Kony, Jenna Talackova and Trayvon Martin

What does an Internet campaign to stop an African warlord have in common with a trans woman barred from a beauty contest and a black teenager murdered in cold blood by a vigilante? Simple: they're all symptoms of what may be our biggest problem as a society and a culture.

In each case, we react when presented with an individual example of injustice, but ignore the wider context. We enthusiastically share the Kony video, but does anyone care why people like him can run riot in Africa? Probably the single biggest reason is the poverty of most of the continent, which leaves governments powerless. One of the chief causes of that poverty is the agricultural policy of us, the world's developed nations. The majority of Africans are farmers, but we won't let them export their surplus to us. Instead, we subsidize farmers in the West to over-produce food, which we then dump on the world market, driving African subsistence farmers deeper into poverty. Is this even mentioned in, say, discussions on agricultural policy in the West? Nope. Indeed, most of the people I saw going on about Kony think that buying domestically grown produce and "supporting our farmers" is virtuous.

It's heartening that the Trayvon case has stirred up such an outcry. But most of the questions being asked are secondary or irrelevant. The real question isn't stand your ground laws or whether the shooter should have been arrested. The question is: how have you managed to create an environment where a suburban vigilante makes thousands of 911 calls solely to report black men in his neighborhood, shoots one of them for no reason, and not only avoids arrest but has his story unquestioningly believed by the police, who publicly defend him? The question isn't if a particular law or an individual police officer of department is at fault, or even the moronic question of whether the vigilante in question was a racist. It's how incredibly racist your society has to be for this whole sequence of events to unfold at all.

How does Jenna Talackova tie into this? As empirical proof. I offer you this tweet from the formidable Natalie Reed: "Miss Universe Canada petition got 20,000 signatures, Bill C-279 petition only 280. I really, really, really, REALLY hate humanity right now." Bill C-279 is a trans rights bill that you can read about here. So about a hundred times more people support trans rights than... support trans rights. Again, people think that a given individual shouldn't be mistreated because she's a trans woman, but they won't support a bill to end that mistreatment.

Part of the problem is psychological. As my co-blogger put it: "our brains can't multiply". We can, if we choose,empathize with a single individual, but we're really bad at empathy with a group. But it's more than that. The same reaction comes up all the time, in just about every political discussion; the copyright system, police brutality (especially the American practice of senseless SWAT raids and wholesale murdering of dogs), racism, corruption. Confronted with an individual example, people will decry and condemn it, but balk at any suggestion that there could possibly be a wider, even structural, problem. It goes far beyond sensible caution of sweeping political reforms; it's a wholesale denial of the very possibility that we might live in a society where systemic injustice happens.

In my opinion, it's simply a psychological defense mechanism that protects people from having to ask themselves difficult questions about the world they live in. It's hard to think about big political questions. Much easier to live in a fairy-tale world where society is fundamentally good and sound, and all problems are caused by evil individuals. Makes for better Hollywood movies, too. The problem is that it also leads people to passively condone, or even actively support, policies and structures that directly harm the people that they claim to sympathize with.

2011 in review

Another year gone by. What did we get up to in 2011?

* We did our best to promote Goblin Camp, with a let's play kind of thing and a bunch of other posts. The game is still a going concern, and although there hasn't been an update for a while, I'm assured there will be. Eventually. Back in February, I put together really epic camp. The website is here; if you haven't tried it, do.

* There was an election in Finland, that led to no noticeable changes in Finnish politics. We have some really good-looking athletes, though.

* They killed 'Usāmah; I was skeptical about that being the death-blow to terrorism. Sadly, terrorism took a different turn shortly thereafter with the senseless attacks in Norway, the background to which we discussed. Steve Jobs also passed away, and we felt that his eulogies went too far.

* Throughout the year, we were alarmed by the police, as despite the death of "Osama", new threats to our precious bodily fluids continued to emerge. To combat these, we got everything from American police UAVs and the German police going all Gestapo on the German Pirate Party to the Finnish police hacking your phone. I also lost faith in Radley Balko, of The Agitator, for hithcing up with the Kremlin's propaganda machine, and my post on the topic inspired a TV show host to discuss my underwear.

* There was a lot of Minecraft. At the beginning of the year, I was still hanging around Epic Island, and we were impressed by music. We also weighed in on the Mojang - Zenimax legal battle.

* Apart from Minecraft, we liked Harms Way, but were disappointed by Mass Effect 2 being a sexist white supremacist game and by EA's various antics. The future looked bleak. In other media, we liked Detroit 1-8-7 and Sucker Punch, as well as the fantastic Robot.

* We all enjoyed some excellent music!

* Some memes were participated in, and scientology was addressed. We also started a series of posts on the Bible.

* There was, of course, a lot of hockey. At the very beginning of the year, the wrong guy was made MVP of the World Juniors, and later on Winnipeg got an NHL team. Sadly, our favorite NHL player called it quits. However, there were the world champs. In my preview, I had a good feeling about Team Finland, and even though Mats Sundin assured us it was impossible, Finland actually won. We were a little disappointed by the overblown coverage given to one particular goal, though.

Sadly, in the words of Jonathan Toews, the summer of 2011 was the worst ever for hockey. Not only did three NHL players pass away during the summer, but the plane carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed, killing the whole team. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of stories on Derek Boogaard, an NHL enforcer who died last summer. I highly recommend reading them.

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Maybe that's a bit of a sad note to end this post on, but as the new year comes around, it won't hurt to take a moment to remember those who aren't around to see it happen. Having said that, though, I'd like to thank everyone who read this sorry excuse for a blag over the past year, and wish you all a happy new year! See you in 2012.

Jack Chick and the Apocrypha

I've discussed Jack Chick and his insane tracts before on this blog, but it's a subject worth returning to. Here to remind us why that is is Detective Constable Charles Ennis of British Columbia:

This may seem silly stuff to many of you readers and it would be if it weren't for the fact that so many people take these publications seriously. Chick's business has thrived for decades and his tracts are available in 100 different languages. Chick has distributors in England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany. Police officers have used these tracts as a resource. For example: The comic The Force was used as the basis for a history of Satanism presented by Detective Eisenbraun of the Rapid City Police Department in his presentation on Satanic Crime in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1989.

As it happens, The Force takes us right to the heart of the matter.

