On 25 January 2021, America’s National Public Radio
headlined “Fatal
Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling
Patterns” and reported that:
Since 2015,
police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black
men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found.
NPR reviewed police, court and other records to examine the
details of the cases. At least 75% of the officers were
white. The latest one happened this month in Killeen, Texas,
when Patrick Warren Sr., 52, was fatally shot by an officer
responding to a mental health call.
For at
least 15 of the officers …, the shootings were not their
first — or their last, NPR found. They have been involved
in two — sometimes three or more — shootings, often
deadly and without consequences.
In
fact:
Of the officers involved in the deadly
shootings of unarmed Black people over the last five years,
13 were charged with murder. Two were found
guilty.
NPR’s report alleged a number of reasons
for that “without consequences,” but ignored the most
important one: In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court created what
is, in practical reality, a new law, almost a total ban
against convicting a police officer of murder if he kills
someone while on the job. The ‘Justices’ called this
judge-made law (subsequently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court
many times, the latest being in 2020) “qualifed
immunity,” but it is very close to being total immunity,
and thus virtually all of the many abuses that NPR reported
there can be traced back to it. Being a mainstream
‘news’-medium, the deeper level of reality is
censored-out by the editors and managers.
The United
States and its allies do not call the U.S. a “police
state,” but, if this phrase has any meaning, then it
clearly does apply, and a strong case can be presented that
the U.S. might even be more of a police state than is any
other nation on Earth.
Is the phrase “police
state” anything more than propaganda that a government
uses against a foreign government that it wants to overthrow
— such as the U.S. did against Iraq before invading it in
2003, and against Libya and Syria since 2011, and against
Venezuela since 2012, and against Ukraine since 2013, and in
all instances destroyed those countries, allegedly to
‘bring democracy and human rights and the rule of law, and
fight against corruption’ there (as if that were honestly
the intention)?
The phrase “police state” is used
propagandistically to denigrate a foreign nation that
one’s own government and its news-media don’t like and
might even be hoping to conquer by means of subversion, or
sanctions, or coup, or perhaps invasion by either the
aggressor’s own troops or else hiring mercenaries — such
as, for example, the U.S. did against Syria, hiring Al Qaeda and Kurdish
separatists as ‘rebels’ there, to bring
regime-change to Syria — all the while labelling as “a
police state” the government that the
aggressor is trying to overthrow. The aggressor-country
alleges itself to be attacking the target-country because
that target-country is ‘a police state’ and ‘violates
human rights’ — and the aggressor and its allies have
continued this ‘civil war’ against Syria ever since
2012, destroying Syria and refusing to pay even a cent for
restitution and reconstruction in Syria. They wreck the
‘police state’, and then abandon it. This is merely one
example of a ‘police state’, as that phrase is commonly
employed. This phrase is just a tool to ‘justify’ an
invasion. It’s a ‘justification’ for international
war-crimes.
So, there is a lot of hypocrisy in many
common usages, of the phrase “police state,” by the U.S.
and its allies; and one must always be aware of the
propagandistic usage of such phrases or words as “police
state,” and “regime,” because the speaker or writer
might actually represent that, more than does the government
which that person is propagandistically
criticizing.
However, objective usage of the phrase
“police state” is also possible (though far less
common). That usage would be based upon rankings, according
to reasonably reliable numerical measures, as being the
basis for an objective comparison of countries; and, so,
this will actually be done here — not the normal,
propagandistic, usage of the phrase “police state.” This
is about only actual police states.
The
measures that will be applied here will be two: (1) the
percentage of the population who are in prisons; and (2) the
percentage of the population who have been shot dead by
police during the latest tabulated year.
