20-22027) w/the Mason County Sheriff, Heather Lund has been blocked from leaving any comments in this forum whatsoever. Photos submitted for purposes of further identifying her would be appreciated, and will make the investigator’s work easier.
Is this Heather L. Lund (dob:3-23-85) of 17202 Heather Ln, SE, Yelm, WA? Thank you, anonymous.
University of Washington professor Cliff Mass poses next to weather equipment on top of the Atmospheric Sciences Building at the University of Washington in 2013.
by Craig Sailor
(8-6-20) — Tacoma public radio station KNKX dropped weather commentator Cliff Mass on Thursday after the University of Washington meteorology professor compared recent violent incidents during Seattle civil rights protests to Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” during the Nazi Germany era.
Mass made the comparison on his immensely popular weather blog Wednesday. Since then, outrage has bellowed across the social media landscape.
KNKX announced Thursday evening it was ending its relationship with Mass immediately.
“ … if a commentator, even on his own independent platform, delivers rhetoric that is offensive and inaccurate, we cannot support it,” the station wrote on its website.
The Nazi-organized Kristallnacht destroyed over 250 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses, cemeteries and homes in 1938. Mass likened the graffiti, smashed windows and threats to public officials of recent Seattle Black Lives Matter protests to Kristallnacht.
“We abhor the comparison and find it sensationalized and misleading — it does not reflect who we are and what we stand for at KNKX,” the station said.
Most of the blog post dealt with Mass’s impressions on a recent walking tour of downtown Seattle where some businesses remain boarded up and where he witnessed an alleged drug transaction. He had harsh criticism for Seattle leadership and Gov. Jay Inslee.
“Seattle citizens had every right to express strong views in public about their concerns for our nation’s Black citizens,” Mass said. “But many of the marches and gatherings turned violent and destructive, breaking windows, burning cars, looting stores, and deliberately harming police who tried to restore safety and order.”
Mass later removed the Kristallnacht comparison from the blog and said he was referring only to the violent aspects of the protests. There was some support of Mass’s post but most comments were negative.
“I did not think that my UW colleague Cliff Mass could lower my opinion of my UW colleague Cliff Mass,” wrote UW bilology professor Carl Bergstrom on Twitter. “I was wrong.”
Mass called KNKX’s decision to remove him hasty and based on pressure from a social media “mob.”
“There’s two types of mobs that will undermine civil society,” Mass told The News Tribune Friday afternoon. “One of the mobs does physical violence. They destroy stores and hurt people. And that’s what my blog was about. And then there’s the other mob, a social media mob who cannot tolerate people with a different viewpoint.”
In 2016, Mass was a vocal supporter of KNKX’s successful campaign to buy its way out of Pacific Lutheran University, where it had broadcast for decades as KPLU. The station and its network of 12 broadcast signals across western Washington were coveted by the weaker signaled but better funded Seattle public radio station KUOW.
Before he started delivering his weekly weather segments, “The Weather With Cliff Mass,” with KNKX’s environmental reporter Bellamy Pailthorp, Mass served the same role at KUOW for 15 years.
KUOW and Mass parted ways acrimoniously in 2011 after he veered off topic while on the air. He was complaining about a Seattle Times story on UW student-acceptance practices.
“When I got canned by KUOW, KPLU called the next day,” Mass told The News Tribune in 2013.
“(Climate change is) real,” he told The News Tribune in 2013. “Some people exaggerated what’s happened so far. That’s been the big tension. Some people are so concerned about global warming they feel they have to hype what’s already happened. Most of global warming is ahead of us.”
“Activists didn’t like what I was saying on my blog, and they thought that that was a reason to kick me off of the radio station,” he said.
KNKX brought in an outside consultant to review Mass’s on-air and off-air work as well as address complaints about him that had been raised in a petition.
“I do not find that Mass’ KNKX weather segment consistently misrepresents climate science, as the petition claimed,” Elizabeth Jensen, a public editor for National Public Radio, concluded in an analysis she conducted for KNKX.
The environmental organization 350 Tacoma celebrated Mass’s dismissal on Thursday.
“We’ve been involved in coalition work over the past year — led by 350 Seattle with 350 Eastside, 350 Everett and 350 Tacoma — to petition KNKX to retire Cliff Mass because of his frequent statements minimizing the urgency of climate science,” the group posted on its website. “We hope that the work we did collectively helped to lay the foundation for today’s decision.”
