Steven Seagal - chicken chaser

Back in March, we got this awesome headline:



Daily Mail: The cockfighting raid on a small farm that required a SWAT team, bomb robot, armoured vehicles, film crew... and Steven Seagal

This Arizona sheriff was only investigating a cockfighting ring on a small farm.



But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was joined on a search warrant by a SWAT team, a bomb robot, two armoured vehicles, an action movie star and a film crew.



Jesus Llovera, 42, was arrested for cockfighting after the operation involving Steven Seagal, 58, who drove a tank onto the property as he shot a reality television show.

Shit, even Orwell didn't see this one coming. Combining the militarization of the police with reality TV is a marriage made in hell, and very appropriately officiated by the infamous Sheriff Joe.



Now Seagal is facing legal action over the raid, because they're also taking part in the War on Dogs.



TMZ: Legal Threats Over Deadly COCKFIGHT RAID

Jesus claims his 11-month old puppy was shot and killed during the raid -- and his home sustained "substantial damage." He also claims the cops killed more than 100 roosters that belonged to him.



The notice of claim is the first step towards a lawsuit -- and Jesus' lawyer tells us his client is demanding $100,000 for the damage and he wants Seagal to issue a "formal written apology" to his children "for the death of their 11-month old puppy, a beloved family pet."

As the Onion's AV Club explained:

Shortly after the incident, Seagal explained that the raid on suspect Jesus Llovera—which involved a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department team in full riot gear swarming his family’s home, as Steven Seagal crashed through his gates in a tank—all came about because, as Seagal said to a local TV station, “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” So in order to prevent said animal cruelty, Seagal and his team apparently “euthanized” the more than 100 roosters it found on Llovera’s property and, according to a just-filed claim from Llovera, also shot and killed his 11-month-old puppy.

Seagal's really taken the ideology of the American police state to heart. It became necessary to shoot the animals to save them.

Here’s hoping that Steven Seagal, puppy-killer, never meets Steven Seagal, guy from Out For Justice, because that dude would be pissed.

Only in SWAT nation.

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.

Radley Balko and Russia Today

Chances are, you've seen activist Adam Kokesh and his buddies get arrested with unnecessary brutality at the Jefferson Memorial. If not, here's the video:

What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:

"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."

And they do. Here's the Independent on the topic:

Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.

But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”

Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:

Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.

After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."

He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."

Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.

The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.

For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:

RT: Who does this government consider an enemy?

The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.

This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.

Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.

You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.

Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.

Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.

**

So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.

This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.

One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:

As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".

Now, I have a problem with this.

**

First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.

My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.

I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.

In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.

To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.

Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.

It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.

**

Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.

Cops for hire: Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.

Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.

American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.

And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.

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.

Tent city

Yeah, so I watch TV. I realize it's very much in vogue these days to disavow the boob tube completely and pretend that reading vampire novels or blogs is somehow decisively more intellectual and desirable, but I won't lie: I like my TV.

The only things I can usually be bothered to watch are documentaries, á la History and National Geographic, and sports. Generally speaking, the two don't overlap. This summer, amidst the most boring NHL off-season ever, it looks like they might, and in a totally unexpected way.

**

Last February, Edmonton Oilers goaltender Nikolai Ivanovich Khabibulin was arrested for drunk driving in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he was recently convicted and faces a minimum 30-day sentence.

Khabibulin won the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning back in '04.

Here's what TSN has to say:

The Russian was convicted on three counts last month and received a minimum 30-day sentence. His lawyer immediately appealed but didn't say on what grounds. The appeals process could last months or even a year.

If jailed, it's possible Khabibulin could serve his time at Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Tent City prison in the Arizona desert.

Ah, Tent City. The National Geographic Channel has run Lockdown quite a few times, and I think I've seen pretty much all of it. I find all these prison shows fascinating, especially now that I'm an ex-con myself, and I do admit I particularly remember the Lockdown episode on "Sheriff Joe's" Tent City.

Lockdown is just like any other prison documentary on the Discovery/National Geographic channels: scenes of prison life that the editors probably imagine are harrowing, prison guards speaking law enforcement jargon and most importantly, a heavy, dramatic voiceover. In the "Tent City" episode, they made a point of finishing each and every segment with the words "...in Tent City." I imagine it's done for dramatic effect, but quite frankly, it's ridiculous. We totally lost our composure after the third time, and probably spent the next week finishing every conversation with "...in Tent City."

**

None of this should distract us from the fact that there's actually nothing funny at all about Joe's tent city. To be specific, Tent City is an outdoor extension of Maricopa Jail, where Sheriff Joe mostly houses inmates suspected of crimes and awaiting trial. They live in primitive conditions on a yard where summer temperatures regularly exceed 40°C.

