A couple or four decades ago, I was arrested during a traffic stop. It was bullshit from the beginning. I had made a small set of "jumper cables" (speaker wire and alligator clips) for my kickstart only motorcycle. I stashed them under the seat. That was a mistake.
The exposed metal bits made contact with a relay and would cause the engine to die. The contact was not secure so, sometimes it worked fine until I hit a bump or braked hard or accelerated hard.
I was leaving a friend's house after the dinner that was my reward for helping pick up heavy stuff and move it around. The bike died on me a couple of times so I pulled over to the side and tried successfully to identify and fix the problem. I was putting the seat back on when the cop car pulled in behind me and fired up the blue lights. No siren was needed as I was already pulled over and stopped.
The officer seemed sure he was dealing with Al Capone. Field sobriety test, breathalyzer, nightstick to the kidneys while being compliant, I experienced all of it and passed the tests.
It was a Friday. Since I had passed the tests, I was arrested, charged with reckless driving, and taken to jail where I spent the weekend.
After getting out of jail on Monday, I got a lawyer and eventually we went to court where the judge essentially stated that it was all bullshit and dismissed the case. All's well that ends well, right? Yea, no. The world is somewhat more complicated than that.
You see, several things did not happen, either at all or not to the best of my knowledge. The first thing that didn't happen is that no one apologized for my wrongful arrest. No one offered to remunerate this veteran of the USN who joined during an active war for the almost 3 full days of me being denied access to my stuff, my life, my freedom. To the best of my knowledge, neither the arresting officer nor his nightstick wielding buddy were disciplined or held accountable in any meaningful way. Hell, I even had to provide my own transportation from jail and to court.
You might be thinking that I appear to have suffered no permanent physical injury or really, any other permanent injury so, after several decades I should probably just let it go. That is exactly what would have happened in a slightly different world.
In the last year in particular, there have been numerous incidents of individuals being detained without cause. There have been individuals whose misdemeanors were treated like violent felonies. Decorated non-citizen veterans of our military are among those who have been abused. The non-citizen family members of some veterans who are citizens are among those who have been abused. The abuses would be embarrassing to us even if the allegations were valid given the verbiage of our Constitution.
Now, I am not what you call an important man. An awful lot of things happen without being run by me first. I'm fine with that. Still, the fact that a news junkie with time on his hands has not heard one thing about apologies or any fiscal acceptance of accountability is telling. This lack of accountability is the foundation upon which an entire panoply of LEO abuses are built.
Though I have not ever been in a prison, here or anywhere else, I have no trouble understanding that they are bad places. They are not made better by being located in developing or 3rd world nations. But then, the cruelty of the prisons, the cruelty of the LEOs, the abuses of humans by humans in authority are the direct and predictable result of the lack of consistently imposed accountability. You might think that since you are not Black or Hispanic, that since you are legally here and following the law, that since you are a patriotic citizen, you or your immigrant wife or your children are safe. I can guarantee that a significant percentage of those abused in the relatively recent past had similar thoughts. It would appear that those thoughts suck as armor.
Something must be done to correct this. I rather seriously doubt the LEOs with abusive tendencies will be deterred by me being taxed more to pay their fines or for the care of those abused. The abusers will need to experience the punishment - whether it is financial or something else - directly. If they have been trained to do things differently than what the published rules say is acceptable, then their training officers need to be held accountable as well. None of this will happen as long as you are or appear to be accepting of the status quo. You will have to contact your political representatives electronically or in person. You will need to go to meetings and protests. You will need to have facts memorized.
You don't have to get out and protest to protect me. You don't have to go vote to protect immigrants. You need to do those things to protect yourself and your loved ones. Those who abuse the power will keep doing it even if every Black and Hispanic leaves the nation tomorrow. If you would not be happy being treated the way you are seeing people treated on television night after night, now is the time for you to take action.
We call out unforced errors in sports. I think we need to make a waaaaaaay bigger deal of them when made by anyone being paid with public funds.
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