| | I note that "24" has apparently declined in popularity, and the pollsters are saying that it has to do with the use and implied condoning of torture practiced by the hero of the series, which for some reason appears to be on the decline in popularity as well. (I only watched a little of the original production and, for the past several years, have rarely watched any TV.)
By the late '70's, I had had several opportunities to observe how corrupt many police are. They may have always been that way, but my impression was that the drug enforcement ramp up to the official War on Drugs made the corruption enormously worse. The top drug enforcement officer in the little town where I went to college had reportedly been hired on the cheap after he was fired for selling drugs he had confiscated while working as a narc in a nearby big city. He played poker every Friday with the number one pot supplier for the campus - and always won.
One night I stopped by the local campus speed dealer to purchase amphetamines for my finals cramming and while we were dickering there was a knock at the door and the dealer told me to wait in an adjoining room and stay silent. Then I overheard him in cheerful conversation with some man who was clearly buying 8mm porno films, so I assumed everything was ok and stepped back into the room. Both men reacted in shock to my entrance and the customer hurried furtively out. I then found out that the customer was this same head of the narc squad for the town.
Even after many such experiences, I was still operating under the assumption that most cops are basically honest. Then I put on an income tax protest in Long Beach in front of the Post Office and several banks. A week later I was arrested for "Loitering with Children," which most people took as somehow implying that I was a child-molestor (J. Aromos ALERT, ALERT, ALERT!!!), although the law was actually targetted at drug dealers operating on high-school campuses.
There were no victims alleged or named and no specific acts. The only "evidence" was that local park officials had told investigators that they had seen me in the park with a camera when children were present - which was virtually 100% of the daytime. After a year, and many thousands of dollars lost in legal fees, and tens of thousands more lost in a land deal that I couldn't follow through on because I couldn't leave the country pending trial, and the deliberate and systematic destruction, almost certainly by the police, of the life of a teenage girl who was in a position to testify on my behalf, all charges were dropped and the judge wrote on the verdict "DEFENDANT EXONERATED."
Meaning, for those such as John, who may be ignorant of basic legal terminology (among other things), that the court itself found me not just "not guilty," but actually "innocent." Almost thirty years later, however, I still occasionally run into people who have heard from one or another of my enemies in the libertarian movement - one of them an actual child-molestor who I helped to expose and others who hated anyone who defended Ayn Rand - that I am a "convicted child molestor."
In one case, a local libertarian who had heard the rumor from a friend of the actual child molestor I had helped to expose - who is, at last notice, permanently incarcerated by the State of California in an institution for the criminally insane - told me that before he would associate with me he wanted to see "proof that I was not a child-molestor." Needless to say, I decided not to associate with him.
I note that although one is "presumed innocent" for the purposes of a trial, one thing that most people do not "get" is that the police grant no credence to that supposition. While I was not "water-boarded" at the Long Beach City Jail during the one night I spent there, the one phone call I was allowed was via this enormous, ancient box, about 7 feet tall and 3 feet deep and wide, dangling a heavy duty power cord, which was rolled over to the bars of the "holding tank," which contained at the time, myself, a trustee who pretended to be one of the arrestees, and about 30 guys who had been arrested as "Johns" in a police sting opperation.
I.e., from an objectivist or libertarian standard, the entire holding cell - except for the trustee perhaps - was filled with people who were innocent to begin with, as the laws were not even valid and certainly would not exist in an objectivist or libertarian limited government, any more than laws against particular religious or philosophical beliefs would be tolerated.
The phone was somehow running 110V AC house current and was not grounded relative to the bars. The only insulation was a thick, grey paint which had worn off in various spots - especially those near to where the phone was typically dragged, where the inmates had to reach through. Thus, one would see an inmate trying to carry on a conversation with family or attorney, and suddenly the man would fling himself ten feet back in a spazm as he was hit with a full surge of house current. Then, amid hoots of laughter from the deputies in attendance, the man would pick himself up off the floor and try to continue.
A few real life experiences like that will probably undo most of the endless propaganda one sees in the form of cop shows on TV about the poor heroic cops pretecting us from all those nasty criminals. Not that there aren't real criminals. Just that the cops are not generally distinguishable from them.
(Edited by Phil Osborn on 3/15, 12:27pm)
|
|
