Huh? You mean cops "don't pay attention to the First Amendment"? It's shocking, Rosemarie, but I'm afraid no, not so much

Plus: An Alexander Cockburn postscript

from the Inwod Community Group's Facebook page

"To lump all cops as killers is wrong."

-- former cop John Garvey, on the same Facebook page

"While police have always considered themselves above the common herd, and have always looked after themselves first and civilians second, it's very clear that police today are much worse in this regard than they were 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, and 10 years before that. Police are well aware that they have near full immunity: they can beat people, kill people, plant evidence on people and they will, in most cases, get away with it. Even if caught on tape, the worst punishment is likely to be paid suspension."

-- Ian Welsh, in a blogpost of "scattered thoughts
on cops, particularly cops in the US"

"What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?”

-- Invwood resident Rosemarie Kliegman, on the Facebook page

by Ken

First, some context for the above Facebook quotes, for those who who haven't been following the story. (I don't know how much play it has gotten outside NYC -- or in the city, for that matter.) it concerns a mural painted on the wall of a building in Inwood, Manhattan's far-northern neighborhood by artist Alan Ket. As Carla Zanoni recalls in a follow-up piece today on the invaluable DNAinfo.com, "Inwood Artist Told His Controversial Work Needs NYPD Clearance" (links onsite).

Ket’s painting, that called police "murderers," was removed by a pair of plainclothes officers who arrived at the New Edition Cleaners at 4929 Broadway at 11 a.m. Tuesday armed with buckets of black paint, roller brushes and drop cloths.

They were carrying out orders issued by the 34th Precinct, according to police sources.

The mural, which showed the word "murderers" painted over tombstones and coffins with epitaph names that included the NYPD, the Environmental Protection Agency and global corporations including Halliburton and Monsanto, had been painted on the wall of the business with the permission of its owners.

[Note: DNAinfo.com has a slide show of photos.]

Before we continue, we ought perhaps to clarify the "permission" issues, from Carla Zanoni's own report (a follow-up to her report yesterday, "Cops Paint Over Inwood Mural That Depicts NYPD as 'Murderers'"), from which I gather that for at least five years Alan Ket had gotten year-by-year permission from the owners to paint some sort of mural. Now, Zanoni tells us:

The building’s landlord, who would only identify himself as Victor, said he is willing to work with Ket on replacing the mural, but would no longer allow him to spray paint just any image on the wall.

"They were nice paintings before, but the new painting was very offensive," he said. "I don't agree with it and neither do the police."

One is tempted to crack some sort of joke about everyone being a critic. After all, "Victor" presumably would have had the right to approve of what Ket painted on his wall, if he had chosen to do so, which it seems he didn't. But then there's that sentence: "I don't agree with it and neither do the police."

Where do the police come into having opinions about murals painted on private property? Opinions that they proceed to back up by unilaterally painting over the painting. And by the way, in the matter of "Victor" being "willing to work with Ket on replacing the mural,"

After the incident, Ket, who has had permission to paint murals on the wall for at least five years, said he asked the landlord if he could paint the word “censored” on the coat of glossy black paint that now covers his original art.

The landlord said no.

“It’s a little bit crazy,” Ket said.

"This wall is being censored by the NYPD," Ket said to Carla Zanoni. Of his conversation with "Victor," he said, "I told him I found it kind of strange he would feel he needed to get approval or permission or run anything by the police, but he said that he doesn’t want any problems with the police, that the police are a bit threatening."

Zanoni concludes her report today:

Inwood residents said they were appalled at the removal of the mural and said aesthetic or political preference should not weigh in on whether the mural remained or was removed.

"If they had to censor something, why didn't they just cross out the tomb stone with NYPD," wrote Inwood resident Rosemarie Kliegman on Facebook's Inwood Community Group.

"What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?” she continued.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to the mural’s removal, not all Inwood residents opposed the NYPD's action.

“Let's just say that nobody would like a wall painted about them and their job, that is a bold lie,” wrote John Garvey on the site, identifying himself as a former cop.

"To lump all cops as killers is wrong."