This rabidly anti-Catholic comic is part four of the Alberto series, the first installment of which you can read here. It's this kind of stuff:

It was a Freemason symbol! That's because in the late Alberto Rivera's conspiracy theory, the Catholic church controls not only the Freemasons, but communists, Jews and atheists all over the world, and, by the way, created Islam in order to destroy Jews and Protestants.

The remarkable Alberto Rivera was a con artist and fraud who sold his lunatic brand of anti-Catholic hysteria to Jack Chick by posing as an ex-priest who had become disenchanted with the Catholic world conspiracy. Thanks to WayBackMachine, you can read an exposé of him that ran in Cornerstone magazine here. Cornerstone may have been an evangelical looney magazine, but some evangelical nutcases were just too nuts for them. Here's a quote from the Rivera piece:

What does Jack Chick think about this? It's hard to find out, because he has made it a policy not to speak with reporters. But when he was finally reached by phone at his home, he said that he had never met a more godly man than Alberto, and that he knows Alberto's story is true because he ,.prayed about it." Jack says he expects his own life to be taken by Jesuit assassins.

Yeah.

Chick is a Protestant fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is a name the movement has given itself, because it supposedly defends the fundaments of Christianity. Like all Protestant movements, they consider themselves more Biblical than the others (and certainly more Biblical than the Pope!), and almost all fundamentalists profess a belief in Biblical inerrancy. The latter is the idea that the Bible is completely and entirely true; a position held by, for instance, Republican presidential candidate candidate Rick Perry. He also believes the Authorized King James Version of the Bible to be the only true word of god.

Now, I take an almost macabre interest in the Biblical exegesis of fundamentalist Christians, because I'm somewhat interested in the Bible as a text, and because it's entertaining that they paint themselves as "Biblical". Most of all, though, the notion of someone claiming the Bible to be "infallible", or that they believe it "literally", is just too hysterical to pass up. So now our blog has a "Bible" label.

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This time around, I'm going to take a look at Jack Chick's downright bizarre "King James onlyism", in the form of this tract:

Here's the blurb:

See the behind-the-scenes struggle to destroy the King James Bible, and how God preserved it.

Just so you know how reliable our sources are, and appreciate the tie-in with Alberto, this is what appears on the very first page:

Yeah, thanks, "ex-Jesuit priest" Alberto.

To start off, we're told an incredibly bizarre story about how Catholics assassinated the Puritan translators of the King James Bible:

Presumably, this is some of the "information" provided by Alberto, as I've been unable to find a single non-Chick source for this notion that a Catholic conspiracy murdered any of the King James Bible translators. Alberto seems to just, I don't know, make stuff up.

We're then told that "Satan has always tried to change, add to or take away from God's words", first in the Garden of Eden and then:

So according to Jack Chick, the Old Testament Apocrypha are a Satanic plot against Christianity.

Obviously, the notion that no "true Christians" have accepted the Apocrypha is a fairly well-known fallacy in itself, and taking it at face value makes some rather drastic claims about the Christianity of, say, the earliest church. Also, the Apocrypha were never "denounced" and totally rejected by Judaism, even though they weren't included in the canonical Hebrew Bible. However, he argues against the Apocrypha some more:

So, Jesus never quoted the Apocrypha, sez Chick. He didn't really quote any of the Old Testament books that much, but made frequent allusions to them. The trouble is, he also frequently alluded to the Apocrypha. Here's a few examples (from the King James Bible, naturally).

Matthew 6: 19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
Sirach 29: 11 Lay up thy treasure according to the commandments of the most High, and it shall bring thee more profit than gold.

Matthew 7: 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Sirach 27: 6 The fruit declareth if the tree have been dressed; so is the utterance of a conceit in the heart of man.

There's several more direct allusions to the Book of the All-Virtuous Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, which has the most awesome name of any Biblical book ever, including Jesus' parable of the seed falling on stony ground.

For more examples, contrast Jesus' refrain from Mark 9 ("Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched") with Judith 16:17:

Woe to the nations that rise up against my kindred! the Lord Almighty will take vengeance of them in the day of judgment, in putting fire and worms in their flesh; and they shall feel them, and weep for ever.

Even though it's slightly anticlimactic that the Book of Judith is just called the Book of Judith, it has inspired some great art, like Judith by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, which I was going to show here but got censored by Blogger, and the similarly named Judith, by Valentin de Boulogne. Dudes really liked painting her.

One more example: Jesus' description of god, no less, in Matthew directly echoes that given in the Book of Tobit:

Matthew 11: 25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

Tobit 7: 18 Be of good comfort, my daughter; the Lord of heaven and earth give thee joy for this thy sorrow: be of good comfort, my daughter.

The title "Lord of heaven and earth" also occurs in Luke 10:21 and Acts 17:24, but nowhere in the Old Testament. So the famous devotional song "How Can I Keep from Singing?" is an apocryphal reference.

There's a whole bunch of allusions and references to the Apocrypha in the gospels, which isn't the least bit surprising, since the Greek Septuagint was the Bible used by the early Christians, and it included the Apocrypha. But I guess that in Jack Chick's books, the apostles weren't True Christians.

But wait, there's more!

And this is where things get confusing. When Chick, or whoever is actually responsible for this tract, talks about the "Alexandrian manuscripts", presumably he is referring to the Alexandrian text-type, which is one of the oldest surviving sources for the New Testament. However, he also mentions the Old Testament, which I suppose might mean he's talking about the Septuagint as well, which was created in Alexandria. So is he seriously saying that the Bible used by the apostles was a Satanic lie?

Elsewhere, Chick offers a bizarre justification for these views by comparing the contexts in which Alexandria is mentioned to Antioch.

Again with the "true Christians", this time with the bizarre idea that the Emperor Constantine was the pope (he wasn't), and the somewhat startling claim that the Vulgate is also "satanic".

The named source in the tract is a book by David W. Daniels called Did the Catholic Church Give Us the Bible?. Here's a section of the blurb:

There is not one history of the Bible, but two. One is a history of God preserving His words through His people. The other is of the devil using the Roman Catholic church to pervert God's words through her "scholars."

Once again we encounter the bizarre notion that the apostles and early Christians weren't "God's people", given that they were using a Bible based on the satanic Alexandrian manuscripts.

I don't recall seeing this kind of pure hatred against the Apocrypha before. After all, in Protestant tradition, the Apocrypha were considered, as Martin Luther put it, not canonical but worth reading.