Mass maintains it’s his right to speak on whatever subject he wants to on his personal blog.
“If you see something that’s profoundly wrong, you should act,” he said. “I mean, it obviously would be easier for me to be Mr. Happy Weatherman.”
Mass pointed to the work he’s done, including securing the installation of a crucial weather radar station on the Washington coast, as the good he’s done for the community.
“I’ve worked very hard to improve society and that’s what this is,” he said of his recent blog post.
Mass, who is Jewish, said his background informs his take on society.
“All these terrible things we’re done to my people … and German people stayed silent,” Mass said. “People were afraid to say anything. And no one would intervene.”
The streets of Rose City ANTIFA (Portland). Even during the day time, the area around the Portland federal courthouse is lawless as police are instructed to stay away. After ANTIFA protesters harassed and assaulted those standing with flags, they beat up this man.
Portland, OR (3-7-17) — A video journalist in Oregon is facing hard time for brandishing a gun to defend himself from an angry mob.
The journalist, Michael Strickland, was covering a Black Lives Matter protest march in Portland on July 7, 2016 – the same day that a BLM supporter in Dallas murdered 5 police officers and injured 9 others, along with 2 civilians during a BLM march in that city.
Strickland is a fixture at left-wing events, and is well-known among organizers and participants for his mocking YouTube channel called Laughing at Liberals. His activities are not popular with these groups, or with local politicians, and at some recent events, protesters have violently confronted him.
In the past he has been physically assaulted, sustaining a broken arm, and has had camera equipment stolen.
During the Portland July 7, 2016 protest, a mob of masked, black-clad “anarchists” spotted Strickland, pushed him around, and ordered him to leave.
An attempt was made to take his camera away, but Strickland extricated himself and moved down the street. A few minutes later, the “free speech” activists again confronted Strickland. This time a tall, obviously angry man was the central figure bearing down on and confronting him.
Several other reporters in the area tried to calm the advancing protesters, as Strickland again attempted to retreat, but as he moved away, the tall, muscular man shrugged off his backpack and moved aggressively toward Strickland.
At the same time, an obese man wearing a black skull mask who had been among the group that had initially assaulted Strickland, rushed forward on Strickland’s left flank.
At this point, Strickland took a few quick steps backwards, yelling “Back off!” and drawing a Glock 9mm, which he first pointed in the general direction of the obese man, then swung back toward the tall muscular fellow. As soon as the rush subsided, Strickland re-holstered the handgun while continuing to back away.
A reporter said something to him, and Strickland stopped retreating long enough to express to the reporter that he thought the protesters were about to attack him, mentioning that some were brandishing heavy poles with black flags on them.
Strickland cautiously retreated, while the protesters continued to follow him. Some reporters and protesters worked to keep everyone back so Strickland could safely get away without anyone getting hurt. Finally Strickland got around the corner to an area where a group of Portland Police officers in riot gear had gathered. They immediately took him to the ground and arrested him.
Police asked members of the crowd whether they had witnessed the events. Then they asked if anyone present had felt directly threatened by the man with the gun. The first person to step up to declare himself a victim was the same obese man who had been helping to instigate the confrontation. He was later a star witness for the prosecution.
Strickland was cited on two misdemeanor counts of Menacing and Disorderly Conduct, and released on his own recognizance that night. The next day the charges were upped to include two felony counts of Misuse of a Weapon. Bail was set at $250,000 based on false claims that Strickland was a “counter-protester” and some sort of white supremacist.
When prosecutors and city officials – many of whom had been “victims” of Strickland’s biting videos at Laughing at Liberals – realized who Strickland was, the charges began stacking up.
He was eventually indicted, tried, and convicted on 10 felony counts of Unlawful Use of a Weapon, 10 counts of Menacing, and one count of Disorderly Conduct. He will be sentenced in May, and faces in excess of 50 years in prison. None of the people who attacked him have been charged.
All of the altercation was captured on video from multiple angles (videos found here), but few of those videos have surfaced. Strickland’s own video of the events was seized by the police and has not been released. Part of it was shown in court, but it has not been made available to the public. What is available is cluttered and confusing – as, no doubt, was the actual event. The videos clearly show several people crowding and menacing over Strickland, then aggressively moving toward him until the gun appears and they back off.
Mike Strickland : The videos clearly show several people crowding and menacing over Strickland, then aggressively moving toward him until the gun appears and they back off.