This last sentence, you'll note is the quote I tacked to the top of this post. "To lump all cops as killers is wrong." Am I the only one who's kind of astonished at the way this ex-cop couches his indignation? "So the "bold lie," apparently is "to lump all cops as killers." Left open is the question of exactly what percentage of cops are killers. Yikes!

Carla Zanoni's original report must have been lodged in the back of my head when I read the new post from Ian Welsh from which I've taken the second quote at the top of this post. If "police are well aware that they have near full immunity," that "they can beat people, kill people, plant evidence on people and they will, in most cases, get away with it," then I don't imagine they would even give a second thought about painting over a mural. Which brings me to the final quote up top, in which Rosemarie Kliegman asks, as I would like to think any patriotic American would, "What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? [emphasis added]" And then she asks, "They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?"

You're probably laughing hysterically by now. Is Rosemarie on medication of some sort? Cops pay attention to the First Amendment? However, I would like to think, at least for this brief moment, that her response is exactly what we would hope any true-blue American's would be. Can it possibly be that cops aren't answerable to the most basic laws of the land?

I don't know how to break this to you, Rosemarie, but no, they don't pay attention to the First Amendment, or to any other fussy old rules they can get away with not paying attention to. As Ian Welsh writes, "The jokes about the crime of 'disrespect of cop' aren't jokes; it is very close to the most dangerous thing you can do around a cop, as any refusal to obey an order can be cause for a beating and a free-standing resisting arrest warrant (something which used to be impossible, but is now common)."

Ian is writing specifically here of the "thug" personality that's so common in Western security forces, which he distinguishes from the "ideologue" type once common, for example, in the old KGB, which brought both the advantages and the disadvantages" of "believers" -- the disadvantage he cites being: "They generally don't get off on violence and cruelty, though they do it when necessary."

Thugs, on the other hand, want a license to allow them to be brutal and cruel. They like power and they like to be able to tell other people what to do, to force them to obey and even to grovel. The jokes about the crime of "disrespect of cop" aren't jokes, it is very close to the most dangerous thing you can do around a cop, as any refusal to obey an order can be cause for a beating and a free-standing resisting arrest warrant (something which used to be impossible, but is now common.)

The problem with thugs is that they really aren't that discriminate. They like hurting people and forcing people to grovel and under the right circumstances they'd be just as happy to do it to their lords and masters as to dirty hippies. From the point of view of a real reformer, security forces, whether police or otherwise, are a huge problem. They're trained in violence, they like it and they want to keep doing it. If you fire them or lay them off in large numbers, they will turn their skill in violence against you. Mind, they are actually lousy at fighting anyone who can fight back, paramilitarized police are generally no threat to the real military, but they are excellent at terrorizing civilians.

In fairness, I would suggest that the constitutional protections against police misconduct defined by the Warren Court really did, in many ways, force police to do their jobs better -- and I do mean not just more correctly, but better. If you can't just beat a confession out of the first schlepp you pick up, you may actually be forced to solve the crime, and back up your arrest with legitimate evidence that can prove the case to a jury.

Of course the Rehnquist and Warren courts have been eroding those constitutional protections as fast as their Constitution-overwriting crayons will allow. And I suspect there's a lot of pent-up rage at the shilly-shalliers' refusal to just let cops be cops, not to mention the abusive reality that these days all the riffraff have cameras and you never know when you're going to wind up on YouTube. I suspect that a lot of this added rage is being released in all the extra-constitutional methodologies that have become part of modern police-state enforcement.

That enforcement isn't necessarily terribly efficient, however, and certainly doesn't come cheap, as we've found out when we get glimpses of the tab for the NYPD's repression of the Occupy movement, acting basically as the hired goons of the .01 Percent, except without the "hiring" part, since the elites got their dirty work done at taxpayer expense.

Ian notes:

One of the most notable things, to me, about the police, is that as they have become more and more "militarized" they have become more and more ineffective. It now takes 10 car loads to quell disturbances that 30 years ago a single car could have handled. I was recently treated to the spectacle of less than 50 Occupy Toronto protestors marching, surrounded on all three sides by police, a squad of horse-cops following and a bunch of paddy wagons in addition. Dealing with any sort of real crowds always involves bussing in cops from hundreds of miles around, and their reactions in crisis are slow, confused and yes, brutal.