I think one of the most vital clues is in the word "scholars" and the quotation marks around it. Belief in Biblical inerrancy and literalism is one of the foundations of Protestant Fundamentalism, and I imagine at least part of it comes from the fact that many fundamentalists aren't very well-read in Biblical scholarship and exegesis. Instead, they stubbornly insist that the Bible can be read "literally", a ludicrous idea, and I imagine they see Biblical scholars who debate the merits of different translations and the Apocrypha as suspicious intellectuals with edumacations. It's also been argued that the roots of Protestant fundamentalism are in Calvinism, which took a very dim view of the Apocrypha.

The key thing to remember, though, is that Catholics are evil:

Yeah. When the inquisitors come for you, they'll be using that law. As I understand it, the Synod of Toulouse in 1229 banned the owning of vernacular Bibles, but I'm not entirely sure about that one.

What I am fairly sure about is that scholarly opinion considers the Textus Receptus to have been compiled from several Greek manuscripts by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1516. All of his sources dated to the 12th century or later, and were mostly of the Byzantine text-type. As Wikipedia puts it, "most modern scholars consider his text to be of dubious quality". Certainly by the standards of modern exegesis, you'll have a hard time justifying the idea that the Textus Receptus is somehow more truly preserved than, say, the Alexandrian manuscripts. Today, this position is only held by Protestant fundamentalists who are completely opposed to any textual criticism of the Bible. Like Jack Chick!

What's even funnier is that some of Chick's comrades on the evangelical right consider Christian humanism and Erasmus himself to be pretty much anti-Christian. While most Protestants regard Erasmus as one of the fathers of the Reformation, Protestant reformers see his "Christian humanism" as a plot of the Catholic church to destroy Christianity. In his documentary series How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer described Christian humanism as not Christian at all, and Rus Walton asks: "Is it not another snare, another delusion, another trap to draw man away from God?"

Just in case you think these are some random crackpots, Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has described watching the Schaeffer films as "a life-altering experience".

So while Jack Chick considers Erasmus to have been a divinely inspired hero who is faithfully preserving the true word of god against a grand Catholic conspiracy, to other Protestant fundamentalists, he's one of the chief agents of that selfsame world conspiracy. This is a wonderful example of what happens when you don't approach history on its own terms but as raw material for a conspiracy theory. When Schaeffer wants to prove that secularism is the greatest evil facing Christianity, he creates a monolithic "humanism" and projects it back into history. Of course, he also thinks the Catholic church is evil, so he tacks that on as well. Chick, on the other hand, wants to prove that the King James Bible is the direct word of Jesus, so he creates a pseudohistory of "inspired texts" leading up to it. Of course, he also thinks the Catholic church is the greatest evil facing Christianity, so he tacks on a monolithic conspiracy theory.

The net result is that Erasmus of Rotterdam is either a tool of the Catholic world conspiracy, or a heroic Christian warrior fighting against it. I guess the lesson is that making actual history fit a lunatic conspiracy theory can be surprisingly hard.

Next, though, we learn that the Inquisition was set up specifically to target the Textus Receptus:

This notion, along with their casualty figure, is just pure nonsense. Certainly Erasmus was critical of the Catholic Church, even in the Textus Receptus itself, but the idea that the whole Inquisition was put together to weed out the Textus Receptus is ridiculous. The notion that the Textus has a different teaching on salvation from, say, the Vulgate, is also basically just made up.

One particular example of a difference between the Textus and more modern texts is the Comma Johanneum. It's worth reading this little piece from Wikipedia:

The words apparently crept into the Latin text of the New Testament during the Middle Ages, "[possibly] as one of those medieval glosses but were then written into the text itself by a careless copyist. Erasmus omitted them from his first edition; but when a storm of protest arose because the omission seemed to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity, he put them back in the third and later editions, whence they also came into the Textus Receptus, 'the received text'."

The modern scholarly view is that the Comma Johanneum is a later addition, and Erasmus himself agreed. However, he re-inserted the passage after protests, and now Chick and other King James Only -fundamentalists insist that it is divinely inspired.

The funniest part of all this is that Erasmus used the Vulgate Bible in creating the Textus. So even by Chick's standards, the Textus Receptus is satanic. The dodge they use to get out of this is to insist that the Textus Receptus itself was divinely inspired, as Chick indirectly says in this tract, and now we've firmly crossed over into cloud cuckoo land. It also, once again, begs the question of whether Erasmus was a divinely inspired Christian or an evil anti-Christian Catholic, but never mind.

After several panels of old, recycled anti-Catholic propaganda, including the notion that the Gunpowder Plot and Spanish Armada took place because of the Textus Receptus, we get this tidbit:

Why, exactly, would this be disastrous to the Catholic Church? The tract claims that the Textus Receptus teaches that salvation only comes from Jesus and not the Church, but as no evidence is offered for this position and I can't find any, we have to regard this as having been made up. In all probability, this is a Chick-Rivera fiction to make the Catholics look bad.

However, we're directly told that the Apocrypha would have diabolical effects:

I can't, for the life of me, understand what in the Old Testament apocrypha, which was included in the King James Bible, would make Protestants suddenly convert to Catholicism. To me, this is the biggest single mystery of this tract. How on earth would getting Protestants to accept the Apocrypha as canonical suddenly make them Catholics?

All the reasons I've been able to find online for rejecting the Apocrypha are either totally spurious, like simply asserting that they're just not cricket, or criteria that could also be used to disqualify any books. For example, several instances accuse the Apocrypha of contradicting books in the Bible; well, the canonical books do that all the time as well. I genuinely don't understand why Chick's tract is so implacably hostile to the Apocrypha in the first place, let alone what sinister Catholic purpose they can possibly serve.

After a brief rehash of the fictional anti-Puritan assassination plot, we're told that when the Apocrypha were omitted from the Bible, God won:

Of course, this is followed by assertions that all subsequent Bible translations have been engineered by the Vatican because they're evil.

The Puritans are prominently represented here because most American Protestant fundies consider themselves to be the spiritual descendants of Puritans. I'll have to talk about that at some point, but for now, let's just go on with the propaganda.

Actually, it's these panels toward the end of the tract that bring us closer to understanding why this tract hates the Apocrypha so much.

