Author Archives: Adam Selene

If You’re Looking …..

For some good, original reporting on Iraq that isn’t the same old, tired, regurgitated AP junk, I’ll recommend Bill Roggio. Yeah, I know everyone knows all about Bill, the embedded blogger, but so what. I’ve never really read him before.

Today I was about fed up with the junk I get from the AP …….. you know, so and so many killed today, Iraqi government dysfunctional, some senator some BS about the war, the ISG report, blah blah. It’s the same tired stories, over and over, with no real insight into how the troops are doing, what being on the ground is like and whether things outside Sadr City are going well, or not.

So, I checked out Bill’s site, turns out he is in Fallujah these days. Here’s a small sample of what he’s doing and writing, from a post about his journey to Fallujah.

Camp Stryker:

While waiting to catch the flight to the Green Zone, I spoke to two Army captains, one who works in Civil Affairs, the other with the Military Transition Teams. Both explained how the situation could look very different based on your job, but that the Iraqi police and Army were making real progress. They said the Iraqis’ skills ranged from poor to excellent, but they always saw improvement.

I also overheard an Army specialist sitting behind me curse the media (and I mean curse), saying they didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to Iraq. I talked to him, and explained I’m considered a reporter, and that I won’t argue with his points. I made him uncomfortable. Had he known I was ‘the press’ I think he would have kept it to himself.

Now, isn’t that more interesting than the junk that the AP, Reuters and the rest are passing off as reporting on Iraq?

footnote: By the way, don’t assume this means that I am “for” or “against” the Iraq War, that I advocate withdrawal or “staying the course” or anything else. It’s just a pitch to you to get a different perspective on Iraq, one well worth checking out. I may, or may not, post my own thoughts on Iraq at some point, we’ll see.

Delicious Irony

From a Wired Blog entry:

On the last day of the recent Reuters Media and Marketing Summit in New York, Warner Music Group CEO [ed: Edgar Bronfman] admitted that he was “fairly certain” that one or more of his seven children had downloaded music without the permission of the copyright owner, which Reuters referred to as stealing.

Now, you may wonder what happened to Mr. Bronfman’s children?

I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. […] A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.

Well, that makes it all better then. Good thing they didn’t get sued by a media company. Like, let’s say, Warner Music Group?

Pretty Darn Funny

Long time readers of The Liberty Papers undoubtedly know who Radley Balko, The Agitator, is. Apparently The Dick List has no idea. Check out this opinion piece for a good chuckle.

Article after article praises “alternative” lifestyles and insult masculine traits. Such is the case with the article by Mr. Balko which accuses American police departments of increasingly using “…paramilitary tactics…” against poor innocent criminals.

While Mr. Balko sits safely in his tony Upper West Side of Manhattan digs puffing on some thai and bemoaning the plight of those persecuted by the gestapo Police SWAT teams to the members of his Mulatto studies literature club, the very men he defames are ensuring the continuance of his existence through their thankless work- protecting the good people of this country from the barbarians within our gates.

Heh, well, that’s pretty funny. The one piece of real meat in the whole thing is this:

In the article Mr. Balko uses a grand total of six examples of SWAT raids that resulted in deaths instead of arrests between the years of 2001 and 2006. He also cites the incredible rise of the use of SWAT teams, 1300% since 1980, stating that on average SWAT teams are used 110 times a day. Given the rise in SWAT action, the real story should be the lack of examples Mr. Balko is able to present in this article to prove his claims that “We the people” are under siege by the menace of “paramilitary” police units.

Well, given that Balko only had 600 words, I think fitting in 6 examples is pretty darn good. But, if you want a LOT more examples, check out this.

What anti-cop liberals want from Police Departments is perfection. What the real world offers is a lot messier. Most people will never be members of a law enforcement agency and therefore they will never experience the stress that goes along with it. This disconnect is clearly exemplified by the strum und drang following the recent shooting death of Sean Bell in Queens last week.

Well, I’m not a liberal in the sense this guy means it. And I’m certainly not “anti-cop”. Neither, though, am I pro-cop. I am definitely opposed to the police culture in our country today. I am in favor of police that act as agents of a government that protects my life, liberty and property. I have yet to find out how the War on Drugs does that, though.

Another Dead Citizen

Another citizen is dead in a raid conducted by police to serve a warrant. In this story, an 18 year old man, and his dog, is killed by police. He is suspected of armed robbery, supposedly one of two men that hit Justin Raines over the head and stole a PlayStation 3 from him.