The ranking
of the world’s most powerful nation, USA, will be shown in
boldface in the listings below, because the
usage of the phrase “police state” is extraordinarily
common in this country to refer to lands that its
billionaires want to conquer and haven’t yet added
to their list of ‘allies’ or vassal nations (such as
Iran, China, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela), but our usage
for the phrase “police state” is different from that
propagandistic one; and, so, here it
is:
(1)
First are the rankings of the world’s
countries according to the numbers of
prisoners per million inhabitants (though Wikipedia
gives those numbers for 223 nations, only the top 12% —
only the top 26 nations, out of these 223, and which have
populations of over a million inhabitants — will be shown
here, because Wikipedia fails to list the nations in rank
order, and even fails to indicate their respective ranks at
all, and also because only the very worst 26 of the nations
might reasonably be considered to be “police
states”):
USA=655
ElSalvador=590
Turkmenistan=552
Thailand=531
Rwanda=511
Cuba-510
Panama=401
CostaRica=374
Brazil=348
Belarus=343
Russia=340
Nicaragua=332
Turkey=324
Uruguay=295
Namibia=295
Iran=294
Peru=278
SouthAfrica=275
Georgia=262
Taiwan=258
Swaziland/Eswatini=258
Colombia=246
Morocco=237
Israel=234
Malaysia=230
Honduras=229
So:
Those are the candidates to be considered as being
possibly “police states.” Conspicuously NOT
included as possible candidates here are (just to name some
of the ones that the nation which has the world’s highest
imprisonment-rate — America — claims or believes to be
‘police states’ (and the respective actual figure for
each of them): China (120), Vietnam (128), Yemen (53),
Zimbabwe (114), Syria (60), Iraq (126), Sudan (52),
Philippines (179), Hungary (173), Venezuela (178),
SaudiArabia (197), Qatar (53), Uzbekistan (150), Tajikistan
(120), Kyrgyzstan (161), Kazakhstan (156), Mexico (163),
Libya (139), Laos (130), Kenya (102), India (34), Palostan
(38), and Nigeria (36). None of those is even nearly
as much of a police state as America is. So: none of them is
a police state.
(2)
Here are the percentages of
the population who have been shot dead by police during the
latest tabulated year as shown at Wikipedia.
Killings by police per 10
million
residents:
Venezuela=1,830.2
ElSalvador=954.5
Syria=831.6
Nicaragua=522.7
Philippines=322.4
Brazil=276.2
Afghanistan=170.5
DominicanRepublic=131.8
SouthAfrica=76.9
CentralAfricanRepublic=64.4
Lesotho=63.8
BurkinaFaso=60.4
Burundi=53.9
DRC=47.8
Iraq=45.1
Nigeria=44.0
Kenya=43.5
Honduras=40.4
Iran=36.6
U.S.=34.8
Angola=34.7
Colombia=34.1
Mali=32.3
Sudan=32,1
Rwanda=31.0
Mexico=30.0
Bangladesh=28.3
Pakistan=25.2
Argentina=21.6
Egypt=21.2
Luxembourg=16.9
India=12.54
Canada=9.7
France=3.8
Indonesia=2.9
Belgium=2.6
Netherlands=2.3
N.Z.=2.1
Norway=1.9
Finland=1.8
Nepal=1.7
Australia=1.7
Germany=1.3
Portugal=1.0
Sweden=1.0
Taiwan=0.8
UK=0.5
Poland=0.5
Japan=0.2
Denmark,
Iceland & Switzerland=0
USA is the 20th in that
list of 60 countries, and may therefore reasonably be
considered to be in the top half, as having a higher than
normal percentage of its people killed annually by its local
police forces. The countries that score worse (higher) than
America on that list tend to be lands which have far
lower per-capita GDPs than America does, and are therefore
commonly called “third world” or “poor” countries by
Americans; and some of these countries — such as
Iran and Venezuela — are routinely reported in American
news-media as being police states. All of the industrialized
countries except the U.S. on that list have lower,
not higher, levels of killings by police, than
America does, and are therefore less appropriate to be
called a “police state” than the U.S. is. Of the nations
that U.S. media treat as being “civilized,” the
only one that is in the top half as having an
abnormally high frequency of police executing people who are
in their custody is America itself. This is
especially remarkable because America is also the country
which also has (and by far) the world’s highest percentage
of its people imprisoned behind bars.