Here's TSN's summary of one inmate's experiences:

Shaun Attwood, a recent inmate from Britain, has written a book on his experiences and told The Guardian newspaper heat-related health problems are the mild part of the punishment. He wrote of toilets clogged with yellow-brown waste, mouldy sandwiches and prisoners shooting up crystal meth or heroin.

The bugs, he said, were the worst.

"I couldn't believe all the cockroaches," Attwood told The Guardian. "I couldn't sleep with them crawling on me. They tickle your hands and limbs and go in your ears to eat your earwax. You can cover yourself with a sheet, but it's so hot, you sweat all day and you get skin infections and bedsores, especially on your buttocks.

"Having the cockroaches crawling on me gave me a nervous breakdown."

Of course, where Khabibulin's from, they have some experience of these things, but it still seems a little harsh.

**

Harsh, however, is exactly how Joe Arpaio likes it. He's an obnoxious, hateful man who shamelessly promotes himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff". Arpaio is the embodiment of the "tough on crime" approach. In addition to his outdoor prison, Arpaio has re-introduced chain gangs and other public humiliations for prisoners.

As an additional humiliation, he makes male prisoners wear pink clothes:

In my opinion, it tells you everything you need to know about a man if he considers wearing pink a punishment.

**

It's not only Sheriff Joe's jail that attracts attention. Just this July, his department conducted a high-profile sweep for illegal immigrants (story), featuring 100 men and truck armed with a .50 cal machine gun.

Just as well he didn't bring a Warthog.

I can't, for the life of me, imagine how a Sheriff's Department can possibly need a .50-caliber machine gun. The .50-caliber rounds have enough penetrative power to make using a weapon like that in any built-up environment a serious hazard, and if they're out in the desert catching illegal immigrants, surely their personal weapons are enough? There's a throwaway quote in the article about illegal immigrants having AK-47s, but even if they do, bringing a heavy machine gun is just ridiculous.

He also has an APC, shown in action here:

The action in question is causing $4,000 worth of damage to a car during a botched SWAT raid on a suburban home. SWAT team members raided a house, set it on fire, and lost control of their APC, which ran into a parked car. As the inhabitants of the house came out, the SWAT officers stopped their puppy from leaving the house and forced it back inside with a fire extinguisher, where it died in the fire. According to the original news report, they later laughed about killing the dog.

As a side note, the dog killing isn't specifically a Sheriff Joe issue. As Radley Balko keeps pointing out, it's becoming routine in America for police officers to shoot dogs for no particular reason.

The purpose of Sheriff Joe's raid was, officially, to look for "a stockpile of illegal automatic weapons and armor-piercing pistol ammunition". They found one handgun and one antique shotgun, both of which were properly licensed. The theoretical justification was that one of the inhabitants had failed to appear in court on traffic citations.

That's being tough on crime: if you don't show up for a court date on a traffic case, the police murder your dog.

His most visible police actions have been massive sweeps for illegal immigrants, before Arizona's controversial new immigration law even comes into force, reminiscent of the 1997 Chandler Roundup.

**

Arpaio's philosophy is that prison needs to be made so unpleasant that no-one will ever want to come back. In his mind, this will decrease crime, as will being "tough", as seen above. This approach once made him wildly popular in both Arizona and around the US, and now it seems that his methods are bearing fruit.

According to lobby group America's Voice, violent crime in Maricopa County has increased dramatically under Sheriff Joe. In case you think that sounds suspiciously liberal, here's what the Goldwater Institute's paper, Mission Unaccomplished, had to say about Sheriff Joe:

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.

Simply put, Sheriff Joe's regime doesn't work. Studies show that his "sweeps" don't work. In 2008, the mayor of Phoenix drew attention to the fact that there were 40,000 outstanding felony arrest warrants in Maricopa County; while Sheriff Joe's posse was rounding up Hispanics, wanted felons weren't being arrested.

In general, routine police work is being seriously neglected in favor of Arpaio's publicity stunts. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting was awarded to two journalists, for an article on precisely that. It can be read here.

Response times, arrest rates, investigations and other routine police work throughout Maricopa County have suffered over the past two years as Sheriff Joe Arpaio turned his already short-handed and cash-strapped department into an immigration enforcement agency, a Tribune investigation found.