What's more, "the police have also been corrupted,"

especially in the US, by seizure laws in general and the war on drugs in particular. The ability to seize cash and property without proving an underlying crime has turned the police into a crime syndicate themselves. I have friends who won't travel through entire US states because police systematically target out-of-state travelers in order to seize their money and property.

"All of this," he continues, "is before we get to the problem of prison guards."

Violent, brutal and numerous, they are politically powerful, their industry is the mainstay of entire towns, and they can't be laid off in large numbers for the same reason you can't get rid of police who are thugs, because they are trained in violence and cruelty and it can be reasonably expected that jobless ex-prison guards in large numbers will engage in violence.

"This problem is an ancient one," he says:

Teach men to be violent, and to enjoy cruelty, give them license and you become as much their prisoner as their master. For now the police are willing to do their master's bidding, and brutalize the citizenry, because they enjoy it and see citizens as lesser forms of life, who need to be taught their power. But they are a danger to everyone, their masters and anyone who would fix society alike, for there is no road to fixing many nations which does not include de-militarizing the police. And that removal of their power and license to abuse is something they are unlikely to tolerate.

I guess we can take comfort in the now-established reality that not all cops are killers.

I might just add that I hate this for the added reason that I would really and truly like to believe in the mission of the police as upholders of our common well-being. It's an unfortunate reality that not all citizens accept the responsibility of behaving in civilized fashion, and we necessarily have laws to protect our society, and it sure would be swell if that's what our men and women in blue were doing. Sometimes, of course, it is, and at those times we can believe in rubrics like New York's Finest. Too much of the time, though, it isn't. I can understand that many cops' feelings are hurt when they're called stuff like "pigs" and "fascist enforcers." Regrettably, when the cause is fascist-enforcer-type behavior, the name-calling truly isn't the problem.


AN ALEXANDER COCKBURN POSTSCRIPT

Drat the luck! I had finished the above post when I stumbled across Hendrik Hertzberg's new newyorker.com blogpost, "Alexander the Great (and the Grating)." The other day I grappled with my wildly conflicted feelings about the late Alexander Cockburn. I could easily have gotten a post out of it -- and may yet. Hertzberg has all sorts of inside knowledge of personalities and issues which I didn't and don't, and so I'm poorly equipped to evaluate his analysis of the "bad" Alex, much of it having to do with the legacy of his father. (By the way, I'd like to think HH already regrets putting into print the clever-sounding but screamingly idiotic notion of him as "John the Baptist to Christopher [Hitchens]'s Jesus," not to mention his preoccupation with their looks.)

I'm sure that some of what Hertzberg has to say about the bad side has validity, and the clear understanding that there were both good and bad sides comforts me in my helpless confusion at to what to make of the man and his legacy. More important, though, at least to me, is HH's description of the "good" Alex.

Within his ideological comfort zone, and when none of his tripwires had been tripped, Alexander Cockburn did a prodigious amount of valuable journalism. Among other services, he practically invented modern press criticism, now (unlike the press itself) a thriving industry. His crackling "Press Clips" column was the perfect vehicle for his talents, his insights, and his prejudices. It was the first thing thousands of readers, me included, turned to in the vital Voice of the seventies, and I don't remember it ever disappointing, even on those occasions, all too rare, when he took a swipe at me. After all, as Katrina vanden Heuvel, Alex's long-suffering editor at The Nation, said in her statement after his death, "It was an honor, in many ways, to join the growing list of people Alexander would attack with his pen."

Let me also pass along this parenthetical note from HH: "Among the many Cockburn tributes and anti-tributes, I’d especially recommend those of Michael Tomasky and Harold Meyerson. Jack Shafer’s is worth a read, too." I haven't read them yet, but don't let me stop you. (Okay, since writing this, I've read all three pieces. You do what you want.)

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