Just Another Day in America

This victim seems like a conniving little whore.  –  Baltimore prosecutor, name withheld by “authorities”

So the US Department of “Justice” has released its long-awaited report on the Baltimore police department, the product of an investigation which was begun after public outcry over the murder by torture of a young black man named Freddie Gray.  Gray was arrested under the pretext that he possessed an “illegal” weapon (a switchblade, like the one I carried in my purse in high school); like all prohibitionist laws, those against “weapon possession” (including the “gun control” laws so beloved by modern “progressives” and racist conservatives of the ’60s) are disproportionately enforced against minorities, and used as excuses for the overpolicing which has decimated black communities (New York’s much-hated “stop and frisk” policy was a gun control measure).  But middle-class Americans in general (and white middle-class Americans in particular) have developed an ingenious defense against recognizing the ubiquitous rot in our society:  they hyperfocus on one particularly blatant example, demand that “something be done” about it, and then smugly congratulate themselves on their enlightenment while ignoring the myriad other examples of exactly the same species of rot that surround them on every side.  The media attention to the Baltimore investigation is a perfect example of the syndrome:  it all tacitly assumes that the Baltimore police department is some kind of unique blot on the otherwise-spotless escutcheon of American policing, when in fact it is an extremely typical exemplar of the authoritarian cancer which utterly permeates the US body politic.

Take this Vox article about the report, for example; it speaks of “revelations” and “damning findings” as though it were about to unveil some shocking secrets, but absolutely nothing it mentions is outside the business as usual of US police departments.  It quotes the report as saying, “This conduct is not only criminal, it is an abuse of power.”  That’s true, but it’s a ubiquitous abuse of power which is so inherent in the machinery of prohibition that New South Wales decriminalized prostitution for the express purpose of eliminating that particular avenue of police corruption.  Barely the week passes that I don’t feature at least one or two examples of rapist cops (as of this writing, over 100 of them so far this year in the US alone), and in the past few years there have been several examples of the systemic pervasiveness of cops raping sex workers that were so egregious that even the badge-licking US media couldn’t ignore them (such as the recent scandal in Oakland).  As the above-linked Vox article notes,

According to the Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, sexual misconduct is the second most common form of police misconduct after excessive force.  An investigation by the Associated Press last year showed that from 2008 to 2014, around 1,000 officers lost their badges for sexual misconduct:  550 officers were decertified for sexual assault, including [rape]…440 other officers lost their certification for other sex offenses, including child pornography, sexting juveniles, or having sex while on duty…

And it goes without saying that these are only the ones who were caught and punished, however lightly; the vast majority never face any consequences whatsoever, because they specifically target women the state has branded “criminals” for completely consensual activities over which it has no legitimate jurisdiction.  This isn’t going to stop because the State makes a big show of prosecuting a few Daniel Holtzclaws or spotlighting a few Oaklands and Baltimores; as I wrote previously, the abuses “will continue to be business as usual until [the] public stops pretending otherwise and demands the abolition of prohibition”.