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THE PROBLEM
Every day we hear of some act of brutality carried out by
federal, state, or local "law enforcement" against individuals or
groups whose only crime was the exercise of their unalienable
individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights. "Policemen" at
every level of government have become, more than any mere military
organization, the "standing army" hated and feared by America's
Founders.
There are many reasons for this, among them a failure on the part
of those Founders to provide for proper enforcement of the first ten
amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights.
Much of today's freedom movement (consisting of Libertarians,
"Constitutionalists", and even a growing number of "liberals") is
attempting to identify the root causes of America's ills.
As long as the causes of a problem are being addressed, there's
nothing wrong with ameliorating symptoms, as well. You may get a
CAT-scan to see why you suffer migraines, but you also take an
aspirin. Accordingly, I suggest the following steps -- many of which
I've considered for decades -- to begin treating the symptoms by
which we know we've all begun living in a police state.
Any one of these measures (or all of them together), may be
pursued by concerned individuals and groups who find them interesting
-- without regard to their political ideology -- as conventional
legislation, as constitutional or charter amendments, as initiated
referenda, or as a part of settlements in lawsuits.
SOME ANSWERS
First, there being no provision in the United States Constitution
for a national police force of any kind -- and in compliance with the
9th and 10th Amendments -- all federal "law enforcement" agencies
must be abolished and their present and former employees subjected to
legal scrutiny of their current and past activities. As "interim"
measures, these agencies and their employees will be forbidden to
carry or employ weapons of any kind, and will be permitted to operate
at all only under close supervision by local police.
All military weapons, vehicles, and aircraft presently in use by
these agencies will be surrendered for distribution to the populace
who paid for them.
Independent civilian review boards will be established to insure
that federal conduct remains fully consistent with the Bill of
Rights. No pleas of secrecy or "national security" will be permitted
to impede their investigations. Any willful misunderstanding, for
political purposes, of any article of the Bill of Rights on the part
of any elected or appointed official will be considered evidence of
an intention to commit a crime against the Constitution.
LOCAL POLICE
All police officers at state, county, and local levels of
government will be required to wear uniforms on duty and be forbidden
to act in a professional capacity when off duty, or wearing civilian
clothing. All uniforms must bear individual name patches and badge
numbers easily legible from a distance of fifty yards, and it will be
unlawful to cover or obscure them in any way. It will also be
unlawful for police officers to conceal their facial features with
any sort of helmet or mask, or to wear camouflaged or military-style
clothing.
All vehicles employed by local police must be clearly marked and
readily identifiable, with highly-visible registration numbers.
Agencies at every level of government will be forbidden the use of
helicopters which, in recent years, have increasingly become an
instrument of state terrorism and statist oppression.
Police officers may not possess, carry, or employ any weapon
prohibited to civilians, nor carry a weapon of any kind off duty,
concealed or otherwise, until laws at every level of government
forbidding civilians to do so in exactly the same manner have been
repealed. Bullet resistant clothing and equipment, which seem only to
have engendered an increasingly contemptuous disregard for the lives,
property, and rights of civilians, will be strictly forbidden.
To avoid conflict of interest and prevent over-zealous
enforcement of statues and ordinances, all fines and traffic revenues
will be divided equally among the American Civil Liberties Union and
Amnesty International (provided they adopt a view of the Bill of
Rights which is consistent from article to article), and state
Libertarian parties, provided they send nothing to the national
Libertarian Party until its own internal corruption has been
eliminated.
Handcuffs or other restraining devices may not be used on those
arrested for nonviolent crimes, especially for purposes of public
display. Arresting officials will be held fully and individually
responsible under civil and criminal law for any humiliation to which
arrestees later proved innocent are subjected.
In "seige" situations (which may not be initiated merely because
someone expresses a wish to be left alone, locks himself in his
house, or possesses weapons) authorities will be prohibited from
interrupting telephone or other utilities, or from restricting free
access by the media to the subjects of the operation.
A NEWER COVENANT
Individual officers of both the military and police will be
required to prove themselves all over again by publicly taking an
oath to uphold, defend, and enforce, without reservation, every
separate article of the Bill of Rights. Any police officer or member
of the military who refuses to obey an order which, in good faith, he
or she considers to be unconstitutional or unlawful will receive
executive clemency and, should the order prove to have been
unconstitutional or unlawful, promotion and reinstatement to full pay
and benefits.
PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
The American people will have their privacy again, whether the
government and government-chartered corporations want them to or not.
In general, owing to an established pattern of abuse by police
agencies and individual officers, all wiretaps, internet
surveillance, and other invasions of individual privacy -- or any
procedure, including taxation, which requires disclosure of private
financial information -- will be forbidden. It was a grave mistake to
grant such privileges to government in the first place. For the
foreseeable future, the Fourth Amendment must be read as if the word
"unreasonable" did not appear in it.
Given the unmistakable injunction of the Second Amendment,
possession or use of any device for detecting personal weapons
(whether by government at any level or by government-chartered
corporations) will be illegal and severely punishable.
It is inappropriate for sovereign individuals to be sorted and
tracked as if they were breeding livestock or government property.
Understandably, there is no provision whatever for it to be found in
the Constitution. Fingerprint records and other identification
systems presently maintained by government or by government-chartered
corporations must will be destroyed and practices like
fingerprinting, voiceprinting, and retinal photography strictly
forbidden.
A PERSONAL MESSAGE
To individual members of the police and military, I say that the
time for denial is over. If any of these proposed measures angers
you, remember that Bill Clinton did it to you. Janet Reno did it to
you. Louis Freeh did it to you. Larry Potts did it to you. Lon
Horiuchi did it to you. And you let them do it. Until you can prove
the contrary to the people you are sworn to protect and serve, you're
no different than they are. You're the same as those who:
Firebombed and burned an entire neighborhood out of existence
when one group of its residents was accused of nothing more serious
than disturbing the peace;
Assassinated a harmless old man simply in order to steal his
valuable real estate;
Shot a little boy and his dog to death, then blew his mother's
head off with a telescopically-sighted high-powered rifle as she held
her baby in her arms;
Illegally confined, terrorized, poison-gassed, and machinegunned
dozens of innocent men, women -- and 22 little children -- in the
church that was their home;
Tortured, intimidated, and attempted to dispose of political
prisoners by denying them necessary and lawfully prescribed
medication and proper medical assistance;
Threatened and confiscated evidence from independent
investigators when they questioned the government's cover-up of an
airliner crash that killed hundreds;
Viciously stomped helpless kittens to death underfoot in an
attempt to frighten the innocent victims of a narcotics raid carried
out at the wrong address;
And committed any of the hundreds of thousands of other brutal
acts that have begun to transform a once free and noble country into
a horror-filled dictatorship.
TIME TO STAND DOWN
The Cold War is over. The War on Drugs was intended from the
beginning to destroy the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend.
Don't let socialists, elected by a minority, use your body and mind
to force illegal, immoral, alien ideas on an unwilling populace.
Your one goal must be to enforce the highest law of the land, the
first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
Indeed, that's the only possible justification for the existence of
government.
Don't let deskbound, overpaid "superiors" tell you what the Bill
of Rights means. Remember your oath. Don't let judges and lawyers --
who only stand to benefit from the destruction of the Bill of Rights
-- tell you what it means, either. Do what most Americans haven't
done for half a century. Think for yourself.
Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founding
Fathers and you'd just fought a successful revolution against the
most powerful and heavy-handed government on Earth, and the last
thing in the world you wanted for yourself or your children or your
grandchildren was to stumble beneath the heels of its jackboots ever
again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?
And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful,
heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away, would
you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its "right" to own
and carry weapons? Or would you have written it to forbid government
from having anything to do with your guns?
I say again, it's time to end the War on Drugs. Think back:
every dime ever spent on it has only made the problem worse, not
better. Many decent individuals have come to believe that, from the
outset, it was never meant as anything but a war against the people
of the United States of America. It's time to end it, to abolish the
DEA, FBI, ATF, and every other federal agency wihich is not
specifically mentioned in the Constitution, and is for that reason
alone, illegal.
My last proposal is that all hiring for these agencies cease
immediately, and that individual officers who survive scrutiny of
their past activities be made US marshals, given a new assignment,
Bill of Rights enforcement, and be turned loose on politicians,
bureaucrats, and judges, instead of the American people.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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