What If Derek Chauvin Was Masked?

 

According to Professor Google, there is no federal law requiring police to identify themselves.

Now, syntax is important here. Try googling, "Do police officers have to identify themselves as police officers?"
Mad Dog has tried and failed.  It may well be police officers do not have to flash a badge or a photo ID in many of these United States. Police "in uniform" may be required to show a badge or an ID but plainclothes police apparently do not. That is a separate question from: does a police officer wearing a uniform, impersonating an officer, have to go the next step, to identify himself not just as a police officer, a sworn officer, but to then identify himself as a particular officer with a name and a badge number?

Go try to find that for your own state and town.

One thing which is clear, if a policeman in Hampton asks you to produce identification, you are by law required to do THAT. But it is not at all clear the same obligation weighs on the policeman. He may legally remain anonymous.

How's that for the home of the free and the land of the brave?

The attorney general and every bimbo on FOXNEWS have insisted ICE agents and police everywhere are being stalked and doxxed by "cartels" and masks are necessary for police and agents of every stripe. Of course, nobody has actually thought it necessary to offer evidence this is a real problem and not just some convenient excuse dreamed up to cover nasty behavior.

This means any sadist may impersonate a policeman easily enough, even though claiming to be police when you are not is often illegal--that would only play out later, after you've been stuffed into a van or raped.

In New Hampshire, local sheriff's department and town police have entered into obscure agreements with ICE to apprehend "illegal immigrants." If those police wear masks, baklavas in this open carry state, things may get interesting.

One can well imagine a gaggle of masked agents wearing bullet proof vests, invading the local Indian or Mexican restaurants in Hampton, and sitting there are gun toting citizens who happen to really like the Patek Paneer or the enchiladas, when the storm troopers burst through the door.  Shoot out at the OK corral hardly begins to describe the possibilities.

And what, as a citizen, even unarmed, should Mad Dog do if two men in baclava's jump out of a van and tackle some guy walking his chihuahua on the sidewalk in front of him? Should he act as a Good Samaritan and rush to the rescue? Whose side should he be on? The guys who scream "ICE" ?  Should Mad Dog respond "FBI" and flash his wallet ID obtained for $14 from Amazon?

Wouldn't that be fun? The "ICE agents" in their hoodies and baclava's now facing Mad Dog in his Hawaiian shirt flashing his pocket FBI badge? 

Then we call the Hampton police, who arrive in their N95 masks and try to sort things out.

What's a citizen to do?

Or suppose Mad Dog sees a baklava masked man with is knee on the neck of a man by the road? Who should Mad Dog hit? 

Outside of the COVID pandemic, Mad Dog would have thought the safest thing to assume would be the masked guy is the bad guy, and you should go to the aide of the guy the mask guy is beating.

It's like coming upon a man beating a dog he is holding by a leash with a stick or a club. You may not have much information, but the scene itself asserts itself--ipse race loquitor: The fact speaks for itself. It doesn't matter whether the dog is a local stray or belongs to the man. That dog may be a bad boy. But you don't like seeing a beating.

We hate cruelty to animals.

We reserve judgment about cruelty to people, especially if they happen to be "illegals."

But if Derek Chauvin had been masked, and people in the crowd gathering around him, watching him crush in with his knee on George Floyd's neck, if that milling crowd become unsure if Chauvin was a cop, would George Floyd be alive today?

Masked Goons or Simply Frightened Cops?

 
"The right of people to be secure in their persons,

houses,

papers, and

effects

against unreasonable searches and seizures, 

shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause

supported by Oath or affirmation,

and particularly describing the place to be searched,

and the persons or things to be seized."

--Fourth Amendment (ratified 1791)

United States Constitution

So, that was written in the 18th century, but the anger which prompted that amendment arose from ordinary citizens being mistreated, accosted on the streets and in their homes--there were no automobiles then--and Americans wanted to be sure they were not bothered, harassed, treated with arrogant disregard, made powerless by the soldiers or police with guns, as they lived their lives in America.