**

What about jail, then? According to a report by Amnesty International, "it is clear that the tents provide serious environmental hazards which make them unsuitable for inmate housing." In addition:

A major concern is the security of both staff and inmates in the tent areas. There are no video cameras in the tents and no sight lights, and if the flaps of the tents are down guards are unable to see into or through the tents, putting them into a potentially hazardous situation if they need to go in to check or respond to an incident. Although MCSO officials told Amnesty International that the tents were "low maintenance", others have said that the In-Tent facilities require greater security than hard cell facilities because of their open design, ready availability of materials that can be used as weapons (including rocks, tent poles, etc) and lack of segregation between violent and non-violent inmates. Amnesty International was told that there were regular bouts of inmate-on-inmate violence in the tents. Yet, alarmingly, the tents have no mechanism to alert prison staff in case of an emergency. Traditional facilities would have some form of alarm system to ensure a swift response.

(...)

The security risks are increased by the fact that the In-Tents facilities are chronically understaffed.

Just for his sake, I hope Nikolai Khabibulin doesn't end up in Tent City. Frankly, I hope no-one does. For Sheriff Joe, treating inmates inhumanely isn't a by-product of his budget or anything else at all; it's entirely intentional. Here's what the ACLU had to say on one particular publicity stunt of his:

Sheriff Joe's Inhumane Circus

His latest taxpayer-financed media stunt involved the "forced march" of undocumented inmates who are serving out their criminal sentences. Sheriff Arpaio closed down the city streets so that everyone could witness their public humiliation as they walked in chain gangs from a "hard" jail to the infamous Tent City, where they will be forced to endure unsafe conditions including summer months with temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees.

Not only was this inhumane, but violated international human rights principles — not to mention American values — that require us to treat people who are incarcerated with dignity and respect. But Sheriff Arpaio has absolute contempt for the dignity of the people in his custody and demonstrates this by treating people like circus animals.

Though he claims otherwise, Arpaio wasn't motivated by budgetary or security concerns to march shackled immigrants to the Tent City; he was motivated by the opportunity of self-aggrandizement and the promotion his anti-immigrant agenda. For those reasons, and for those reasons alone, he chose to re-route traffic and waste dwindling law enforcement resources.

So far, a study has showed no difference in recidivism rates under Joe Arpaio's regime. So when this is combined with the rising crime rate, it seems that Sheriff Joe's program of systematic humiliation and ill-treatment isn't achieving any ulterior motives at all.

The more one reads about Sheriff Joe, the more one comes to believe that these policies aren't in place to prevent crime. They seem to be ends in themselves. Here's another ridiculous example from the ACLU.

ACLU: Let's Do Some Math, Sheriff Joe

Yesterday, I argued in Maricopa County Superior Court about whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio, "America's Toughest Sheriff," can block inmates' access to abortion. The specific issue is whether the sheriff can demand that inmates who seek abortion care prepay $300 a day in transportation and security costs. If an inmate can't come up with the money, she will be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. Of course, Sheriff Arpaio doesn't require inmates seeking other medical care to prepay for transport and security costs. We argued it is unconstitutional to make access to the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy conditional on the ability to pay hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, the judge agreed.

(...)

But the most telling part of yesterday's argument came when the judge asked us to do some math. He asked both parties how many hours since June each of us worked on the case - we agreed it was at least 40 hours each. He then assumed an hourly rate of $250 an hour and asked us to calculate the total. The answer? A lot of taxpayer money is being spent on a policy that may cost the Sheriff a few hundred dollars a year given how few women request abortion access.

Then the judge asked the question that sums it all up - he asked the sheriff's attorney to explain "the real reason" behind the policy. Clearly, it can't be that the sheriff is really worried about $300 a year.

The sheriff's attorney didn't really respond.

The same question could be asked of Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, or his advocacy of barbaric prison conditions. Does he really believe these policies are going to bring about positive results, or is he doing this for its own sake?

**

Inefficiency and dubious ends aren't the whole story, either. During Sheriff Joe's time, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has become embroiled in a number of controversies. They're currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations, and by the FBI for abusing his power to attack his political rivals. Sheriff Joe has started several investigations against politicians and media representatives who have criticized him. Only one investigation resulted in a conviction, when the former school superintendent of Maricopa County pleaded guilty to the crime of patronage: namely, getting her daughter a summer job.

I re-iterate that Sheriff Joe has time to investigate an improperly acquired summer job, but not the 40,000 felony arrest warrants.

**

All in all, Sheriff Joe's "tough on crime" regime looks more and more like an elaborate joke, driven by the attention-seeking megalomania of one man. It's a sad indicator of the state of public discussion on crime and law enforcement that a buffoon like Arpaio remains popular, despite the rather obvious fact that none of his methods work. Sheriff Joe isn't the only example of the general public preferring macho posturing to effective policy.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with crime and law enforcement policy.