So: not only
does the U.S. lock up a higher percentage of its population
than does any other country in the entire world, but it is
also the only wealthy country whose police forces execute an
abnormally high percentage of the country’s population.
Certainly, therefore, if the phrase “police state”
objectively means anything at all, then it applies to
the United States of America.
Virtually all of the
people whom the American criminal ‘justice’ system
imprisons and executes are poor people, who, if they have
violated any laws at all, have violated the types of
laws that apply especially against the very poorest of
Americans. (Only few Americans are in prison for convictions
of “white collar” or upper-class crimes.) Furthermore,
there appears to be a considerable amount of sheer racism
that is involved, because the ethnic skew of Americans who
become executed by police, and also of Americans who become
imprisoned, both skews are intensely against black people.
For example, on 31 December 2015, Britain’s Guardian
bannered “Young
black men killed by US police at highest rate in year of
1,134 deaths”, and reported that, “Young black men
were nine times more likely than other Americans to be
killed by police officers in 2015.” Most of those killings
by police were not processed to any conclusion by American
courts; but some were, and, of the 1,134 people killed by
police in 2015, only 23% (255 of the 1,034) became ruled by
a court as having been “justified.” The other 77% might
not have been (even according to American laws, which are obscenely
slanted in favor of police against anyone whom they arrest
or try to arrest). That news-article didn’t say how many,
if any, of the murderous police became convicted by any
court, but only 23% of these 1,034 cases even were evaluated
by a court as having not been murder by the police
officer. So, the situation in the United States seems to fit
very well a police state. It is non-accountability regarding
individuals who exercise the power of the government,
especially against the poor and
minorities.
Further about that non-accountability: I
headlined on 21 August 2020, at Strategic Culture, “U.S.
Judge Urges Supreme Court to End U.S. Police State It
Imposes”, and reported that, “A black U.S. District
Court Judge in Mississippi — one of America’s most
bigoted-against-Blacks states — issued on August 4th a 72-page
decision, Jamison
v. McClendon, containing a plea for the U.S. Supreme
Court to discontinue its imposition of police legal
immunity when police are being accused of — while on the
job — having violated Constitutionally guaranteed rights
of American citizens (such as by shooting or killing
innocent persons — such as George Floyd). Legally immune
police is what defines a police state; and, so, this was a
black judge’s request for the U.S. Supreme Court to end
the existing police state it imposes in America — to end a
police state that this judge attributed to (and which he
documented to have been produced by) choices that the U.S.
Supreme Court itself had made, and that only they
therefore can possibly reverse.”
The judge was
Carlton W. Reeves. I continued:
Reeves went on to
say, “Our courts [he was referring here to today’s U.S.
Supreme Court] have shielded a police officer who shot a
child while the officer was attempting to shoot the family
dog.117.” That was a
case which had been only recently decided by the
U.S. Supreme Court, on June 15th, and which decision by this
Supreme Court was ignored by the nation’s press, since
that decision exposes how totalitarian this country has
actually become. That Supreme Court decision, which
(especially because of the recent headlines about the George
Floyd murder case) should have been front-page news
throughout the country, was instead hidden from the public
by the ‘news’-media, though that decision — and the
others which were similarly dismissed that day on the very
same ground of “qualified immunity” of police officers
— probably constituted the most important decision of the
current Supreme Court term, and directly relate to the
George Floyd case. That June 15th decision (now virtually a
precedent protecting the murderer of George Floyd) ruled in
a slew of cases that had been brought against police
officers by their victims. This Supreme Court dismissed all
of them, on the basis of this absurd court-precedent, which
had been established in 1967,
and which was further defined in 1982.
It’s “qualified
immunity”, and asserts that police are allowed
to do anything to anyone unless Congress has passed a
specific law against what they did, and in that law, has
described and identified exactly the same circumstances that
the claimant against the police is claiming had existed —
each and every detail of it — in his/her specific case.
