Later On

As part of establishing a police state, it’s important that people fear the police and in particular fear to make any complaints about what the police do. When that is established, the police can do whatever they want. Great strides have been made in this direction: the Supreme Court under Roberts has established that prosecuting attorneys and DA have immunity for misconduct so long as the misconduct concerns their official duties. For example, a DA who gets a conviction by hiding the evidence that establishes the defendant’s innocence cannot be sued. The Court feels that it’s important to allow such officials to do whatever they damn please in their official capacity.

Similarly, when John Ashcroft directed that a man be locked up, held under harsh conditions, and shipped from prison to prison, even though the man was never charged with anything and was a model American citizen, the Supreme Court found that Ashcroft was immune from lawsuit: Ashcroft could do whatever he wanted to the man, so long as it was done in prisons.

And the Courts also did not allow lawsuits for the cases in which the CIA kidnapped various innocent people and took them into other countries so they could be tortured at least, and then finally let them go (at least, the ones we know about; the ones they murdered and buried in the back country will never come to light, but such actions would be completely consistent with the way the CIA now operates, outside the law and with complete immunity).

So it’s completely consistent with this direction that police forces are turning with fury on those who record police misbehavior (with cellphone cameras, for example). Consider this story by Radley Balko at Huffington Post:

When Chicago police answered a domestic disturbance call at the home of Tiawanda Moore and her boyfriend in July 2010, the officers separated the couple to question them individually. Moore was interviewed privately in her bedroom. According to Moore, the officer who questioned her then came on to her, groped her breast and slipped her his home phone number.

Robert Johnson, Moore’s attorney, says that when Moore and her boyfriend attempted to report the incident to internal affairs officials at the Chicago Police Department, the couple wasn’t greeted warmly. “They discouraged her from filing a report,” Johnson says. “They gave her the runaround, scared her, and tried to intimidate her from reporting this officer — from making sure he couldn’t go on to do this to other women.”

Ten months later, Chicago PD is still investigating the incident. Moore, on the other hand, was arrested the very same afternoon.

Her crime? At some point in her conversations with internal affairs investigators, Moore grew frustrated with their attempts to intimidate her. So she began to surreptitiously record the interactions on her Blackberry. In Illinois, it is illegal to record people without their consent, even (and as it turns out, especially) on-duty police officers. . .

Continue reading. The article is more amazing than you expect.