It turns out that, although there were weapons in the house, Peyton Strickland kept them unloaded and none of them were in his hands when he answered a knock on the door. What, apparently, was in his hands was a game controller. Although he was, according to his roommate, going to answer the door, sheriff’s deputies knocked the door down before he could. They entered the house and fired four or five times, killing Strickland and his German Shepherd.

Although the police told Strickland’s roommate that they were there to serve a warrant, they never provided a copy of it to him. The District Attorney and Sheriff’s Department will conduct an investigation:

Investigators were reviewing the conduct of all officers and deputies involved in the incident, said New Hanover County District Attorney Ben David, who confirmed at least one sheriff’s deputy was involved in the shooting.

“I am making this my top priority,” David said Saturday. “No one’s above the law. If there’s any criminal conduct that can be established, I’m not going to hesitate to treat them as any other defendant.”

Neither he nor Sheriff Sid Causey would release any information on who was present at the time of the shooting or details about why or how it happened. The State Bureau of Investigation is assisting in the investigation, they said.

“It puts a cloud over everybody,” Causey said. “Nobody wants things to happen, but they do happen. When they do, we have to investigate … and then do the approriate thing.”

So, I have several questions.

  1. What about negligence, even if it wasn’t criminal? It sounds to me like the sheriff’s deputies chose a high risk approach to serve a warrant when they could have just waited until Strickland was leaving, or coming home, to serve the warrant. Or, simply waited for him to open the door. I have yet to hear anything that indicates the need for a forced entry. There was nothing that indicated immediate danger to anyone. So, even if there wasn’t criminal behavior, it sounds pretty negligent.
  2. What sort of compensation will be offered to the roommates, the friends, the family? Is the Sheriff’s department going to repair the home, clean up the blood, pay for the counseling that the roommate is likely to need?
  3. The Sheriff appears to be of the mindset that such things happen. It seems to me his mindset should be that they should never happen and a significant part of his job is making sure that citizens are protected. Obviously, I only have the quotes the paper chose to provide, hopefully this doesn’t reflect his attitude accurately.

Although not as cut and dried as the Kathryn Johnston case, it still seems pretty clear that Strickland didn’t have to be killed. Nor did his dog. What is interesting is that no details of why the police believed Strickland had committed armed robbery are provided. We have no way to judge if the warrant was appropriate, or not.

What do we know? An 18 year old is dead. A police officer may, potentially, have his career ruined, depending on this investigation. No weapons or lethal force was involved, or threat to the cops, except their own weapons. Another 18 year old is probably emotionally scarred for life. All of this, it would appear, could have been avoided by a change in tactics. As Radley Balko says:

Instead of kicking down doors, wouldn’t have been easier to just wait until this kid was coming or leaving his house?

As far as I can tell, yet another death to lay at the feet of a police culture that now emphasizes the citizen as the enemy.

Continuing to Think About Police and Police Culture

There has been a significant amount of blogging activity and discussion around “no knock raids“, police culture, Police Militarization, giving the police the benefit of the doubt, and much more.

First, some credit. Radley Balko, The Agitator, has been blogging on this topic for quite a while. He has the best collection of posts on the problems that I have seen, including a Raid Map. It provides details of botched paramilitary police raids over time that Radley has collected. For those of you that think things are okay, this might be eye opening for you.

It seems evident that there is a problem. Innocent citizens die and cops get off with, at most, a slap on the wrist. People don’t trust cops and instead view them with suspicion and distrust. Cops conduct no knock raids on flimsy evidence, use armored vehicles, where every podunk town has a SWAT team and uses them. Then we have, just to make sure everyone realizes that it isn’t the party that’s in power that’s the problem, the BATF and Waco, where Koresh could have easily been taken into custody without the massacre that ensued and where the BATF used para-military playbooks even though they were counter-productive and created a worse situation. I could go on for pages with these sorts of examples, but Radley has already provided them for us. Why don’t we just stipulate that there is a problem.

Let’s define the problem, then. I won’t bother with the conservative definition of the problem, aside from saying that the idea that agents of authority should be automatically respected, that the Drug War is somehow moral and that police should have significant para-military capability is a set of ideas I cannot get on board with. I will point out that the men that founded our country were suspicious of the government and designed our Constitution (as well as the state governments they helped to create) to put boundaries on our government and its agents. While many will try to separate the government and the voluntary agents, saying that those agents are doing their job and the policy is really the problem, I point you to the War Crimes Trials in Germany and Japan after WWII. We established there, as a point of law and morality, that “following orders” is not a reasonable defense.
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