Re. the case of Mark Shurtleff: When they're on the butt end, militant right-wingers may retreat into a "civil liberties crouch"

Former Utah AG Mark Shurtleff
"Aggressive police raids for thee, but not for me"

"It’s swell that [former Utah AG Mark] Shurtleff now sees the danger of excessively aggressive police raids, at least when they’re waged on people like him. It’s swell that he could see the potential medicinal benefits of marijuana for sick people, at least once he got sick. What would be nice is if politicians like Shurtleff had the capacity to empathize with the victims of these policies without needing to first become victims themselves."

-- Radley Balko, in a washingtonpost.com post,
"Aggressive police raids for thee, but not for me"

by Ken

The last time we checked in with Radley Balko, "who blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post," in April ("Does "fact-checking" done by idiots and ideologues count as, you know, fact-checking?") he was taking a fascinating look at what can happen in the name of "fact-checking" when the facts being checked run up against actual facts that important chunks of the establishment, or rather their media stooges, don't wish to acknowledge the actual facts and prefer the fairy-dust kind.

The specific instance was a crock-of-doody ad placed by the Republican Governors Association against SC Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Vincent Sheheen accusing him of "protecting criminals," based on the identity of (obviously unpopular) defendants he defended as an attorney. It was cheap political grandstanding done by America-hating idiots who either aren't aware that our judicial system depends on every defendant having access to a decent defense or just don't believe it. (Probably what they believe is that, especially in the cases of crimes that offend public sensibilities, we know who's guilty, sweetheart, and anyone who sticks up for scum like that deserves the same treatment.

Where this really became really interesting for Radley, who after all titled his post "When fact-checking fails," was in the failure of the "fact-checking" effort by a local radio station whose "fact-checkers" came up with the bogus conclusion that right-wing pressure interests would want them to come up with. (I don't rule out a role here for sheer incompetence, but the pattern of such ideologically based fact-phonying argues for something more.)

Now Radley is reporting another of those astonishing coincidences that look more like a way of dishonest living for right-wing pressure interests. His post today is called "Aggressive police raids for thee, but not for me," concerns right-wing loon Mark Shurtleff, who served three terms (2001-13) as Utah State Attorney General, a service that I think can be fairly characterized as both hard-core fascist and as, well, "messy" (from what might most sympathetically be called the "you-have-to-crack-eggs-to-make-an-omelet school" of messiness) and during that time was a fanatical proponent of kamikaze-style law-enforcement raids of subjects he deemed bad guys.

Notably [links onsite],

he set up a unit called the Statewide Enforcement of Crimes by Undocumented Residents Strike Force — or the SECURE Strike Force for short. The unit sent armed police to raid businesses that were suspected of employing undocumented workers, suspected fake ID makers and suspected human traffickers. (To his credit, Shurtleff did actually support fairer immigration policies while in office.)

Some of the unit’s targets have been legitimately dangerous people. Others, like suspected copyright violators, probably weren’t. A video of one of these raids that I posted a couple of years ago (no longer available online) showed armed SECURE Strike Force cops breaking down the door to a home to serve a warrant for pirated CDs. (They did at least knock first.)

Shurtleff showed consistently and pointedly little interest in abuses of the rights of anyone who offended his far-far-right ideological vision, and --

was also in office during a period that saw a dramatic increase in the use of SWAT teams and the militarization of domestic police in Utah. In 2000, he opposed an important ballot initiative to rein in the abuse of civil asset forfeiture, the absurd legal doctrine that lets police seize and keep cash, cars, houses and other property without ever convicting the owner of a crime. The practice has been a major funder of police militarization.

Now, however, it's Shurtleff and his successor as Utah AG, John Swallow, who are at the butt end of the law-enforcement rifle. They're under investigation for election fraud, and the investigation led to raids on both their homes.

[Shurtleff] wasn’t in the house at the time, but his son and daughter were. And now that it has affected members of his family, Shurtleff has taken an active interest in the growth of aggressive police tactics.

Here Radley quotes from a Salt Lake Tribune report by Robert Gehrke, "Shurtleff blasts agents' 'Dirty Harry' tactics":

Former Attorney General Mark Shurtleff on Tuesday accused law enforcement agents of using “Dirty Harry” tactics when they searched his house, breaking through his door and pointing automatic weapons at his children who were home at the time.

Agents with the Utah Department of Public Safety and the FBI executed search warrants Monday evening on the Sandy homes of Shurtleff and his handpicked successor, John Swallow, as part of a sweeping, months-long criminal investigation that appears to be nearing its end.

“It was way overboard, a horrific abuse, an extremely improper abuse of force, given the nature of the alleged charge, the fact there were minors in the home — there was no reason for it,” Shurtleff, who is in Washington, D.C., told The Salt Lake Tribune …

Shurtleff lashed out Tuesday at the conduct of investigators who searched his home Monday evening. He said the raid traumatized his teenage daughter, who was in the bathroom when officers in body armor pounded on the door and ordered her out, a laser sight pointed at her chest.

“To go in and point a gun at 5-foot-3, 117-pound minor who was coming out of the bathroom, for crying out loud, is absolutely wrong,” Shurtleff said. “How do you get that out of the mind of a 17-year-old who is innocent of everything. I don’t care what you think of me or what you’re looking at me about.”

"It’s amazing how quickly a politician can change his position when he becomes a victim of aggressive government policies he previously supported"

The above is how Radley began this post. Later he points out that the onetime mad-dog scourge of drug users, who apparently still believes that pretty much any enforcement technique used against drug traffickers is A-OK, eventually showed himself capable of a tiny bit of nuance on the subject:

This isn’t the first time Shurtleff has changed his mind about a policy issue when that issue began to affect him personally. In a 2011 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, Shurtleff said that he was “tempted” to use medical marijuana to treat his nausea while undergoing cancer treatment and that the whole experience had made him aware of the drug’s benefits — although even that wasn’t enough to inspire him to push for concrete legislation.

There's a pattern here, and it's a pattern of Mark Shurtleff not getting it.

Which leads Radley to the conclusion I've put up top. Let's just listen once again to the very last sentence:

"What would be nice is if politicians like Shurtleff had the capacity to empathize with the victims of these policies without needing to first become victims themselves."

Yeah, I think that would be nice.

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