As we're once again joined by "Dr." Rivera, we can try to offer an answer to this implacable hostility toward newer Bible translations and the Apocrypha. All "Biblical literalists" profess a belief in a monolithic Bible that contains only one message; after all, if the Bible were to contradict itself or even be ambivalent about something, it couldn't be interpreted literally. Now, this kind of interpretation isn't actually possible, but it is possible to insist that it is. If the Bible is mostly read by uneducated people who don't know the first thing about history or exegesis, I suppose they can imagine that the Bible can be regarded as being literally true.

The above panels make it pretty clear that this tract's hate is directed at exegetes who actually know about the Bible in its historical context and about textual criticism. After all, their knowledge threatens the whole notion of Biblical infallibility, by pointing out where the King James Bible contradicts itself, is flatly wrong about historical events or geography, and similar things. This, of course, is anathema to them, as is the general shift in opinion toward viewing the Bible as a historical text among texts.

So what better way to banish these doubters than by implying that they're part of a Vatican-directed satanic conspiracy?

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There's a classic fundie quote floating around the Internet:

The only thing I don't like about them is they sell foreign language versions of the KJB. I don't think that's right. We know the only true translation is the 1600's version in English. It's too risky for anybody to translate that into other languages. Mistakes can creep in... and that can lead to heresy. True Christians should only read English.

To most people, that's pretty funny. However surprising it may seem after reading the above tract, Jack Chick is actually a fairly moderate King James Onlyist. He seems to belong to the "received text only" faction, who maintain that the Textus Receptus was divinely preserved to serve as the basis for the Dinsdale, erm, Tyndale Bible and the King James bible.

Others, though, believe that the translation process that gave rise to the King James Bible was itself divinely inspired. Chick hints at that when he says God oversaw the process, but although he says the original authors of the Old and New Testament were divinely inspired, he doesn't extend the metaphor to cover the King James translators.

There is yet another view, sometimes called Ruckmanism after its vocal exponent, Peter Ruckman, a Christian lunatic who believes the CIA is secretly breeding aliens in underground facilities. As Jack Chick predicted he would be assassinated by Jesuits, in 1997 Ruckman predicted the government would have him killed in the next few years because he knew about the brain transmitters they had implanted in African-Americans and all the other nefarious CIA plots he's invented. Of course, making predictions that fail to come about is very Christian. Intriguingly, Ruckman also seems to think that anti-abortion activists are Darwinists. Yes, you read that right.

Ruckman believes that the King James Bible constitutes revelation in itself. He's said: "Mistakes in the A.V. 1611 are advanced revelation!" He considers that the King James Bible, as more recent divine revelation, is superior to any earlier manuscripts or translations. He attacks an "Alexandrian cult", which according to him believes that the original text of the Bible has been lost, and that therefore no final word of god exists on Earth. The Textus Receptus, on the other hand, he considers a separate text from the "Alexandrian cult" manuscripts, even going so far as to say that the Septuagint is a deliberate forgery created to discredit the Bible.

Ruckman's views are so extreme that the majority of the King James Only movement is opposed to them, let alone other Christians. What's interesting here is that Chick's narrative parallels Ruckman's in many places. Chick's strange references to "Alexandrian manuscripts" now appear to be derived from Ruckman, as is the primacy of the Textus Receptus and its fictional history. On Chick's website, we can find a strong defense of Ruckmanism.

However, in the tract, Chick doesn't quite go the whole hog. He replicates several parts of the Ruckman narrative, but portrays the Textus Receptus as the divinely protected original word of god, and doesn't claim divine inspiration, let alone revelation, for the actual translation process of the King James Bible. I imagine Chick has toned down the Ruckmanism to make his tract have a wider Christian appeal, but in doing that he's created numerous inconsistencies. In insisting that both the "Alexandrian manuscripts" and the Vulgate are satanic, but that the Textus Receptus is the "preserved" word of god, he's created a textual history that just doesn't add up. Of course, he may claim that the textual history of the Bible is all a Catholic lie. That's really a kind of "get out of jail free" card for conspiracy theories: if the history doesn't work out, just claim it's a conspiracy. Works for everything from ancient aliens to Bible translations.

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To end on a sobering note, this can all seem like the deranged fantasy of an almost 90-year-old man who publishes comic books on the Internet. But like I said earlier, the current governor of Texas, who is one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, actually believes that the Bible is infallible. So this isn't just a study in Internet lunacy, but in contemporary American politics.

To recap, in this post we've seen that in the world of Jack Chick, only the Textus Receptus and the King James Bible are the word of god, and the "Alexandrian manuscripts" (possibly including the Septuagint) are satanic. The way these conclusions are reached tells us quite a lot about the theology of Jack Chick, and about his cavalier disregard for history and Bible exegesis, and his positively danbrownian dedication to simply making stuff up. Or, if you prefer, lying. All this will also have some interesting implications later on, when we continue our series of blogistic exegesis.

Police brutality, part IIIa: Introduction to SWAT nation

I've been moving house, so one day I found myself browsing through my back issues of Playboy, mostly to read Bobby London's Dirty Duck comic strips. As I was doing that, though, I ran into a Forum piece in the November 2006 issue by Radley Balko called Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. (for a cautionary note on Radley Balko, see here)

The Playboy article is a simple one-page thing with six examples of SWAT raids gone wrong. The real issue, of course, isn't just that sometimes raids go wrong, but the whole spectacle of police militarization in the US.

I first encountered this subject in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine back in 1999. Funnily enough, you can read the story in question online here, because when FOX News asked Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to explain his motivations for his attack, that article was one of the things he sent them. The article, by Wayne Laugesen, is called "The Thin Blurry Line: When Cops and Soldiers Are One-and-the-Same".

"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade. "These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."

In 2006, the aforementioned Radley Balko wrote a paper for the CATO Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. To start with, I'll be quoting heavily from those two sources to give you a brief summary of what's going on in SWAT nation. Here's Laugensen:

Kraska says his research has found that in small town America - towns of 25,000-50,000 - two of every 10 policemen serve on a department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.

A tenfold increase in paramilitary police deployments. Why? Here's a chilling quote from Balko's paper:

“They [police officers] made a mistake. There’s no one to blame for a mistake. The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”

—Hallandale, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers conducted a late night drug raid on the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude after hearing the commotion, was also subdued and handcuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear, then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.

The war he's referring to is, of course, the war on drugs. Wayne Laugensen explains:

"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might be carrying drugs."

In addition, the federal government has been especially keen to promote the militarization of the police. Balko:

In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of equipment and technology to state and local police. The same year, Congress created a “reutilization program” to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.

(...)

