By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton, or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.”—Officer with the Los Angeles Police Department
Americans aren’t dying at the hands of police because of racism.
For that matter, George Floyd didn’t die because he was black and the cop who killed him is white.
Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes, died because United States is being overrun with militarized cops, vigilantes with badges, who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution. Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis warns, “The system is corrupt. Police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.”
Now, not all cops are guns for hire, trained to act as judge, jury, and executioner in their interactions with the populace.
However, the unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that the good cops, those who take seriously their oaths of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace, are increasingly being outnumbered by those who believe the lives and rights of police should be valued more than citizens.
It doesn’t matter where you live, big city or small town, it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.
Indeed, if you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures, or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings during encounters with the police.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, it doesn’t matter if you’re being treated with less than the respect you deserve: If you want to emerge from a police encounter with your life and body intact, then you’d better comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority, and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.
In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”
It is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.
It is how we have gone from a Nation of laws, where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least, to a Nation of law enforcers, revenue collectors with weapons, who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
As a result, Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg-shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike, not being compliant enough.
Americans as old as 95 are being beaten, shot and killed for questioning an order, hesitating in the face of a directive, and mistaking a policeman crashing through their door for a criminal breaking into their home, not being submissive enough.
Americans of every age and skin color are continuing to die at the hands of a government that sees itself as judge, jury, and executioner over a populace that has been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.
The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”
Warrior cops, trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later, are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.
Worse, militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by the United States police forces. Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.
If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.
Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must get the bad guys, such as anyone who is a potential target, before the bad guys get them.
This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat has all but guaranteed that unarmed Americans will keep dying at the hands of militarized police.
Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.
Much of the credit for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse.
It’s happening all across the country.
If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated, and fearful for your life and your property, you should be, because as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient, citizen in a police state is a dead one.
—The Rutherford Institute