It’s a Supreme-Court precedent, for a police state
(unaccountable government-officials) to be
‘Constitutional’ in America, and this black judge in
Mississippi was here essentially begging the U.S. Supreme
Court to reverse the precedent that the 1967 Supreme Court
had established (and which had been reaffirmed and worsened
yet further, by the Supreme Court in 1982).
Prior
U.S. Supreme Court rulings had placed judge Reeves into the
position that, in the specific case he now was ruling upon,
he had to choose either to rule in favor of the U.S.
Constitution (and convict the cop) and then being virtually
certain to be overruled on appeal, or else ruling (as he now
was doing) in accord with the U.S. Supreme Court’s
existing precedents and against the U.S. Constitution (and
rule that cop ‘innocent’) and thereby being safe against
being overturned on appeal. He was pleading with today’s
Supreme Court: please change your precedent on this, so that
judges such as I won’t, in the future, have to choose
between either the Constitution or else being reversed on
appeal. He didn’t want to continue being merely a
cog in an evil (Constitution-violating) machine.
That
“evil” doesn’t consist ONLY of police murdering
innocent people. For example, the
framing of innocent persons is almost routine in the United
States and other dictatorships. Non-accountability is
the rule there, but, since police are near the bottom of the
power totem-pole, way below national leaders — and even
farther below the billionaires who control the government
— the news-media, even in dictatorships, are allowed to
expose it, if and when they find it. And doing so “helps
sell newspapers.” (That’s a safe way to do it, because
that type of ‘sensationalism’ poses no threat against
the billionaires.)
Russia isn’t even listed in
Wikipedia’s article on killings by
police per 10 million residents. However, Britain’s
Guardian headlined on 13 January 2016, “200
people died in Russian police custody in 2015, says
website”, and reported (apparently intending to make a
hostile impression against Russia’s Government, which is
something that both Britain’s and America’s billionaires
seem to be unanimously in favor of doing)
that,
Nearly 200 people are thought to have died in
police custody in Russia last year, according to a new
investigative website calling itself “Russian
Ebola”.
Founded by journalist Maria Berezina,
the site monitors deaths in police stations, pre-trial
detention facilities and related institutions, and publishes
the information online.
Berezina, who
previously worked at the Journalism Investigations Agency in
St Petersburg, said she first noticed the reports of
frequent deaths while working for the prominent Russian
opposition journalist Oleg Kashin.
She decided
to request data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and
said she had been shocked by the
statistics.
Each month, the official figures
showed that between nine and 29 people died at police
stations across the country, with very few cases ever
investigated further.
To convert those numbers
into killings by police per 10 million residents (and Russia
has 144 million, so 10 million is 7% of it) would be not
“nearly 200 people” but instead nearly 14 people, which
would place Russia into the category of Luxembourg, India,
and Canada, on that. America’s rate of killings by police
is about 2.5 times higher than Russia’s.
Usually, a
police state has a constitution, but if this is a written
constitution (which not all countries have — UK doesn’t,
and Israel doesn’t, for examples), then that nation’s
supreme court routinely finds ways to ‘interpret’ it so
as to ‘justify’ unConstitutional laws, and
unConstitutional actions by that regime’s officials; and
this is what has happened, which judge Carlton Reeves was
objecting to. But he was actually saying that the blame was
specifically against the U.S. Supreme Court itself, ever
since 1967, because that Court had created this not law, but
it was and is instead merely judicial ‘precedent’ — it
didn’t come from Congress. The U.S. Supreme Court had
itself created this (in effect) ’law’. Of course, when
it’s an unwritten ‘Constitution,’ then even overtly
the regime’s jurists are constantly ruling what that
‘Constitution’ is, and what it isn’t, and therefore an
unwritten constitution is like chewing gum, and can become
turned into virtually any shape at all, by the court. All
the judge needs to do is to cite existing precedents for it.
However, a written constitution doesn’t necessarily mean
that the government adheres to it. But an unwritten
constitution is virtually an invitation to
dictatorship.
