The Low

I find my blood pressure spikes every time I read stories of people like Shawn Glans, the bully thug in a police uniform who assaulted & battered a citizen unaware he was being recorded.

Official United States Bully, Shawn Glans

You can imagine how I felt reading yet another similar story, this time from Alabama. A Police Department Training officer named Eric Parker and his trainee came across a supposedly suspicious person whose crime started and ended there. I have yet to see where it is a crime to be a suspicious person in any ordinance or edict in any city or state.

"Found guilty of being a suspicious person, Abraham Lincoln of Springfield Illinois was today sentenced to two months' jail time. He was rigorously reprimanded & the accused promised never to be suspicious in the future."

Eric Parker will end up costing the citizens of his city millions of dollars, but worse, he will solidify the visceral hatred of the police that ordinary citizens continue to harbor. The chief of police stated that Parker did not exhibit the "high standards" of that city's police department. Sure, chief, that's why he's a training officer.

How dare you be a suspicious person!

If you don't know, (now ex-) Officer Eric Parker accosted an Indian grandfather who had been reported as suspicious. The law requires that a crime be currently & actively investigated before an officer may detain a citizen and in this case, that crime was being suspicious, you see. Alas, the frail Indian gentleman did not understand he was committing this crime, and after he added on the veritably hateful inability to speak English, paid for it by having his neck broken in a takedown befitting the felony crime of being suspicious.

As bad as that is, there's something far, far worse at play here, and is the reason these two jerks acted the way they did. I've already touched on this topic in my other post, In Mala Fide. It is characterized by the following statement: someone somewhere once did X therefore everyone is guilty of X until they prove otherwise.

These officers are trained to ensure that every interaction with the citizenry holds within the potential for violence. Because of this, it conditions these simpletons--and I use this term advisedly, because for too many police officers it is unfortunately true--to act as if the citizen is already guilty of the crime of executing a police officer and it is their job today, right now, to stop their own murder from commencing.

They deal with citizens in bad faith, assigning the worst intentions to every person until that guilt person has proven otherwise. This is the same thing the TSA does: everyone is guilty of trying to blow up airliners until they've proved they won't. Someone once tried to blow up an airliner by smuggling a bomb in their shoe therefore everyone thenceforth is guilty of trying to blow up an airliner with a shoe bomb and must prove they won't by taking off their shoes for inspection.

Once you think of it like that, everything snaps into focus. The Newtown board set up to Do Something about the shooting there just came out with even more restrictions to be placed on the sale & transfer of not only firearms but cartridges as well. None of this would have prevented Newtown from happening, as even a laudatory ("courageous!") newspaper editorial points out. Nevertheless, proceed full speed ahead, guilty citizens one and all.

Seen through the filter of bad faith, it makes sense why these simpletons would call for further restrictions on erstwhile law-abiding citizens. Let's see how it fits into our bad faith template: Adam Lanza committed a crime with guns therefore every citizen in his state is now guilty of committing a crime with guns and must prove they (i) have not (ii) are not now (iii) will never commit a crime with guns. The burden of proof lies with them.

Aside from the fact that it is in a 180-degree direction from how our system was designed to operate--the presumption of innocence, in case you missed it--it is actually a completely worthless approach to law enforcement & safety. This is likely the reason why our Founders designed the system in that way! Who would've thought. While it is straightforward to prove I have not committed a particular crime, it is quite difficult to prove that I am not currently committing said crime and further, just about impossible to prove I will never commit that crime.

We treat each other with the basest of assumptions, assigning the worst possible to our intent, locking us away in virtual jail cells until we have each proven to one another that we are not guilty. If you want to exercise your Second Amendment rights, you are guilty of trying to murder someone. So you must prove you haven't and aren't currently by undergoing a background check. If not that bad, then you are certainly guilty of negligence. You will leave your weapon unattended and someone will get hurt. You will kill your wife and children with that weapon. You will shoot up the local elementary school.

Some other examples, in passing: men who sit with their legs open in subway cars are guilty of patriarchal oppression and must be shamed & punished. A mother brings in a child to the ER who hurt itself falling off a high chair; she's guilty of Munchausen-by-Proxy until she proves she isn't. That guy who made a joke about Asians is guilty of racism and must be prove to our collective sense of justice that he is not a racist; until then he is to be punished. Eric Eich once gave money to a cause therefore he is guilty of hating homosexuals and must prove his innocence; until then he is punished.

Someone suspicious once walked the streets casing houses for later burglary. Therefore the frail Indian gentleman is guilty of both being suspicious and casing houses therefore he must prove to Officer Parker's finely honed sense of justice that he is not guilty of that crime, but in the meantime, will be handled like a guilty criminal until such time as he has proven he's no threat.

Do you see how nefarious this is? Low-trust societies do not survive long yet this is exactly what we're positively encouraging each other to do. It is brutal if you're the person caught in the headlights of the oncoming Guilty Train for the simple reason that it is very difficult if not sometimes impossible to prove a negative, to prove something isn't there. Asking me to prove there are no black swans requires an extraordinary amount of work on my part because I must search every corner of the earth for a negative, as you sit there actively punishing me.

Guilty of rara avis!

Bad faith.