I cannot emphasize enough: NEVER VOLUNTARILY TALK TO THE POLICE.
On this theme I highly recommend this 27-minute video by Prof. James Duane on why innocent people should never talk to the police.

The police have become the active enemies of civil society and are primarily (by far!) concerned with imposing social control over your non-aggressive behavior. The police are the main enforcement arm and unthinking muscle behind a government that actively opposes the moral and natural jurisdiction that every human being -- including you -- has over their property and the peaceful use of their own bodies. For the love of your own liberty/safety and that of your family, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM GOVERNMENT AGENTS, especially the police who do not care about your rights or safety...other than considering them to be annoying barriers to doing whatever the hell they want. And the courts will back them up.

The NAACP may be surprised by the recent Department of Justice finding that a SWAT team didn't use excessive force when they shot the suspected killer of a sheriff's deputy 68 times during a manhunt near Lakeland in 2006. Angilo Freeland was the man believed to have fatally shot a Polk County deputy and his police dog. Nine officers fired on the 27-year-old after finding him hiding in the woods the next morning. They say a sudden movement by the suspect caused them to fire. I find nothing surprising about the police shooting down an apparently unarmed man with 68 bullets (especially a black man) and, then, an in-house government investigation utterly exonerating the police in finding that the dead man's civil rights had not be violated. The police follow-up response is also predictable: Polk sheriff's officials have said Freeland shot and killed Williams and his police dog, DioGi, after a traffic stop on North Wabash Avenue in Lakeland, then fled into nearby woods. Apparently an arrest, legal procedure and/or trial no longer needs to precede summarily execution by the police. The man is guilty because, well, the police shot him...just as the Duke defendants were guilty because, well, District Attorney Mike Nifong produced an indictment.

A significant number of people rubber-stamp anything and everything "an authority" does in the face of all and overwhelming evidence of savage cruelty and injustice on the part of the state -- including cold-blooded murder and the kidnapping of 460+ children (the FLDS sect case in Texas). If a police officer were filmed shooting an infant in its cradle over and over again, these people would ask "Ah, yes, but what did the infant to deserve being killed" or "what happened before the camera rolled?" I have to restrain myself with such people. I am by nature (or seem to be) a tolerant sort who is slow to condemn anything but real violence. But I have to restrain myself from the vicious condemnation I wish to rain down on those who facilitate and make possible the extraordinary and unnecessary suffering of innocent human beings. And, yes, I consider the black man dead of 68 bullets to be innocent until proven guilty. And, no, I don't credit the word of his self-interested murderers that "he really, really deserved it."

In the wake of the unbelievably callous and absolutely unjustifed removal of children from the FLDS ranch in Texas, I actually said out loud -- "I hope those social workers have their children removed; I hope they go through the hell they are imposing on others." Then, I stopped short. Why would I wish a living hell on the children of anyone? I want those social workers, along with murderous police and arrogant district attorneys, to be up on criminal charges... But to be willing to victimize children would make me no better than the scum of the earth that is the Child Protective Services of Texas. (In regard to the FLDS and criminal charges, BTW, David Friedman has a good commentary.) That's what happens when rage replaces reason as the currency of law.

Enough...I am devolving into a fury again as I write this and bile helps no one, including me. Anger does not make me feel invigorated, righteous and alive as it clearly does for some people. It leaves me with a physically sick feeling in my stomach. I will continue this rant tomorrow when I have a day's emotional distance from murdered black men and kidnapped children.