Even a written constitution can be
totalitarian and yet still the regime calls itself a
“democracy.” Netherlands is a good example of this —
and thus it’s far more blatantly a dictatorship than
America is, because Holland’s Constitution (unlike
America’s) is itself ridiculous. That
Constitution’s five most important Articles
are:
Article 42
1.
The Government shall comprise the King and the
Ministers.
2. The Ministers, and not the King,
shall be responsible for acts of
government.
Article
43
The Prime Minister and the other
Ministers shall be appointed and dismissed by Royal
Decree.
Article
44
1. Ministries shall be established
by Royal Decree. They shall be headed by a
Minister.
Article
87
1. A Bill shall become an Act of
Parliament once it has been passed by the States General and
ratified by the King.
Article
117
1. Members of the judiciary
responsible for the administration of justice and the
Procurator General at the Supreme Court shall be appointed
for life by Royal Decree.
So: the King has total
veto power; he even appoints all Ministers and judges, and
yet absorbs none of the blame for any of their decisions,
because “The Ministers, and not the King, shall be
responsible for acts of government.” And, of course, the
judges alone are ‘responsible’ for their rulings. There
is no accountability. To call that a ‘democracy’ is
farcical. (And, yet, when a confidential NATO poll asked the
residents in 53 countries whether they agree with the
statement “My
country is democratic”, Netherlands ranked
13th-highest at 66% “Yes,” and America ranked
38th-highest at 48% “Yes”; so, even though Netherlands
isn’t a democracy even on paper, the Dutch population are
much more convinced that they live in a democracy than
Americans are. That is ridiculous on top of
ridiculous.)
Things are not what they are said to be.
However, Netherlands definitely is not a police state —
not by a long shot. Not every dictatorship is
also a police state. But America is both a
dictatorship and a police state.
In addition,
the United States spends around
half of the entire world’s money that is devoted to the
military, and this too is consistent with the U.S. being
a police state, even a global one — and very much in a
class by itself about being so.
All of this is
discussing actual police states, not employing
the propagandistic usage of that phrase.
Throwing
labels around (such as ‘police state’) is what
propagandists do. But social scientists cannot afford to.
Where do any such people (social scientists) even
exist, at all? The public drown in all the
propaganda. And this is how today’s dictatorships
function: by means of propaganda.
Issues about
government — what is mis-called “political science,”
even though there isn’t yet any scientific theory existing
in that field — are inextricably connected to issues about
criminal justice: police, courts, and laws. Following below
are two discussions of criminal justice, exemplifying this:
first, a reformist proposal, such as is accepted to be
published in a dictatorship; and, then, a much deeper
revolutionary proposal, which a dictatorship won’t allow
to become widely distributed (and so it never
was):
——
“Let’s
use Roger Stone’s case to fix our broken justice
system”
12 February 2020, BY
DAVID OSCAR MARKUS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR, criminal defense
attorney at Markus/Moss in Miami. He is a magna cum laude
graduate of Harvard Law School. He tries criminal cases and
argues criminal appeals throughout the
country.
… the larger problem, and the one
that no one is talking about, is that the system itself is
fatally flawed because it is set up for prosecutors and
judges to issue unjustifiably harsh sentences. Stone
shouldn’t be thrown in a cage for 7-9 years — and
neither should any other first-time non-violent offender.
…
Had Stone pleaded guilty, he would have
been looking at a sentence of closer to 24 months under the
guidelines. And had he met with prosecutors and cooperated,
he likely would have been sentenced to probation. Because he
had the audacity to go to trial, his sentence goes from
probation to 7-9 years. It’s no wonder that innocent
people plead guilty. It’s no wonder that trials are
vanishing. Before the sentencing guidelines …, 20 percent
of cases went to trial. Now it’s less than 3 percent. That
is pretty stark evidence that the trial tax [the
Government’s fee for a defendant’s choosing to go to
trial] has become too severe.
Lots of people
are rightly saying that Trump was wrong to jump in for his
friend and overrule the line prosecutors’ sentencing
recommendation. But what was wrong about it was not
overruling an overly harsh sentence. What was wrong about it
was that he did it for a friend instead of across the board.