By the late 1990s, the various laws, orders, and directives softening Posse Comitatus had added a significant military component to state and local police forces. Between just 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country.

(...)

A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”

One of the reasons given for this militarization, and enthusiastically peddled by Hollywood, is the spectre of heavily armed criminals. Radley Balko debunked that:

Moreover, there's simply not much evidence that criminals are arming themselves with heavy weaponry. In a paper by David Kopel and Eric Morgan published by the Independence Institute in 1991, about a decade into the militarization of civilian policing that began in 1980, the authors point to a number of statistics showing that high-powered weapons, which are often cumbersome and difficult to conceal, simply aren't favored by criminals, including drug peddlers. The authors surveyed dozens of cities and found that, in general, less than 1 percent of weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides across the United States involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant through- out the 1980s. It was during the 1980s that SWAT teams first began to proliferate.

Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. The examiners in Dade County, Florida—home to Miami— for example, found that contrary to the Miami Vice depiction of the South Florida drug trade in the 1980s, the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in Miami was in decline throughout the decade.

Despite this, more and more military-grade weapons and equipment are being channeled to police forces around the United States. The latest threat invented to justify it is the heavily armed illegal immigrant. When I wrote about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's antics earlier, I encountered this piece of reporting:

Arizona Republic: Joe Arpaio launches 16th immigration sweep in desert

In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.

Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.

"I am trying to send a message to Mexico," he said. "We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back."

The 7-year-old gun has not yet been used, Arpaio said. "It is more for defense." Nor have any of his deputies yet been harmed in a border scuffle.

"We have been very lucky," he said.

The sheriff said criminals smuggling drugs and immigrants across the border are now carrying AK-47s along the swath of desert that is seldom patrolled. The Barry M. Goldwater Range is used for shooting and cannot be patrolled without permission from the United States Air Force. That gives smugglers an easy path for entry, Arpaio said.

This is classic law enforcement logic: there's supposedly a heavily armed enemy out there who puts the officers at risk, necessitating military-grade hardware and civil rights violations. The fact that the AK-toting illegal immigrants seem to be a myth, as evidenced by, among other things, the lack of shootouts with heavily armed immigrants in Sheriff Joe's neck of the woods, is irrelevant. What matters is that the police need bigger guns. Balko:

With all of this funding and free or discounted equipment and training from the federal government, police departments across the country needed something to do with it. So they formed SWAT teams — thousands of them. SWAT teams have since multiplied and spread across the country at a furious clip.

It's no joke, too. I earlier wrote about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's SWAT team. Just recently, a SWAT team raided a house at the behest of a department of education investigating white-collar crime.

In this part of the world, it used to be a running joke how every single Russian government agency sprouted a SWAT team equivalent around the turn of the millennium. Now the same seems to be true of the US.

What's wrong with it? Balko:

The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

That's no exaggeration. Here's a few of the examples Balko provided for the Playboy piece I mentioned earlier:

- Anthony Diotaiuto, a 23-year-old student, was killed by a SWAT team making a "no-knock" raid on his house. They knocked down his door, without declaring themselves to be the police, and when the justifiably alarmed Diotaiuto went for his gun to defend himself, the police shot him.

- Cheryl Lynn Noel, a 44-year-old woman, was shot to death in her bed by a SWAT officer in 2005. After finding marijuana seeds in the family's trash can, the Baltimore police department sent a SWAT team to raid her house in the middle of the night. The team broke down the door, threw stun grenades inside and stormed up to the bedroom, where they found Noel holding a handgun. The police officers immediately shot her. Full details here.

- Cory Maye, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who entered his apartment on a no-knock raid. Maye had no idea the man he shot was a police officer. Read the Reason piece here.

This is the most terrifying aspect of this era of SWAT teams. The police may come by information that leads them to seek a search warrant on your house or a nearby house, or an arrest warrant on you or one of your neighbors. This information may well come from a paid informer, who may have a grudge against someone or just plain lie. It's now becoming increasingly common for the warrant to be carried out by a SWAT team breaking into either the target house or one near it; wrong-door raids happen far too often.

If you do find your door being broken down by a SWAT team, you're very unlikely to be able to tell that it is, in fact, the police who are coming at you, and not, for instance, home invaders. In the United States, it's considered legitimate to own a firearm for home defense, and the country has seen some spectacular home invasion cases. However, should you exercise this right to home defense, and it's the police coming in through your door and not a criminal, they will shoot you and face no consequences for doing so. Not that being unarmed will protect you, as SWAT teams regularly kill unarmed people as well, whether because they think they're armed or by accidentally discharging their weapon.

To sum up, it's entirely legal, and considered totally legitimate, for US law enforcement agencies to maintain heavily armed paramilitary units which regularly assault the homes of private citizens and kill and maim some of them. In the Soviet Union, people lived in dread of the midnight knock on the door: it would mean the secret police were coming to arrest them. In the United States, on the other hand, the police don't knock, and they'll shoot.

The fact that this kind of activity is considered normal policing is just terrifying. On principle, the idea that police officers can invade your home without announcing themselves, kill your pets and possibly kill you, based on nothing more than vague circumstantial evidence that you might be guilty of anything ranging from failing to appear in court to a misdemeanor, is unthinkable. Yet it's true.

This is another case of the basic problem of police misconduct: the majority of the population believes that the police only ever do bad things to criminals, and that criminals, by being criminals, deserve it. The problem with this is that there are criminals and there are criminals: the majority of SWAT team raids target unarmed people without serious criminal backgrounds, guilty of non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of marijuana. Worse, it ignores the fact that there are wrong-door raids where the police attack the wrong house or apartment, and raids based on false information. And in both those cases, the police shoot, tase and beat first and ask questions later.

The reasoning given for all this is, most commonly, the safety of the officers. For these SWAT teams, that comes before the safety of the citizens they're supposed to be protecting. That isn't right. US law enforcement is treating the citizens of the United States like the inhabitants of an occupied country.

Reading the Laugesen article from 1999 is especially scary now, in 2011, when it's gotten even worse than he imagined.

Police brutality, part II: Phasers on stun

We're back with more police brutality, with a brief post on a question of equipment. In my previous post, I talked about police shootings; this time we'll see that they don't need a gun to kill you. For Finnish readers interested in the topic, I wrote more about it in my Finnish blog.

