The State of the Police State
From by Sunny Sun-Downer
May 12, 2010“...Cop’s face is filled with hate,
Heavens above he’s on a street called Love-
When will they ever learn?”
-from San Franciscan Nights by Eric Burdon, Victor Briggs
In this 40th anniversary month of the Kent State National Guard’s shooting of un-armed Viet Nam war protestors (resulting in 4 students dead and dozens more wounded) here on American soil, I’m compelled here to comment on a couple aspects of the current state of affairs regarding police harassment from Arizona to Desert Hot Springs, California. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio are proud of their new controversial Immigration Law that essentially turns Arizona Police into ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Officers on top of their already established duties in order to, according to the Governor, “fight the Mexican drug cartels.”
Of course, they are dealing now with the blowback as Latino and civil rights groups (and ironically, even an Arizona Senator) are calling for a boycott of everything from tourism and convention booking to attending the Arizona Diamondbacks and Phoenix Suns games. Even a boycott of Phoenix-based US Air Airlines has been called, while ironically, New York-based “Arizona Tea Co.” has been calling for mainstream media to inform people that they’re not based in Arizona! (Comedian George Lopez briefly made the drink one of his topics by joking that “I went to buy an Arizona Iced Tea - and they asked me for my documentation...”) There’s no word yet from J.C. Penny’s Plano, Texas-based “Arizona Jeans.” (I think they’re lying lower than a Diamondback rattlesnake!)
But seriously, folks- I have a better idea: Legalize the victimless crime of drug use by adults and you’ll bankrupt the “Mexican” cartels, and the next cartel after them. I mean, how many billions of our tax dollars have been wasted in this ridiculous “Drug War” since it’s inception by the Hearst and Du Pont Corporations in 1937, and how many people’s lives has it ruined? It has definitely filled police and prison coffers for decades and that is the main reason the beast is still rearing its ugly head.
From Wikipidea: “In 1937, the Marijuana Transfer Tax Act was passed in order to destroy the hemp industry, largely as a result of the efforts of the wealthy businessmen Andrew Mellon, Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family. With the invention of the decorticator, hemp became a very cheap substitute for the paper pulp that was used in the newspaper industry. Hearst felt that this was a threat to his extensive timber holdings (and the great job he was doing of destroying America’s old growth forests).
Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury at the time and the wealthiest man in America, had invested heavily in the Du Pont family’s new synthetic petroleum-based nylon fiber, which was being out-competed by hemp… In 1994, it was reported that the “War on Drugs” results in the incarceration of approximately one million Americans each year. Of the related drug arrests, about 225,000 are for possession of cannabis- the fourth most common cause of arrest in the United States.” (It’s interesting that it was approximately that year in California that spending on prisons surpassed that of education and since that time spending for incarceration has multiplied immensely higher).
More recently, in 2008, 1.5 million Americans were arrested for drug offenses. 500,000 were imprisoned.” OK, I know I’m mostly focusing on cannabis here, but drug prohibition in general makes as much sense as “a screen door on a submarine!” As far as drug addiction goes, it should be treated as a disease, not a crime.
Now, getting back to Arizona’s Immigration Law, the biggest problem opponents have with it is that it appears that it will create the first “Legal Racial Profiling” in our once-great nation.
Glen Wasserstein, a partner with the Immigration Law Group in Washington, says “There’s no distinguishing characteristic between an undocumented alien and someone who’s here legally. How do you possibly have reasonable suspicion? Everybody of Hispanic orientation will be scrutinized.”
Thus, if a police officer suspects a Latino person of being an undocumented immigrant, he or she can lock that person up. Day laborers are targeted. It will be illegal to accept (or make) a job offer in some roadside settings, and even makes “communication by a gesture or a nod” in accepting a work offer an arrest-able offense. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, Ariz., and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called for a boycott of his own state even before the signing of the controversial law, and said, “It’s a license to racially profile. It creates a second-class status for primarily Latinos and people of color in the state of Arizona. Arizona’s been the petri dish for these kinds of harsh, racist initiatives.”
Meanwhile, “back at the ranch,” I’m not going to say that the new and improved Desert Hot Springs Police Department racially profiles, but I think Brewer and Arpaio would be proud of them for their stepped up harassment of its citizens. I see it almost daily with people being harassed for doing nothing more than such things as waiting peacefully for the bus.
Recently I had a One Year Anniversary Celebration for my Healing Arts Center. Some of my musician friends were harassed out back by three patrol units, claiming they had to make sure my friends weren’t “Al Kite-ah” as the one officer’s drawn out accent claimed. Although the officer didn’t say anything that indicated he was racially profiling my Latino friend, he commented that my friend was “a poster boy for marijuana,” referring to his long Bob Marley-like dread-locks. Religious (as in Rastafarian) discrimination might be closer. So then, while waiting for results of the “Al Kite-ah” I.D. check, he said “What would my K-9 find if he were to go through your car?”
My friend responded, “What would be your probable cause?”
The officer then took on a “macho tone,” and claimed, “All I have to do is walk him around your car, and if he indicates in any way that he detects something illegal (that “gesture or a nod” thing again)- THAT’S my probable cause…”
He then gets in my friend’s face and aggressively says, “So do you want to play THAT game?” So what is the probable cause for his walking the drug/bomb sniffing shepherd around the car in the first place? Oh yeah, that religious discrimination thing. Never mind that my friend had a medical cannabis doctor’s referral, which was never brought up to the offensive oppressors, as my musician-amigos were found to be “terrorist-classification free” and released back into the public.
We all know that good ol’ “Desperate Hot Springs” is going through some “cleaning up” as it is transformed into the new “Vortex-Marketing-City,” but I would like to suggest that the cops cultivate respect for human rights in their training and that the new cameras sprouting up around the city (at $25,000 apiece), with their new Chinese-developed “facial recognition technology” (originally developed to spy on their citizens, dissidents and Tibetans), be trained on themselves and all DHS City Council members as well (including during their “backroom sessions”).
Let’s not forget that two Desert Hot Springs officers are currently suspended and under criminal investigation for using their Taser Guns on arrested and handcuffed individuals, that we still haven’t heard the outcome of the DHS Police shooting of local un-armed teenager Travis Jonsrud just over a year ago, or of the more recent fatal shooting of someone armed only with a pizza.
Most of all I want to remind everyone what used to be the city’s slogan up to just a few years ago, as seen on the side of the police cars: “DHS- Desire Heart Spirit!” I vote that we re-introduce that slogan back into this “Vortex-City-of-So-Much-Human-Potential!” Peace in and out!
Read more... Paul Krassner's Kent State Anniversary Blues
Note: COP “Community Oriented Policing” is from Art Kunkin’s August 1, 1969 Los Angeles Free Press.
-Sunny Sun-Downer can be contacted at conchustimes@yahoo.com and all his articles can be found at www.conchustimes.blogspot.com 
