“A crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit…”
Freda Adler
Glenn Greenwald witnesses the political police swing pre-emptively into action in Minneapolis/St. Paul ahead of the GOP Convention:
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as “Do you have Terminator ready?” as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
It’s like Genoa all over again, bar the murder, blood and broken bones, and if there hadn’t been journalists and a camera there no doubt there’d’ve been those in the Twin Cities, too.
It’s not even a partisan issue; one can almost understand rabid partisanship taken to extremes, but this kind of suppression of dissent and political collusion with police is common to both parties. The only difference is in the degree of force used. As Greenwald concludes:
The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.
Well, I wouldn’t say the worst tactics, exactly. There are much worse than those – just ask the Argentinians or Chileans.
But still, this police/politician synergy is so strong that the wishes of the one are the policy of the other. There is way too much money to be made from modern paramilitary policing. There is a revolving door between policing, private security consulting and the trade in weapons and accoutrements. Take Blackwater for example….. there’s barely a police officer in the US who hasn’t attended it’s mercenary training camp police training centre. It’s the School of The Americas for cops.
Meanwhile in London, a senior police officer – no 3 on the force of the capital city – who is making a claim of race discrimination against the Met is so scared of death threats from his own colleagues he’s had to hire mercenaries himself. Who’s policing who?
In recent years it appears to have been been deliberate policy in Europe and in the US for police authorities to recruit right-wing meatheads who actively enjoy violence to do the politicians’ dirty work for them, and gladly.
Politicians and senior cops themselves needn’t get their hands dirty; when investigated it’s always a rogue cop what done it and in extremis there’s always medical or early retirement…
Paramilitary political police on both sides of the Atlantic need only a discreet nod from the pols (and sometimes not even that) to go in joyfully and with boots, taser and fists. They love that sort of thing: that’s why they’re police. For every saintly murdered copper, devoted village bobby or innocuous deputy sheriff there are ten barely-controlled thugs with plenty of hate and plenty of gusto.
Every now and then they get let off the leash and someone notices. This time is was Salon. Then it all goes back to normal and soon these incidents just become part of the wallpaper of normal life, like warrantless wiretapping, torture, routine tasering or prison rape.
For anyone to expect that police on any continent will do anything but suppress any person or movement that might put their industry or jobs in jeopardy is very naive indeed.