Rise of the Warrior Cop … Evidence Says Culture Well Established in New Zealand Too.

I’m sadly succumbing to a theory, or rather, to the weight of history, that once the state gets to a certain size, and a certain penetration into our lives, it starts to subconsciously militarise its police against its own citizenry, who become cast as the enemy in a necessary Orwellian forever-war, and thus the justification for use of force and pan-population surveillance for no other purpose than the state's own continuation. We’re there, I think. By this ‘theoretical’ stage enough proles have been brain-washed into thinking in terms of a state theocracy to be obeyed in all things, or at least are reliant on the state for their living, therefore the government law enforcement agencies begin to leave a secular peace keeping role and take about them a religious fervour protecting mindlessly all things in the name of the state. Nihilism trumps philosophy; there’s no going back to a free, peaceful classical liberalism. Following so many of my other posts, it’s paradise lost, again.

When I see some of what is happening – much of it farcical, but deadly serious – in the United Police States of America, and cast my mind over recent happenings in New Zealand, the above conclusion is inescapable. The below quotations are from a piece largely behind the pay-wall at The Times:

 AT DAWN a dozen masked police officers, grenades strapped to their hips, smashed through the gates of the designated “crime zone” in rural Pennsylvania in an armoured car. 

A helicopter hovered 300ft overhead, packed with more officers ready to abseil down and swamp the enemy. 

Their target, Daniel Allgyer, an Amish farmer, was surrounded before he could reach for his deadliest weapon — a pitchfork. 

His crime: selling unpasteurised milk across the border to customers in the Washington suburbs, illegal under federal law. 

Fearful of being “Swatted” again, the farmer promised to desist. “These big guys in black, with weapons he had never seen before, terrified him,” said a friend. “Dan always thought the police were on his side, but they behaved like an occupying army.”

Funnily enough, by which I mean sadly, again, I’ve blogged before on this heavy-handed authoritarian approach to milk sales; in that post regarding milk sales in Australia. Apparently we must be saved from ourselves, even if that means the state intimidating, raiding, and locking up adults for wanting to drink unpasteurised milk. In some type of state-mad state-made parody, what is happening is the war on drugs is morphing into the war on milk, pets, and organic vegetables. The Times article continues:

Radley Balko, … author of a new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, says President Obama has revived funding schemes that encourage the police to militarise – plans that were abandoned by his predecessor, George W Bush.

“For some it’s now easier to get Pentagon military surplus … than conventional policing tools like up to date computers, so obviously police chiefs grab them,” Balko said. “Then they have to use them.” He said that many federal agencies were using powers originally granted for the war on drugs to launch armed assaults on organic farmers, firms that breach environmental laws and to clamp down on illegal immigrants.

The first move by Swat teams is to ‘clear’ buildings of people and their pets: they routinely shoot not just guard dogs but poodles, lapdogs and, in a raid in Missouri that netted a single marijuana cigarette, a family’s corgi.’

Sounds like too many ‘boys’ in the police force. And look at New Zealand. We already have the entire infrastructure of the surveillance state in place; the sanction first legislated via the Tax Administration Act. The broadening of that to total population surveillance happens very soon when National and its muppet, that ‘willing seller’ of our right to be left alone, Peter Dunne, put the GCSB Bill into law. And noting while I support the principle of intellectual property, there was yet that ridiculous show of inappropriate force called the raid on Kim Dotcom, and the more I read of Tame Iti and the Urewera raids, the more I grow uncomfortable with that whole episode also. But the Dotcom raid especially: from the very first when watching the news footage my mind leaped to boys and their toys having a great day out, even getting to fly in the choppers. Remembering that raid was essentially at the behest of the United Police States of America, there must have been many boys-own fantasies fulfilled in the months planning up to that one. The manner and over-reach of that raid was an insult, and a wake-up, to all of us. Again from the article:

In 2008 Swat officers raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, a Washington suburb, after a political rival posted a bag of marijuana to his house and tipped them off. During the raid they shot dead his two Labradors. The Washington Post called it ‘a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.’     

Yeah. We’re there alright. What was the Dotcom raid other than Keystone Kops? So New Zealand organic farmers, you had better hold onto your private parts, or at least encrypt your private conversations, ‘they’re coming for ya’. Buggered if I know why, trafficking in vegetables or some damned thing, though I suspect it’s more because you dare to live your own lives, think for yourselves, you’re often a bit ‘out there’ aren’t you, a bit ‘alternative; definitely seditious. We can’t have difference in the bland, creamy and homogenous society, a GCSB spook in every computer and phone. What did you think this was? The free society?

And lock up your pets: the West isn't safe for them anymore; if we're not shooting them we're applying pain to them. Re that last, to Minister McClay who would not front up to the 'stop animal testing for party pills' protests yesterday: that's not good enough. In fact it was gutless, and I still want answers to my questions please.