WendyMcElroy.com

Where are the good cops when police brutality happens? Where are they afterward when victims plea for justice? William Norman Grigg eloquently asks and answers these questions on his blog Pro Libertate where he is currently presenting a series of articles about police brutuality; it runs under the general title "The Thin Blue Whine." Where are the good cops is a question of particular interest to me because, whenever I write about police brutality, I hear from at least one reader who objects, "But what about the good cops?" The clear implication is that I focus on a few "bad apples" and, so, I'm being unfair to the majority of cops who are (it is claimed) decent men.

I disagree...for several reasons. First and foremost (to me) is the fact that most laws today are directed at "victimless crimes" and are themselves travesties of justice; a decent person could not pull a gun on a non-violent human being and force him or her to comply with unjust laws. Using force against someone who is harming no one means the policeman is a thug, pure and simple. Worse, he is a thug who does it for money and the cushy benefits being paid for by the peaceful taxpayers he brutalizes. Injury meet insult. Added to that -- the prison system is the most vicious violation of civil liberties in America; it is a living hell where men are de facto sentenced to be raped for "crimes" like being behind in child support or a probation offense like having a beer. Any policemen who participates in tossing a non-violent person into prison like a piece of raw meat to lions -- and all policemen are instrumental in that process -- is a vile specimen of humanity who makes me ashamed to share the species.

But I should return to the question "Where are the good cops?" In Part One of "The Thin Blue Whine," Grigg presents several horrifying instances of police brutality -- some are against children, one resulted in a man being beaten to death for a trivial offense; in essence, he was beaten to death for "contempt of cop"...the police did not like his attitude so they killed him. Grigg concludes with an incident involving Portland, Oregon activist Don Joughin, his wife and three children, including an eleven-month-old baby. The Joughlins were at a protest which turned ugly. Grigg explains,

He [Don] turned to a police officer obstructing an exit and asked how he and his family could leave the embattled intersection. "He pointed and said to exit to the [northeast], into the spraying police opposite him," Joughin recalled. With the crowd pressing down on him and his children, Joughin pleaded with the officer to let him and his family through. "He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me," Joughin recalled. Joughin didn't bear the brunt of that criminal assault, but his three-year-old caught some of the blast. The assailant then turned on Joughin's wife and the infant "and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than 3 feet," Joughin recalled.

Grigg asks a key question, Just where the hell are those good, decent, honorable police officers when their comrades are committing crimes of the kind committed against Don Joughin's children? How can a police officer direct a weaponized stream of caustic solution into the face of a terrified eleven-month-old baby in the serene knowledge that nobody among his peers would object?

Is the bar of decency so low for policemen that a good cop is the one who silently watches a fellow officer douse a baby with pepper spray while the bad apple is the one who brutalizes the infant? And what does this good cop do when the baby's parents arrive at the station to file a complaint? Police notoriously refuse to give evidence against each other, they lie on the Bible in court, they falsify or lose documents, and they justify beating people to death with official jargon about "resisting arrest" even if the victim was an unarmed 150 lb man who 'resisted' four hulking cops.

Another reason I doubt the "good cop" objection is because of what appears to be a precipitous rise in the incidents of police brutality over the last few years. I've surfed news sources for ten years now in order to feed the ever-hungry maw of the ifeminists' daily newsfeed and, so, I have a fairly good sense of major trends in news coverage. Although my evidence is anecdotal, I am seeing a dramatic increase in stories such as the following:

From Associated Press via Yahoo News, "Pa. police chief accused of cover-up ordered held." A police chief charged with trying to cover up the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant by white teenagers was named in a 2006 civil suit that made a startling claim: Borough police beat to death a Hispanic teenager, then hung him from the bars of his holding cell to make it appear a suicide. Police Chief Matthew Nestor was never charged, but the allegations contained in the suit, in Tuesday's indictment and in other civil claims depict a police department with pervasive hostility to minorities and a penchant for using excessive force. Nestor, 33, and two other officers were charged Tuesday with orchestrating a cover-up as the FBI investigated the fatal attack on Luis Ramirez by a group of high school football players. Gennarini and Nestor were indicted separately in a scheme to extort money from illegal gambling operations. On Wednesday, Nestor was ordered held until trial...Judge Malachy Mannion called Nestor "clearly, unequivocally a serious danger to witnesses in this case."

Again, from William Norman Grigg... To his comrades in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), Adam Stoddard is a martyr to principle and an innocent victim of injustice -- a heroic figure unjustly consigned to prison by petty, power-hungry figures. His boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, went so far as to describe Stoddard as a "political prisoner" during his brief and uncommonly comfortable incarceration....Stoddard, a member of the MCSO's correctional unit, was videotaped stealing a document from the desk of a defense attorney. As a result he spent several days in the custody of his co-workers after being cited for contempt of court by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe for refusing to apologize for his offense.

The next time I'm asked "but what about the good cops?" I intend to repeat a slightly revised version of the question right back at my questioner -- "Where are the good cops?" .