Strickland’s lawyers, convinced that a fair trial could not be had in extremely “liberal” Multnoma County, asked for a change of venue, but that was denied. When the jury pool proved to be exactly as expected, the lawyers advised waiving the jury trial and taking the case directly to the judge. Hindsight suggests that was a mistake, as the judge declared that Strickland was not being threatened and was not justified in deploying his handgun.
One of the organizers of the BLM protest admitted during testimony at the trial that a group of enforcers had been tasked with keeping Strickland away from the protest – by force if necessary.
As someone knowledgeable about firearms and self-defense, I think Mr. Strickland made some questionable decisions that day, but I believe the videos clearly show a man in fear of imminent, grave bodily harm taking action to prevent that harm.
Much of this case is reminiscent of prosecutors blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively and walking in a seedy neighborhood after dark. The conclusion seems to be that Mr. Strickland brought this all upon himself by posting controversial videos, carrying a gun, and going where he knew people hated him. His greatest offense appears to have been that of being an outspoken conservative in a liberal community.
Here, the Seattle police spokesperson shows great restraint and professionalism on May Day, 2013, a trait increasingly in demand from today’s LEO’s. The heightened training they receive today was sorely lacking not so long ago. Moreover, this officer’s professionalism discredits his antagonist better than any arrest could.
If weeks of rioting, arson, vandalism and assaults on journalists, police, or simply citizens who refuse to submit to their mob fueled street justice under the phony guise of BLM ideology hasn’t enlightened you to the comparison, read on:
Baboons armed with knives, chainsaw spotted in UK safari park
There’s some real monkey business at a British safari park, where a roving gang of baboons armed with knives and even a chainsaw has been wreaking havoc and sowing fear, according to a report.
The prowling primates are known to have vandalized vehicles, ripping off windscreen wipers and mirrors from them at the Knowsley Safari Park in Merseyside, The Sunday Times reported.
But the baboons have recently been seen carrying an assortment of weapons, including blades, screwdrivers and a chainsaw, leading some workers to suspect that visitors have supplied them with the dangerous items for a thrill, according to the news outlet.
“We’re not sure if they are being given weapons by some of the guests who want to see them attack cars, or if they’re fishing them out of pickup trucks and vans,” one employee told the paper.
“They will literally go into people’s toolboxes and carry them around. One of the baboons was seen lugging around a chainsaw.”
Park officials pushed back at the reports, suggesting that armed apes were an urban myth.
“We believe many of these stories have grown in exaggeration as they’ve been retold, with embellishment to make the objects that are sometimes found in the enclosure seem more exciting and unbelievable,” the park told the news outlet.
The monkey enclosure is well known to mechanics in the northwest area of England where the 550-acre park, which also houses lions, tigers, rhinos, wildebeest and camels, is located.
Monkey gangs are taking over Thailand amid coronavirus
June 29, 2020
These guys aren’t monkeying around. Gangs of hungry macaques have overrun Lopburi, Thailand, after a drop in tourism due to coronavirus. While the local attraction, Monkey Temple, is known for its mischief-making population, the roughly 6,000 crab-eating macaques have become violent as two rival groups are fighting over food.
”They’re so used to having tourists feed them and the city provides no space for them to fend for themselves,” said Supakarn Kaewchot, a government veterinarian. “With the tourists gone, they’ve been more aggressive, fighting humans for food to survive.”
Hector Diaz before he was removed from the K9 unit for dishonesty/misconductProvided by Mason County Prosecutor’s Office
A Giglio or Brady list is a list compiled usually by a prosecutor’s office or a police department containing the names and details of law enforcement officers who have had sustained incidents of untruthfulness, criminal convictions, candor issues, or some other type of issue placing their credibility into question.
Police officers who have been dishonest are sometimes referred to as “Brady cops.” Because of the Brady ruling, prosecutors are required to notify defendants and their attorneys whenever a law enforcement official involved in their case has a sustained record for knowingly lying in an official capacity.
Notably, Dracobly’s name is not on the list. Thus, it cannot be considered factually exhaustive and calls into question the process used to lodge names on the list. Officer Dracobly’s story was reported in this publication some time ago and can be found @ WOMEN’S LIVES MATTER
Most states, in a variety of ways, keep police disciplinary records from public view. Some states, including New York and, until recently, California, keep police disciplinary records completely private. This has led activists to pressure prosecutors to create these Brady lists, expand them, and make them public.
Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963); Giglio v. … Under Brady-Giglio, when a police officer is called as a witness for a law enforcement agency, the prosecutor must disclose impeachment evidence,meaning any evidence that “casts a substantial doubt upon the accuracy” of the witness testimony.
Four types of prosecutorial misconduct are offering inadmissible evidence in court, suppressing evidence from the defense, encouraging deceit from witnesses, and prosecutorial bluffing (threats or intimidation).
Nearly 200 cops with credibility issues still working in Washington state
A Crosscut investigation found at least 183 police officers flagged for issues such as dishonesty, bias and excessive force remain in law enforcement.by
Seattle police officers wear gas masks and carry weapons as smoke rises and they clash with protesters, Saturday, July 25, 2020, in Seattle during a protest in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality and racial injustice.
By the time police arrived, the street fight had dispersed. A man emerged from his house, clearly intoxicated, shouting for the cops to come fight him.
Without saying a word, Officer Casey Gillette entered the man’s yard and punched him in the head.
Gillette then wrestled the man to the ground and, with the help of another officer, placed him in handcuffs.
An internal police investigation found that Gillette, a Yakima police officer, used excessive force during the 2013 incident and lacked probable cause to detain the man. According to a superior, Gillette first tried to arrest the man for a crime that didn’t exist in city code, then arrested him for a different offense — also not supported by the facts — in an apparent attempt “to justify [the] prior use of force.”
The list is essentially a collection of cops who come with a warning label. When these officers are called upon to testify, letters are sent from the prosecutor’s office to alert defense attorneys of their past misbehavior — incidents that could be used to question the officers’ testimony, or impeach their credibility in court.
Officers with credibility issues
Brady List Map
Officers end up on the Brady list for a variety of reasons, but the most common is dishonesty. About half the officers Crosscut identified as still working in law enforcement were flagged by prosecutors because they appear to have lied or were somehow deceptive.
Others were placed on the Brady list because of incidents of bias, such as posting racist remarks on social media or making discriminatory comments toward suspects.
A few, like Gillette, are there because of their excessive or questionable use of force. The Yakima police chief agreed that Gillette’s use of force was improper, but disagreed with the investigator’s conclusion that Gillette fabricated a reason for the arrest. Next: How fired cops win their jobs back: arbitration
Crosscut began compiling a statewide database of officers placed on county Brady lists more than nine months ago, shortly after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police.
Prosecuting attorneys say being on the list doesn’t mean a cop is dirty (although, prosecutors have occasionally been known to call their Brady list their “bad cop” file, for short). Officers on the list are regularly called upon to testify in court, with their testimony serving as evidence against defendants in criminal cases.
“There are instances where the officer involved may have had something relatively minor as to what the misconduct was,” said Dan Clark, who leads the criminal division in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. “We still have an obligation to turn that [information] over.”
Defense attorneys, however, question why any cops who have been known to lie, abuse force or stretch ethical limits continue to work as police officers, when a police officer’s word can be enough to convict someone of a crime or put them in jail.
“I really think we should not need a Brady list, because there should be no such thing as a police agency that keeps cops with histories of lying, or false arrests, or brutality, or fabricating reports, or other misconduct,” said Anita Khandelwal, director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
“Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are disproportionally ensnared in the criminal punishment system. They should not be forced to confront claims or purported evidence found by officers who have been disciplined for being dishonest or racist,” the Department of Public Defense wrote in August 2020.
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has yet to formally respond to that letter.
Eight months later, a deadly shooting
In addition to deciding whether a criminal defendant ends up in jail or facing charges, a police officer’s honesty can also be crucial in determining whether families of police shooting victims get justice.
Eight months after Gillette punched a man in the head in Yakima, he shot and killed an unarmed man in a parked car at a Yakima car wash.
The Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office ruled the 2014 shooting of Rocendo Arias was justified, based largely on Gillette’s statement that Arias lunged at him while pointing what turned out to be an Airsoft pellet gun.
But a retired police captain who reviewed the case on behalf of Arias’ family said the evidence contradicted Gillette’s story. The blood spatter pattern, along with the position of Arias’ body — slumped forward, with his hands in his lap — suggested he was actually sleeping at the time, not lunging, as Gillette had claimed, wrote former Yakima Police Capt. Rodney Light.
The Arias family brought a wrongful death lawsuit, and the city ended up paying $500,000 to settle the case without admitting any wrongdoing on the part of Gillette.
