In A Truly "Free" Country, Citizens Should Be Able Tell Cops To Go Fuck Themselves

Or anything else, for that matter, especially when, relying on the "respect" that the "gun" inspires, the moronic, fascistic pigs "go off" and act like the dickheads their training -- to say NOTHING of the full might of the corpoRat PR/entertainment machine (how many "LawnOrder" shows can that fascist fuck Dick Wolf, produce?) -- struggles so bravely to conceal.

The totalitarian/authoritarian state REQUIRES that kind of blindly, bovinely obedient deference to its authority (i.e., GUN) bearers. Summarizing the lessons that the Bosses and Owners want us to take from the gates affair, according to Eric Etheridge, is this:

It doesn’t matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.

The End.

Radley Balko thinks otherwise. Writing at Reason, he says, “If there’s a teachable moment to extract from Gates’ arrest, it’s that arrest powers should be limited to actual crimes. Instead, the emerging lesson seems to be that you should capitulate to police, all the time, right or wrong. That’s unfortunate, because there are plenty of instances where you shouldn’t.”

But the big gun in this dispute, brought to the surface by the "tumultuousness" of Harvard (black) scholar Henry Louis Gates's unreasonable and probably illegal rousting from his Harvard Square home, is on the bench of the 9th Circuit. Via Ed Brayton, poaching on Andrew Sullivan, who unearthed the opinion of noted conservative (but also First Amendment absolutist) jurist Alex Kozinski on such matters. Kozinski concluded, more than a decade ago, that

...basically ...“mouthing off to police is protected speech.”

The case, Duran v. City of Douglas Arizona, began when “Plaintiff Ralph Duran directed a series of expletives and an obscene hand gesture at defendant Gilbert Aguilar, a police officer. Officer Aguilar responded by detaining and arresting Duran, who, along with his wife, now brings this lawsuit for injuries he suffered during the incident.”

In his ruling, Kozinski wrote:

Thus, while police, no less than anyone else, may resent having obscene words and gestures directed at them, they may not exercise the awesome power at their disposal to punish individuals for conduct that is not merely lawful, but protected by the First Amendment. . . . Inarticulate and crude as Duran’s conduct may have been, it represented an expression of disapproval toward a police officer with whom he had just had a run-in. As such, it fell squarely within the protective umbrella of the First Amendment and any action to punish or deter such speech–such as stopping or hassling the speaker–is categorically prohibited by the Constitution.

According to Sullivan, “The difference between real conservatism and the police-state authoritarianism now cherished by Cheney Republicans has rarely been better explained. You live in a free country. The police are your employees. You pay their salary.”

Cops 'protect & serve' their communities mostly by regulating the ability of members of despised minorities to remain, live, and to try to survive in those communities. Cops do to the folks they're assigned to regulate -- non-whites, mainly, still, and the poor, homeless, etc. whom their employers, the good burghers, wish to see be kept moving -- no more or less than what they have learned their bosses will stand for.

They learn who they can roust with impunity, who they can abuse for fun, whose asses they can kick for 'motivation,' as quickly and as certainly as they learn the locations of the donut shops that give cops freebies.