**

The taser was invented by NASA scientist Jack Cover in 1969, and he finished the first version in 1974. Over the last few decades, the taser has gradually become more and more popular with law enforcement agencies around the world. Finland's police force officially adopted it in 2005.

To take a fairly random example, last year a 60-year-old man with a heart condition in Marin County, California, fell and hurt himself when he and his wife returned home from a fundraiser. His wife called paramedics, and as they were treating him, two police officers turned up at his house.

A word of warning: no sensitive person should watch the video. Seriously.

ABC: Man sues Marin sheriff after being Tased at home

"All of a sudden, they just showed up, they came in here like there was a fire going on, like a gunfight was going on," McFarland said.

What happened in the following minutes was captured on a camera mounted on the deputy's Taser.

The deputy tells McFarland he is going to take him to the hospital because he may be suicidal.

"We want to take you to the hospital for an evaluation, you said if you had a gun, you'd shoot yourself in the head," the deputy can be heard saying.

McFarland says it was just hyperbole. He was tired and in pain.

The deputy orders him numerous times to get up or else.

"Stand up, put your hands behind your back or you're going to be Tased," the deputy says.

McFarland keeps refusing.

The exchange goes on for about five minutes; his wife keeps pleading with the deputies not to Tase him, saying he has a heart condition.

Then, McFarland tells the deputies in no uncertain terms to leave.

As he gets up to go to bed, McFarland is Tased. Not once, but three times.

The video accompanying the article is honestly shocking. There's a 60-year-old man lying on the ground, screaming in pain as he's being electrocuted by the Taser. The deputy keeps shocking him and shouts "Stop resisting!". It's like a sick torture scene.

There are too many infamous Tasering incidents like this to list. There's a couple of particularly glaring ones here. To make a very long story short, over the past decade or so it's become almost standard policy for far too many US law enforcement agencies to use Tasers to arrest people, violent or no.

The idea that they're needed for "officer safety" is nonsense, and as for making the public safer:

The Houston Chronicle: The Taser Effect

Since the Houston Police Department armed itself with Tasers, touted as a way to reduce deadly police shootings, officers have shot, wounded and killed as many people as before the widespread use of the stun guns, a Houston Chronicle analysis shows.

Officers have used their Tasers more than 1,000 times in the past two years, but in 95 percent of those cases they were not used to defuse situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force clearly would have been justified.

Instead, more than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people.

In more than 350 cases, no crime was committed. No person was charged or the case was dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by judges and juries, according to the Houston Chronicle's analysis of the first 900 police Taser incidents, which occurred between December 2004 and August 2006.

Of those people who were charged with crimes, most were accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.

Here's another study that found no change in injuries to officers, but a dramatic increase in deaths in custody. The ACLU had this to say in 2005:

Few if any controls are imposed on police using Taser stun guns to subdue suspects, which could explain the rise in Taser-related deaths throughout the region, according to a new study released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

"The lack of regulation of Tasers is very disturbing in light of the increasing number of deaths associated with their use," said Mark Schlosberg, the ACLU of Northern California's Police Practices Policy Director. "We fear that in the absence of strong regulations on how police use the weapon, we are likely to see more unnecessary deaths."

In an exhaustive survey of Taser policies and training materials in more than 50 police departments across central and northern California, the ACLU found that while stun gun-related deaths have risen dramatically, the weapon remains largely unregulated. Tasers work by firing twin metal barbs that emit a 50,000-volt charge into an individual, causing him to collapse from loss of muscular control.

Since 1999, at least 148 people in the United States and Canada have died after encounters with police who shocked them with Tasers. More than half of those deaths occurred in the past year, of which 15 took place in northern and central California.

Despite these alarming figures, the Scottsdale, Arizona based manufacturer, Taser International, continues to encourage liberal use of the weapon while grossly downplaying safety concerns. These misleading promotional tactics are reflected in the training materials, which are almost exclusively relied upon by police departments, the ACLU said. Indeed, the ACLU study found that only four of the departments surveyed created their own training materials.

Taser International has also pursued an active policy of silencing its critics with threats of lawsuits, so the actual lethality of the Taser is still an open question. What isn't a question is that Tasers do consistently kill people.

This is just a very brief introduction to the way Tasers are being used in the United States and Canada these days. Their introduction has led to more police brutality and more deaths in custody, with very little to show in the opposite direction. What everyone needs to be aware of is that tasers are not Star Trek phasers that you set on "stun" and then harmlessly knock someone out: they're potentially lethal. The taser, combined with the cult of officer safety, are combining in the US to create a culture where it's become acceptable, even normal, to tackle anyone being arrested, from the elderly and disabled to professional athletes, to the ground and shock them with a Taser. It's a disgrace, and it's pure brutality.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

**

Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

Finnish police seek authorization for data crime

To sum up what's happening over on my Finnish-language blog, just two months away from the next parliamentary elections, the Finnish government is seeking to give the police new powers to covertly break into citizens' computers and mobile phones.

The legistlative proposal for a new police law recently became public. In addition to existing wiretapping and covert surveillance powers, the police will be allowed to secretly install keyloggers or other technical devices, or crack telephones and computer systems remotely.

Although the new law will give the police increased powers to act covertly, it provides no real oversight or any opoprtunity for citizens to challenge the legality of covertly obtained evidence. In order to carry out a covert cracking operation, the police will need to seek permission from a court of law. Once the operation is complete, the police are required by law to inform the targets that they have been under surveillance, and the targets can then challenge the legality of the surveillance permit in court.

However, if the police fail to inform the target of the surveillance, nothing happens. As for the court challenge, there is already a decision from the Finnish Supreme Court that even if a surveillance permit was found to be unlawfully granted, evidence obtained in the unlawful investigation is still fully admissible in court. If a court is found to have granted a permit unlawfully, or if the police gave false information while appealing for a permit, no sanctions will be applied.

The law very specifically delineates what actions the police will be allowed to take under any given form of covert information gathering, and specifically what kind of information they will be allowed to extract. Permits must be sought based on the severity of the crime being investigated. However, the different forms of covert information gathering overlap and use similar methods. For example, if a suspect is being investigated for treason or a similar very serious crime, the police can obtain a wiretapping permit that allows them to listen to his telephone calls and read his e-mails. However, if a suspect is being investigated for any crime that happens on the Internet, such as a copyright violation, the police can obtain permission to crack their smartphone. According to the letter of the law, they aren't allowed to listen to his calls or read any of the "messages" stored in the phone. However, if they do, any evidence they obtain is admissible in court. If the suspect files a complaint, the maximum penalty (in practice) for the officers violating the law will be a reprimand.