William Pickett, the family’s attorney, called the sequence of events “absolutely disgraceful.”
“He should have been discharged. Instead, he was promoted,” said Pickett, referring to how Gillette moved from patrol to the SWAT team after the shooting, and later became a detective.
Gillette didn’t respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.
The current Yakima police chief, Matthew Murray, wasn’t around when the incidents involving Gillette took place, but said he saw no indication in his records that Gillette had lied. He called Gillette “a star” detective who investigates sex crimes against children.
“I don’t think there’s any indication he was acting in bad faith,” Murray said of Gillette.
Rocendo Arias is shown in this undated photo provided by his family’s attorney. Arias was 23 when he was shot and killed in Yakima by Police Officer Casey Gillette.
How officers end up on the Brady list
Most incidents that land cops on the Brady list are of much lower stakes than fatal shootings — things like submitting inaccurate reports about traffic stops or lying about why they missed a court date.
But Pickett, a former president of the Washington State Bar Association, said any deception in a cop’s record “is always relevant, because it addresses the character of the witness.”
“These folks, when they swear the oath to serve and protect, they are given an enormous amount of control over our lives, if they choose to exercise that,” Pickett said. “And they have to be of the utmost trustworthiness — they just have to be.”
The Brady lists from Washington’s 39 counties aren’t a complete accounting of every cop who has ever crossed a line. But they shed light on the kind of behavior that police officers can be credibly accused of while still being allowed to keep their jobs.
In most cases, police officers end up on these lists if their departments have conducted an investigation and determined that they have been less than truthful or have committed some other form of misconduct.
In other cases, prosecutors have added officers to the list if they have been observed giving conflicting statements, or a judge has determined they disregarded the truth in some way.
After filing more than 100 public records requests, Crosscut has identified at least 183 cops across Washington state who have been placed on prosecutors’ Brady lists, yet continue to work as police officers.
That number is likely an undercount, as it doesn’t include every officer who may have been added to these lists in recent months, or some officers on lists that may be held by city instead of county attorneys.
“These folks, when they swear the oath to serve and protect … they have to be of the utmost trustworthiness — they just have to be.”— William Pickett, lawyer for the family of Rocendo Arias
About half of the working cops that Crosscut identified as being on Brady lists ended up there because of some form of deception — such as lying to co-workers, submitting false reports or affidavits, or lying during internal investigations. That’s 89 officers.
A dozen others were placed on the lists because their official reports were deemed to be inaccurate, but it wasn’t clear that they were intentionally trying to deceive.
Other reasons officers were placed on their county’s Brady lists included past criminal convictions, failing to properly handle evidence, or other forms of sloppy police work.
Crosscut identified 20 working officers who are on Brady lists for excessive force or bias. That number doesn’t capture every officer who has exhibited those behaviors around the state. A few officers are on Brady lists for multiple reasons, according to prosecutors’ notes.
For 26 officers, Crosscut was unable to determine why they were placed on prosecutors’ Brady lists.
Fired for lying, but still on the force
Sometimes, officers are fired for lying. But the discipline doesn’t always stick.
That’s what happened with Shelton Police Officer Hector Diaz.
An internal investigation in 2019 found that Diaz made inappropriate sexual comments to dispatchers, members of the public and other police employees. During the investigation, Diaz “displayed a lack of integrity and truthfulness,” his police chief wrote at the time.
In another incident, Diaz lied to his then-girlfriend by telling her a restraining order was in effect against her — part of a ploy to keep her from talking to a barista she suspected Diaz was also dating.
In a statement to police, Diaz’s former girlfriend said she feared she “would go to jail” for violating the nonexistent restraining order, causing her to drive out of her way to avoid passing the coffee stand where the barista worked.
She also reported receiving threatening texts from Diaz, and told police she terminated a pregnancy because she didn’t think she could keep the baby safe from him.
“I know for a fact that my life, along with the baby’s, would be in danger,” she wrote of her decision to get an abortion.
“… This is not something I would have ever done if I felt safe.”
Darrin Moody, a former police chief of Shelton, decided to fire Diaz in September 2019, citing “a pattern of dishonesty” that included lying in court.
“… You admitted to ‘lying’ several times in order to get the desired results in your personal relationships, and you did this while using your position as a police officer to further the deception,” Moody wrote in his letter firing Diaz.
But Diaz filed a grievance under his union contract, leading the city to reinstate him as part of a settlement agreement.
