Archive for July, 2011

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It looks like John Barlow was right

July 29, 2011

In the week following 9-11, I came across a message John Perry Barlow had sent to his friends, assuring them that he was OK. (He’d been in New York City during the attack, I believe.) In that message, he went on to mention that he thought the police state in America would only get more oppressive as a result of the attack on the Twin Towers.

At the time, I thought his prediction was probably right: things would get more oppressive. But I thought his calling America a ‘police state’ was a little over the top.

In the intervening years, I seem to have come across more and more cases like the one below. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Radley Balko’s The Agitator and he often documents police and prosecutors’ abuses — with a special focus on what he calls puppycide. (That’s one of his many posts on the topic.)

Balko did a paper called Overkill a few years back, when he was at the Cato Institute, which is all about the militarization of police forces in the U.S.

Or maybe it’s that I’ve seen too many St. Louis County patrolmen walking around in fatigues and paratrooper boots. It’s not all that rare to run into one of them at the local QuikTrip where I buy coffee. It makes me wonder: when did Missouri turn into Franco’s Spain?

So the sad tale below — about a 135-pound homeless man who was beaten to death by police — isn’t much of a surprise now. And I’ve had to re-evaluate Mr. Barlow’s remarks ten years ago. He was right in one way or the other: we may have been living a police state then but, even if not, it seems we are now.

Homeless Man Dies After Being Brutally Beaten by Five Fullerton Cops

Kelly Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County police officer, did not recognize his own son when he went watch him die at the UC Irvine Medical Center after police beat him into a coma on July 5. The officers were responding to a call about vandalized cars when they found Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic, and attempted to search him

Images and video at the link. They’re not pretty; in fact, they’re pretty disgusting.

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We know tyranny when we smell it

July 24, 2011

There are two news items in this post, both of them about city governments that are attempting to limit their citizens’ freedoms – in one way or another.

#1: A couple of weeks ago, Reason ran an article (one of several) about the Washington, D.C. Taxi Commission and a meeting it had to discuss a new requirement for taxi drivers in the city to have permits called ‘medallions’. (Medallion licensing is used in New York City, Chicago and Boston, for example.)

The whole thing seems to stink to me, since medallions aren’t currently required and I don’t know of any problems arising from the lack of them. It sounds to me like a cartel is attempting to capture the taxi business in D.C. But maybe I’m wrong about that; I don’t live in D.C. and I don’t know anything its taxi market.

What makes me suspicious, though, is this. Click the link in this quote to see a video of a reporter being arrested for recording a public meeting.

And the commission is so wary of scrutiny that when reporter Pete Tucker snapped a photo on his cellphone at a recent public meeting he was dragged out and arrested.

Reason.tv Producer Jim Epstein captured Tucker’s arrest on his mobile phone. Later, Epstein was also arrested after resisting attempts by the taxi commission and us park police to confiscate his camera phone. When Tucker was arrested, cab drivers, stormed out of the meeting in protest.

This clip of D.C. taxi drivers protesting the meeting was produced by Reason.TV. One of the cabbies is spot on: "We know tyranny when we smell it. And we are not going to take this stinking smell again."

#2: Paul sent a link to this news report from Gould, Arkansas, where the city council wants to ban a group it doesn’t approve of. But wait, there’s more: it also wants to require any group in the city to get its approval before holding meetings. What color is the sky on their planet?

The mayor of Gould nails it: “This is America. […] And in America you just can’t vote and violate peoples’ constitutional rights.”

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You lose some; you win some

July 23, 2011

There was some good news recently about a local free speech case. This quote is from the Post-Dispatch’s article about the decision.

Appeals court backs man in fight over St. Louis eminent domain sign

ST. LOUIS • A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down at least part of St. Louis’ sign ordinance and ruled that a St. Louis man had the right to protest eminent domain with a two-story mural on the side of an apartment building near Soulard.

Jim Roos commissioned the two-story painted mural, roughly 360 square feet in size, that proclaims “End Eminent Domain Abuse” inside a red circle with a slash to protest the government’s taking of private land, but the city ordered him to remove it in 2007, saying it violated city sign regulations prohibiting signs in that area larger than 30 square feet.

I’ve see the sign in this picture many times, while headed north on I-55 into Illinois. It’s hard to miss. And it’s good to hear it will be around for a while.

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