In short, the bill provides the police with the authority to break into any kind of data systems covertly. The only judicial oversight consists of the police themselves reporting their actions to the parliament's ombudsman. Confusingly, this seems to be based on the idea that if the police break the law, they'll admit it in an official report.

So in practice, there is no oversight. The only recourse a citizen has is to appeal to the same ombudsman, who has few actual powers and less willingness to use them. Under Finnish law, basically any evidence, no matter how it's obtained, is admissible in court. This, combined with the lack of oversight, seems to present the police with a carte blanche to engage in covert surveillance of just about anyone they like.

Finland may not be a police state yet, but it looks like we're on our way there. Frighteningly, the parties currently in office are solidly behind this proposal, as it's being presented in the name of the entire cabinet. Their strongest challenger in the upcoming elections is running on a populist platform that includes harsher penalties for criminals. So not only are we on our way to becoming a police state, but no-one seems to care.

Police brutality, part I

Commuter trains are more dangerous places than you might think. So dangerous, in fact, that San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system employs its own police department of some 300 officers, complete with its own SWAT team.

On New Year's Eve, 2009, the BART trains were packed, and at around 2 a.m. a fight broke out on one, involving a dozen people. Several BART police officers moved in to break it up.

What happened next is disputed, although there are a bunch of cell phone videos of the incident. As people were being cuffed, according to one witness, two police officers rushed a young man called Oscar Grant, and one of them punched him in the face. This officer, called Pirone, and officer Johannes Mehserle, wrestled Grant to the ground. Pirone stood over Grant and called him a "bitch-ass nigger" (SF Chronicle).

San Francisco Chronicle:

Video footage played repeatedly in court showed that as Mehserle raised his gun, Pirone had his left knee on Grant's neck. Pirone's left hand was pressing Grant's head into the platform, and Pirone's right hand was holding Grant's right arm - the same one Mehserle said he had struggled with - behind his back.

As Grant was lying on the ground, restrained by the two officers, Mehserle drew his service handgun and shot Grant in the back. Mehserle claims he was trying to use his taser, but confused his gun for the taser and shot Grant by accident. The jury in his case agreed, and he was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

When the verdict was announced, several hundred people disagreed and rioted. Mehserle will be doing prison time, and resigned from the BART police after the shooting. Officer Pirone was fired, as was his partner, for the same incident.

**

This is the first post in a new series on police brutality. I thought I'd lead with the most recent example of totally excessive force, whatever the actual story behind it. More to the point, as the Oakbook points out, in the 12 months before Oscar Grant was killed, law enforcement officials killed 102 people in the state of California. Meaning that every three days, someone was shot by the police, just in California. What makes the Oscar Grant case unprecedented isn't that someone was shot, but that the police officer in question actually went to court for it, and was accused of murder.

Interestingly, the majority of the people shot by the police in California were Hispanic. As a European, I've always found "Hispanic" to be the most confusing "race" in the United States. The way they see it, when you cross the Pyrenees, you cross a racial boundary. I find that somewhat insane. Also, I was never able to understand whether Brazilians count as Hispanic or not. Hispanic obviously comes from Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, so it might include Portugal and Portuguese speakers.

Wikipedia tells me that in the US, Brazilians either are or aren't considered Hispanics. So, depending on which definition you like, I either have a good segue into a Hispanic getting shot on a train or not. If you don't accept that Brazilians are "Hispanic" by American standards, then you can read about an electrician getting shot here and segue from that.

Those of you that follow the news may remember that in July 2005, the British police shot a Brazilian electrician called Jean Charles de Menezes on the Tube. It's a scary story.

On July 22, 2005, the Metropolitan Police and various other arms of the British government were looking for the terrorists responsible for the previous day's failed bomb attack on the subway system (and a bus). Some of them were watching a block of flats where they suspected some of the terrorists, who were of Middle Eastern or African extraction, were staying. de Menezes was staying at the same block of flats with two of his cousins, and had just been called to fix a broken fire alarm at Kilburn.

Armed officers followed de Menezes from his flat to the subway station. The police were instructed to follow him and prevent him from entering the subway system, as he was believed to be a terrorist. It's worth noting at this stage that the only reason anyone thought he was a terrorist was that he lived in a block of flats that was under police surveillance, and looked foreign. Later, in an attempt to justify following de Menezes, the Met photoshopped a picture of him to make it look more like one of the terrorist suspects (Independent).

Being followed by the police, de Menezes made his way to Stockwell station and got on the subway. Some people may remember reports that he ran away from the police and vaulted a security barrier; those aren't true. The person who jumped over the turnstile was one of the officers. Similarly, reports that he was dressed "suspiciously" are untrue.

De Menezes boarded a train perfectly normally and took a seat. Just as he's sat down, several plainclothes police officers ran into the car, knocked him onto the ground and shot him in the head.

As the Telegraph reports, despite claims to the contrary, the Independent Police Complaints Commission found that the officers did not challenge de Menezes in any way or identify themselves.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report said police had given the Brazilian no instruction "that an innocent man would have understood".

IPCC Commissioner Naseem Malik said: "There is no action he could have consciously taken that would have saved him".

The revelations contradicted the Met's insistence that Mr de Menezes failed to obey a challenge by police at Stockwell Tube station.

What happened was that de Menezes was suddenly attacked by people in ordinary civilian clothes. One of them grabbed him, pinned his arms behind him and forced him down into his seat. While he was being restrained, the other officers shot him in the head seven times at point-blank range. One other bullet hit him in the shoulder, and three apparently missed. He died on the scene.

He was never challenged or even spoken to; he was simply grabbed by the police, restrained and executed. And they didn't even know who he was.

In the inquiries that followed, it emerged that the British police were operating under a policy known as "Operation Kratos". There is a report by the Metropolitan Police Authority on it here. One of the provisions of the policy is that if police are facing a suicide bomber, their only recourse is to shoot him in the head. The explosives most suicide bombers carry are so volatile that a gunshot to them would detonate them, say the police, and they believe that if a suicide bomber thinks he has been identified, he will detonate the explosives.