If you wore a red uniform, carried the seal of the King, then you could do whatever you liked under the British and Americans wanted to be sure they would not have to put up with such stuff in their new country.

One thing which makes a seizure unreasonable, it ought to be clear is if the person or persons arresting you cover their faces, travel in unmarked cars and show no identification beyond a metal badge anyone can purchase on line. 

ICE agents, and now their collaborators, the local police or sheriffs are hiding behind baklavas, wearing no identifiable uniforms and using unmarked vans--is that not, ipso facto, unreasonable?

Oh, Blondie Bondi protests: The officers are being "doxxed" and their families are receiving threats from those mysterious, invisible drug cartels! So our police and ICE agents can become like those Star War automatons in white armor, robots seizing anyone walking, working or traveling while Brown and spiriting them away to prisons in El Salvador or Sudan or Gitmo, because, you know, they are possibly illegal aliens, which means,  you know, they almost certainly have raped and murdered white women here in the USA.

The question I have is this: If these guys are so afraid they are wearing masks and unwilling to identify themselves: Should we not ask them whether maybe they should go into another line of work? I mean, did Elliot Ness or Wyatt Earp cower behind masks? And don't try to tell me Dodge City was any less dangerous than some (possibly imaginary) cartels.

And then there is the Sixth Amendment: 

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusations; to be confronted with the witnesses against him...and to have Assistance of Counsel for his defense."

If you are wrestled into a van in Maryland and dumped in a prison in El Salvador or in Vermont or New Orleans, then ipso facto, your 6th amendment rights have been violated.

If your masked abductors do not have to reveal themselves, you do not even know who is making the accusation: again violating the 6th amendment.

You are certainly not "safe in your person."

And those rights are not just for citizens but for anyone walking down the street in the USA.

Of course, the Trumplings have tried to evade those inconvenient rights by whisking people off to Gitmo, saying the Constitution does not apply in that Black Site, but, that of course does not explain how you can violate all those rights in Maryland or New Hampshire and all those protections melt away as soon as your plane lands in Gitmo.

Mad Dog is no lawyer, but he can read.

And Professor Google is a help. 

And then there is that old sticky principle "Habeas Corpus" which means the government has to justify the arrest of anyone.

Article One gives the one exception: the government can suspend habeas corpus in the case of Rebellion or Invasion as the public safety may require it."

So here is where the Trumplings try a sleight of hand: By calling illegal immigrants an "invasion" they can say, oh we have an exception here. Except, invasion means Mexican troops pouring across the border with Santa Anna waving his sword. If you want to go all Scalia and originalist, the meaning of invasion is not simply a convenient metaphor, it is an actual invasion by an identifiable army.

Unless, of course, you are Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and maybe Coney-Barrett, because then, anything goes, if Trump says so.

It is here where watching the movie, "Judgment At Nuremberg" is helpful. 

Based on the trial of German judges who carried out the laws of the Third Reich as Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler commanded, the American prosecutors are, at first knocked off guard.  German judges on trial approved of sterilization of "undesirables" who included Communists or anyone thought to be mentally deficient, and the German defense counsel reads the opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Bell case, in which he concludes sterilization of the woman Bell was justifiable as "three generations of imbeciles are enough." What the German defense attorney is saying of course is Americans were models for the German race theorists--with the eugenics movement of the Boston/Harvard era in the 1920's providing a "scientific" basis for excluding undesirable races from America and preventing some undesirables already here from reproducing.  Teddy Roosevelt described allowing immigration of populations from undesirable places like Italy, Africa and Central America as "race suicide." 

Now, we are drifting back to those days which gave us the "Chinese exclusion act" and when Henry James describes a Jew walking across Boston common in great detail with repugnance, describing his black frock, his sideburns and that description pops up nearly verbatim in "Mein Kampf."

So, America has been in some very nasty places before. We swung back toward valuing diversity and tolerance, and then the pendulum may have swung a little too far, as campuses made it a requirement for hiring that professors swear a loyalty oath to DEI.