We are in bad need of criminal justice reform. Let’s
overrule all of these insane sentencing recommendations for
first time non-violent offenders.
——
http://critcrim.org/files/MythsThatCauseCrime.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20161227132231/http://critcrim.org/files/MythsThatCauseCrime.pdf
Myths
that cause crime (a 185-page book) by
Harold E. Pepinsky & Paul Jesilow.
1992.
CONTENTS …
Myth 4:
“White-collar crime is nonviolent.” 54
Myth
5: “Regulatory agencies prevent white-collar crime.”
62
Myth 6: “Rich and poor are equal before
the law.” 78 …
54:
WHITE-COLLAR CRIME is violent crime. There is a common
belief shared by the general public and criminal-justice
personnel that white-collar crime is only economic. That is,
“crime in the suites” involves money being taken from a
group rather than some physical attack on a victim. The
treatment of white-collar crime as economic, nonviolent
crime is clearly evidenced in statements by high Reagan
administration officials and, more recently, by appointees
of Pres. George Bush, who define white-collar crime and
violent crime as two mutually exclusive behaviors. Then
Attorney General William F. Smith said in regard to Reagan’s
policy on crime, “Top priority … would be violent crime.
That would be closely followed by organized crime, by drug
enforcement, and by white-collar crime in due course.”
Smith’s ranking of crime priorities seems to say that
white-collar crime lacks a violent component, a position
unsupported by the evidence. Consider the following
corporate incidents.
Union
Carbide
On December 4, 1984, in Bhopal, India,
a large amount of a poisonous chemical gas leaked from a
storage tank at the Union Carbide India, Ltd., plant. The
chemical, known as methyl isocyanate (MIC), was used in the
production of pesticides. Touted the “world’s worst
industrial disaster,” the leak left approximately 2,000
people killed and between 30,000 and 40,000 people seriously
injured. …
79: THE RICH are
as violent and crooked as the poor, so why are they not
punished in equal proportion? Why are 48 percent of American
prisoners black? Why is it so rare to see rich, prominent
people sent to prison? Criminal justice officials, and
indeed many criminologists, say that people are largely
punished in proportion to the seriousness and quantity of
offenses they commit. How can they believe
this?
Looking for Crime
Suppose
that most of the officers of an urban police force were to
patrol the suites rather than the streets (leaving
sufficient cars on the streets to cover emergency calls).
… This pattern of enforcement would begin to ensure that
the crimes of rich and poor would be detected
equally.
——
The vast majority of
dictatorships, throughout history, have been controlled —
often behind the scenes — by the super-rich (especially in
fake ‘democracies’), who also control the
‘news’-media. That’s the reason why the latter, far
deeper, type of analysis (from Pepinsky and Jesilow) gets
squelched and is therefore not made available to the public
in a dictatorship. And it’s why anyone who would say
merely “Let’s overrule all of these insane sentencing
recommendations for first time non-violent offenders”
can get plenty of publicity, and is acceptable to teach in
places such as Harvard — the world’s
most-billionaire-endowed university. But what is taught by
individuals such as professors Pepinsky and Jesilow is
not.
It’s not merely a dictatorship: it’s one that
is also a police state (even a global police
state).
On 22 June 2020, Britain’s Guardian
headlined “‘State-sanctioned
violence’: US police fail to meet basic human rights
standards”, and reported on a study
that had just been published by the Law School at the
University of Chicago, which examined 20 big-city U.S.
police departments, and it found that “not one met the
minimum standards established by human rights law.”
Furthermore, “Across Europe, policing policies are much
more closely aligned with human rights directives.” The
U.S. Government, at its federal level, was found to be
grossly deficient in the very same measures, of
accountability and rule-of-law, that that Government
pontificates against, issues sanctions against, and invades.
(Yet those European governments still ally with the U.S.
regime, instead of condemn its aggressions.)
The U.S.
actually is a “police state.” It is certainly the
world’s leading police
state.
—————
Investigative historian
Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re
Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic
Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created
Christianity.
—
Source: www.scoop.co.nz