Whether that's reasonable or not, I'm not one to judge. The way it was implemented, though, is nothing short of shocking. The police had no evidence whatsoever that de Menezes was a suicide bomber, and, of course, he wasn't. Witnesses say de Menezes didn't react in any way to the police coming onto the train, and even as he was being restrained and had a gun held to his head, he appeared calm. Despite the fact that his arms were pinned back, totally restraining him, and that he wasn't wearing any kind of bomb, resisting arrest or behaving in a threatening way, the police officers executed him.

No charges were ever raised against any of the officers, and it was determined that they all acted properly and appropriately. The Metropolitan Police apologized for de Menezes's death, but as far as anyone knows, all the officers involved are still serving with the police.

**

One incident that also sprang to mind after the BART shooting was that of Wolfgang Grams, a member of Germany's Rote Armee Fraktion, a Communist terrorist organization. In 1993, Germany's antiterrorist police unit, GSG-9, was arresting Grams on the platform at Bad Kleinen station. Grams and the police exchanged fire, and he shot two officers, one of whom died.

According to the police, Grams then fell off the platform and shot himself in the head. He was airlifted to hospital but died of his injuries there. His death has always been controversial; the officers present maintain that he shot himself, while there are persistent rumors that he was executed by GSG-9. Ordinarily, I'd think "persistent rumors" like that are pure bunk, if it wasn't for the way some of his fellow terrorists died.

October, 1977. Four members of the Red Army Fraction are being held in maximum security solitary cells in Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart. Since September 6, all four had been denied any mail, telephone use or visits, because of allegations that they continued to direct terrorist activity from their cells. They were also forbidden from contacting each other.

On the 18th of October, Gudrun Esslin was found hanged in her cell. Jan-Carl Raspe was found dead by gunshot, as was Andreas Baader. The fourth RAF member in the high security wing, Irmgard Möller, was alive. She had allegedly stabbed herself in the chest four times.

Möller had since told the press that none of the deaths were suicides, and that she never attempted to kill herself. Certainly stabbing yourself in the chest four times is an unlikely suicide method, but it isn't even the least likely one. It's significant that both men died from gunshot wounds, while one of the women was hanged and the other stabbed. One of them, Jan-Carl Raspe, died from quite an unlikely gunshot, too.

There were no less than three bullet holes in Raspe's cell, but the most significant was the one in him. According to the autopsy, Raspe shot himself in the back of the neck. There was an exit wound in his forehead. Anybody reading this is welcome to try to work out how that's physically possible.

Raspe's suicide is only one of a series of unexplained details in the deaths. At least two of the dead terrorists had written to their lawyers that they suspected the prison authorities were planning to kill them. The official explanation is that when an operation that was partly planned to give them their freedom, the hijacking of a German airliner, went wrong, the prisoners decided to kill themselves. Irmgard Möller, though, maintains they didn't even know about what was going on in Mogadishu.

To be honest, I don't know what happened to any of the four people at Stammheim, or for that matter to Wolfgang Grams or Ulrike Meinhof, who also allegedly hanged herself at Stammheim. The reason I'm going through this is that the shooting of Oscar Grant powerfully reminded me of Wolfgang Grams's death.

But surely the idea of police officers, or whoever is supposed to have killed the RAF members, murdering people and getting away with it is ridiculous?

**

In September 1999, a 46-year old Scots decorator was making his way home to his Hackney flat. He'd been to the local pub, and was carrying a table leg that his brother had been restoring with him, wrapped in a plastic bag. For reasons of their own, someone at the pub called to police to report that a man with "an Irish accent" had just been there, carrying a gun in a plastic bag.

A Metropolitan Police armed response vehicle was directed to the site, and found the man, names Harry Stanley. As the officers challenged him, Stanley turned around to face them. As he turned, the officers shot him. He died on the scene.

After several inquests and deliberations, the officers were held to have acted in self-defence, and returned to duty without facing criminal charges. Why they needed to defend themselves against a non-threatening man armed with a table leg, and why they needed to kill him in the process, was a question the British justice system didn't see fit to answer.

Initially, though, the officers were suspended. In protest, over 100 armed police officers turned in their weapons, because they thought it was so unreasonable that their colleagues had been suspended for shooting an innocent, unarmed man.

To be fair, Stanley was carrying a table leg. In April 2009, 47-year-old newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson was on his way home from work during the G20 protests. As he walked past a police cordon, innocuously minding his own business, one of the riot police attacked him from behind, hitting him with a baton and knocking him to the ground. Tomlinson was injured and later died of a haemorrhage. An investigation was underway but nothing has been heard for almost a year.

Finally, any review of people killed by the Metropolitan Police would hardly be complete without mentioning Blair Peach. He was actually attending a demonstration in 1979, on behalf of the Anti-Nazi League. According to fourteen witnesses, Peach was hit over the head by a police officer. The blow broke his skull, and he later died in hospital. An internal inquiry by the Met concluded that Peach was killed by a police officer, but they couldn't identify the officer because none of the officers present would co-operate with the inquiry.

The Peach case is one of the most shocking examples of the blue wall of silence; the refusal of police officers to testify against one of their own, seemingly no matter what they've done. It continues to be universal policy in police forces around the world, even in the West.

**

The point of this rather long post is to introduce the reader to the idea that people are being killed by the police practically every day. According to statistics from the FBI, from 2004 to 2008 over three hundred people were killed by law enforcement in the United States. In four of those years at least one person was killed by the police every day.

Considering the population of the United States, that isn't really a lot. Then again, looking at spectacular cases like Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, not to mention the ones I've talked about here, even one death like Jean Charles de Menezes's is too many.

From mistaking a taser for a gun to executing a Brazilian electrician on the subway, deaths are the most spectacular examples of police brutality. Overall, largely due to nationalist indoctrination, most citizens of Western countries have a ridiculously high level of trust in the police. I think that it's worth reminding everyone that it may not be justified. When de Menezes was executed, the reaction of many people was that he must have done something to deserve it. The idea that the police would murder an innocent person is so impossible to so many people that they'll grasp at any cognitive straw to avoid admitting that the police might do something wrong. This is how the totally false reports that de Menezes vaulted over a ticket barrier or was wearing suspiciously heavy clothes circulated: people wanted to believe that he must have done something.

In fact, he didn't do anything wrong. Neither did Ian Tomlinson or Blair Peach, neither of who even had any kind of criminal record. All of them were simply innocent, everyday people going about their daily lives until they were murdered by the police. And none of the police officers involved were even charged with anything.

So really, this is the most powerful reason to care about police brutality. No matter who you are, it could happen to you.