As a result, Diaz still works as a Shelton police officer.His response to everything is, ‘I’m a cop, why would I lie?’”— An ex-girlfriend of a police officer accused of dishonesty
Diaz did not respond to requests to interview him for this story. His current police chief, Carole Beason, wrote in an email that she wasn’t around for those incidents, then didn’t respond to further inquiries.
In her statement to police, Diaz’s former girlfriend questioned why the Shelton Police Department would want to keep an officer like Diaz, who she said abused his power while using his badge as cover.
“His response to everything is, ‘I’m a cop, why would I lie?’ ” she wrote.
‘A deadly force situation’
The Brady lists are not specifically designed to track uses of force by police agencies. Still, at least eight currently working officers ended up in prosecutors’ Brady files after using force in a way that was thought to be questionable or excessive.
Gillette, the Yakima police officer who punched a man and later killed Rocendo Arias, is one of those officers.
So is Darrin Dotson, a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy who has a history of losing his cool.
Dotson once got suspended for yelling at a Little League umpire while armed, on duty and in uniform, according to local media reports. The umpire had apparently called a strike on Dotson’s 10-year-old son.
A few years later, Dotson was cited as having “clearly exhibited poor control of his emotions” when he detoured from an urgent call to pull over a truck driver, then swore at the man and possibly dented the door of the man’s truck when slamming it closed.
Director of Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability Andrew Myerberg.
Targeting a person’s face with a Taser goes against the guidance listed in the device’s operations manual, which says “to avoid targeting the face … to reduce the risk of serious injury or death,” said Andrew Myerberg, the director of Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability, which reviews misconduct complaints.
“For me, that would be a deadly force situation,” Myerberg said, after hearing a description of Dotson’s case.
Myerberg said there are alternative, less lethal tactics that can be used in a situation where someone is resisting arrest, but deliberately deciding to apply a stun gun to someone’s face is “hard to justify.”
Dotson didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed. Neither did Jefferson County Sheriff Joe Nole, who was not in office at the time of the Taser incident or the other two incidents involving Dotson.
An outside prosecutor from Kitsap County weighed whether to press criminal charges against Dotson for the Taser incident. Ultimately, no charges were filed, but the incident was added to Dotson’s Brady file at the county prosecutor’s office.
Showing bias
Racism is another reason prosecutors flag cops for the Brady list. At least a dozen working cops have landed on Brady lists because of incidents where they showed some form of bias.
Sometimes, those offenses have occurred on social media. In 2017, a Whatcom County sheriff’s deputy posted an image on Facebook of a female model in a Native American headdress, with the caption “Victoria’s Secret apologizes after use of Native American headdress in fashion show draws outrage.”
The deputy, Ryan Rathbun, posted along with that image, “Time to get the small pox blankets out and shut some people up.”
According to a 2017 memo from the Whatcom County prosecutor’s office, Rathbun said he wasn’t biased against Native Americans, and “this remark was a parody of something he had seen on South Park, a cartoon broadcast show.” The county prosecutor at the time, David McEachran, wrote that he considered Rathbun a “well qualified, hardworking and good deputy sheriff” who didn’t show bias or prejudice while on duty.
Other agencies may have reacted differently to the same set of facts.
“For me, that would be almost certainly a termination case in my mind,” said Myerberg, Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability director. “I don’t see any way that officer would be able to stay with the Seattle Police Department.”
Myerberg said discriminatory social media posts do, in fact, say something about a cop’s ability to police people fairly.
“If you are racist, you are not just racist on Monday,” Myerberg said. “You are racist on every day of the week.”The public absolutely has to trust that when an officer raises their hand and swears, ‘This happened,’ that what the officer said was the truth.”— State Rep. John Lovick, D-Mill Creek
‘A second chance’
Cops often object to being on the Brady list, saying it damages their credibility and could end their careers.
Yet several police officers who have been placed on the Brady list in one jurisdiction later go on to find employment somewhere else.
One of them is Wade Murray, a former Seattle cop who admitted to insurance fraud while trying to cover for his nephew, who had crashed Murray’s car into a retaining wall. Murray filed a false insurance claim saying that he, not his nephew, was the one driving, while also arranging for his nephew to leave the scene and for the car to be privately towed. Murray was suspended in 2018 over the incident and now works for the Milton Police Department.