But here we are, with that pendulum swung back to the anti immigrant thing where people are described as insects and sub-humans and no law protects them. 

It Can't Happen Here

 

The United States of America has been a gonzo, berserk nation from its inception, an unlikely an amalgam as ever pullulated up from planet earth, with silk stockinged bewigged delegates from the slave states of South Carolina and Virginia (Edward Rutledge, Thomas Jefferson)  joining dowdy, disgruntled New Englanders (John Adams) along with Benjamin Franklin, to establish a half slave nation which claimed to be a beacon of liberty, and which did, indeed inspire others (the French most immediately) to realize that even if there is a God in Heaven, He likely did not actually anoint a mere mortal to be a king. 

This America, Man!

Looking at developments in their own countries and in the world Sinclair Lewis and George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) wrote parables which proved to be both prescient and illuminating. Lewis's novel and then stage play depicted the rise of a Hitler/Huey Long like figure who played on American prejudices and gullibility to seize power.

Orwell once said he'd like his tombstone to read, "Damn you all to Hell! I told you this would happen!"

Mad Dog has thought fascism would not take hold outside the South, where it has been in place since the 18th century, simply because the rest of the country was too self absorbed, complacent and ignorant to actually bother embracing the mind control necessary to a fascist state.

But now, we see masked goon squads, trundling people off into unmarked vans in broad daylight. So, Mad Dog asks, how are we any different from Russia, Venezuela, Brazil or El Salvador? 

No Baklava. Home Address is Public

When asked why sheriffs from Rockingham County who now assist ICE agents in abducting people from their work sites or automobiles, the New Hampshire's finest replied that police are now subject to "doxing" and they and their families are at risk from "the cartels," and so the police are afraid and must be allowed to beat, subdue and even kill their prey for fear...fear of what? 

We Hang Together or We Hang Separately

Mad Dog asked what doxing is and was told it meant publishing on social media the telephone numbers, home addresses and other identifiers publicly.

Which reminded Mad Dog of the conversation he once had with the CEO of Portsmouth Hospital, in Portsmouth New Hampshire. Mad Dog said he was glad to finally meet her because he could not find her name on any of the printed media, on the hospital website or even at the reception desk in the hospital and when he asked where her office was, the man behind the counter asked, "What do you need to know for?"  

If You Can Find Me

She explained she did not want anyone to know who she was--outside of the hospital staff--because she feared getting hate mail and who knows what else? This was fifteen years ago, well before doxxing or shootings of CEO's of health insurance companies. 

I stared at her thinking: If you are THAT afraid, maybe you should not BE the CEO. After all, isn't that why we pay CEO's the big bucks, because they are willing to take the responsibility? (Of course, all this was long before that United Health Care CEO got shot.) But really, if you are going to be a CEO, or a cop, shouldn't that entail a certain risk? What's next, soldiers and sailors and marines wearing masks?

Eventually, the CEO was fired for not meeting budgets and the CEO functions transferred to the Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville, Tennessee, where presumably the managers in power would be safe.

No Hiding From His Enemies

Taken to it's logical extreme, this might mean our next candidates for Congress, for the Presidency may simply identify themselves by numbers or some sort of social media tag, "MAGAMAN" or "Super Sleuth" or "Ultra Kool Dude."  And police walking a beat? Forget about it. Police will cruise around in airconditioned Hum Vees totally garbed up in body armor and equipped with robots to pluck likely looking suspects off the streets.

Remember when police in New York did "stop and frisk" for any suspicious looking (i.e. dark skinned) young males walking down the street, claiming that technique had made crime drop? Then, when the actual data was examined it turned out crime had dropped years before stop and frisk and after stop and frisk was outlawed, crime dropped further.

Buy Your Badge on Line

So, yes, it CAN happen here.

Already has. 

Where's His Baklava?

We are just too complacent and preoccupied with getting the kids to day care and camp and with watching the Red Sox and the girls displaying on the Sea Wall to notice.