Police Chief James Schrimpsher of the city of Algona, Wash. outside of the police department on April 2, 2021
Another Brady list officer who switched departments is James Schrimpsher, the chief of police in Algona. He is on King County’s Brady list for being less than truthful in an internal investigation in 2007, when he was a King County sheriff’s deputy. He was fired over the incident.
Schrimpsher cautioned against writing off officers on the Brady list as bad cops who are somehow irredeemable.
“I made a mistake going on 15 years ago and, luckily, I had some good mentors who picked me up, dusted me off and put me on the right path,” Schrimpsher said.
He said he has used what he learned from the experience to try to improve the state’s criminal justice system. That work has included helping get members of the Washington Fraternal Order of Police on board with major reform measures, as well as serving on the Washington State Criminal Sentencing Task Force, which recommended ways to reduce long prison sentences and promote alternatives to incarceration.
“One of the reasons I wanted to be on that task force is that people make mistakes, and they shouldn’t have to pay for them the rest of their lives if they have learned from that mistake,” Schrimpsher said. “Because I got a second chance.”
‘The tip of the iceberg’
Lisa Daugaard, executive director of the Public Defender Association, said she doesn’t think the worst actors in police departments actually show up on prosecutors’ Brady lists.
Rather, she said, the cops who end up on the lists are simply the ones where there is a “smoking gun” showing how they lied, cut corners or abused their authority — things typically hard to prove.
“The few officers that are proven to have Brady material are the tip of the iceberg,” Daugaard said. “The iceberg is the other officers you are worried are hiding evidence, fabricating evidence, producing inaccurate pictures, or subverting justice.”
Clark, the lead criminal deputy in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, said his office takes its obligation to turn over potential impeachment material very seriously, and is diligent about providing that information to defense attorneys.
But there are other places the system can break down, including with the police agencies themselves.
Khandelwal, the director of the King County Department of Public Defense, said decisions about who goes on the Brady list rely too much on police agencies investigating themselves and issuing disciplinary findings against officers, which doesn’t always happen.
State Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, hopes to address that in part by passing a new law, Senate Bill 5066, that would make it mandatory for officers to report any misconduct they see.
But even when there is an official investigation or misconduct finding, prosecutors don’t always learn about it in a timely manner, said Dhingra, who also works as a King County deputy prosecuting attorney.
Another proposal, House Bill 1088, would try to fix that by requiring police agencies to notify prosecutors within 10 days about any misconduct that could cast doubt on an officer’s testimony. The measure would also require police agencies to check whether potential new hires are on their local county’s Brady list.
State Rep. John Lovick, a former Snohomish County sheriff who is sponsoring the bill, said the goal is to help restore people’s faith in law enforcement, which he said has been eroded by high profile police killings and allegations of police misconduct.
“This is hopefully going to bring some trust back to the system we have in place,” said Lovick, D-Mill Creek. “The public absolutely has to trust that when an officer raises their hand and swears, ‘This happened,’ that what the officer said was the truth.”
Be aware an apiarist (white man ~52) who resides in/near Olympia with hives in the Matlock area is selling tainted honey from the back of his pickup truck on the north side of Martin way near the veterinarian clinic/hospital west of Ensign Rd. When questioned about his methodology of controlling varroa & tracheal mites, he admitted he left the strips between the frames until harvesting the honey.
The mite pesticide chemical in these strips is extremely toxic to humans. For that reason, regulations require they be removed prior to the nectar gathering season of the foraging honey bees, not after the honey has already become tainted. Unfortunately, the State never tests for the presence of this poisonous chemical and the man sells it from his truck by the side of the road in any event.
The guy became belligerent when I pointed out the regulations to him and offered information regarding non-toxic alternatives. My wife was with me as the guy became so agitated we left for our own safety.
Don’t risk your and your family’s health. Know the source of the honey you buy and make certain you can trust it. This guy’s unethical practices putting the public at risk with tainted honey is common in the industry because the strips are expensive and the State does no testing for the presence of the toxins in the honey.
Cumophos is one of the poisons used in the pest strips. Read about it.
To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.
“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.
History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.
But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.
There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.
That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.
The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.
In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.
Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the prevention and detection of crimes.”
It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.
It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”
New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.
American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.
Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.
The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, swat teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.
Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.
When Humanitarian Aid Is Considered A Crime
To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)
Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.
Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.
More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”
Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.
The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.
Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”
As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.
Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.
In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.
The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of Police Behavior,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end stress arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. stress defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”
For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.
Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.
In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”
Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.
Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦
