Glenn Reynolds links to a video interview of numerous Louisiana citizens whose property was stolen by the police and sometimes destroyed. It was a time when that property was most needed.
Just because you have a badge does not mean you are not a criminal. The New Orleans police are storm troopers in my book and cowardly ones to boot. What else can you call heavily armed men who beat up an old lady and steal her revolver?
Now that some people have recovered their stolen property, it is perhaps time to severely punish these warriors without a clue. Criminal prosecution could be possible in a few cases. As to the rest, perhaps there are grounds for a class action suit for cost plus and triple damages against the city. At the very least, these ‘officers’ should be told to their face that their actions were illegal, unconstitutional and not even close to being American.
They really need to be taught a lesson about who runs things in a free country. The fellow at the end of the video said it succinctly. It is not our country any more.
It is damn well time we took it back.
Dale,
I would certainly hope for some criminal convictions. Remember that in at least a couple of the cases they were pointing multiple live ‘machine guns’ at people they believed were law abiding citizens while they stole their guns. They refused to give receipts when asked and I think that is a very significant point from a legal perspective. I would really like to hear our resident reality check (Sunfish) give us his take on whether these are good cops, bad cops or criminals in cop’s uniforms.
New Orleans, . . . I’m leaning towards door number three. Especially since the cops destroyed some guns but kept the ones they thought were valuable.
those cops were doing what they were told to do by higher-ups.
The bureaucratic/Federal position on firearms is that if you own one, you will use it, so they used this as a test case to remove firearms from anyone in their way.
In 2000, I signed on to be a census taker- I was the last line of defense from the ‘jack booted thugs’ who would come beating down your door if you refused to fill out your form. We were told the Federal position on firearms, then were told that if we had a concealed carry permit, we were dangerous, and our employment would be terminated immediately.
That is the “Nuremberg defense” as it has been called ever since WWII. “But we were only following orders!”
When your boss commands you to do something criminal, you should turn him in. Particularly if you are a cop. I know that in the US military you may refuse an illegal order because if you carry it out you are also accountable.
I would also like to see the guys in the US telecoms companies outed and shamed… the ones who violated the law and handed over records without even a shred of due process… and whom got their arses retroactively legalized by the bill the Republicans and Democrats recently voted into law.
Heartbreaking and all, but y’all don’t actually think you have anything so prosaic as rights anymore, do you? Do you?
“They took something they didn’t have a right to take,” one victim says.
What is it, again, that we do with thieves? Do you remember? Do you?
“America as we have known it before has changed,” says another victim.
Indeed it has.
Fortunately I have a picture of an automatic with a picture of Popper. I feel safer already!
The NOPD has been notorious for years as being especially corrupt. They have been profiled in national news magazines a number of times.
The whole Katrina episode revealed that governments at every level are incompetent at best and criminal thugs at worst. And the lesson learned? Government is great, it will work if we have more of it, and isn’t it a grand time for photo-ops and partisanship? And it was just another nail in the coffin of common sense. The MSM said very little about the incompetence lest they feel they were being racist (much of incompetency and thuggery was by African-Americans) and it sat well because they could hurl mud at Bush.
And the electorate (the part that votes anyway) keeps on chomping the grass, gets electro-prodded in the ass every once and a while, and are presumably content. One just can’t help but dispair when such flagrant evidence of government stupidity and ultimately helplessness in the face of chaos goes unexamined and more of the same is demanded. We’re heading for collectivist healthcare in the very near future, and yet we have ample evidence of what the government does. I have little hope left.
The New Orleans police are a mixed bag:
There was one policeman who was a D. day veteran and was still on active duty (may still be on active duty) at near 100 years old.
However, other New Orleans policemen either ran away during Katrina or joined in the looting.
Once again, come down like a thousand of brick on the individual officers, without looking at the whole story.
It’s all very well to prattle on about how their actions were illegal and they should have refused their orders, and make comparisons with the Nuremberg defendants.
Well, guess what? Almost everyone knows that gassing women and children and shovelling their corpses into ovens is most-likely an illegal act. There’s not a lot of nuance there.
But the officers in NOLA are not constitutional scholars. Under some circumstances, confiscating weapons from citizens might very-well be an entirely-legal act and indeed, their duty to perform. In that highly-fluid and confused situation, with a crumbling command, terrible communication and a wave of crime spreading, Joe Average Beat Copper might very-well have been convinced that his orders to confiscate weapons were lawful, and that it was his duty to carry them out. Officers don’t get to debate the finer points of constitutional law with their sergeants, and in fact, so long as their orders are not self-evidently illegal, they are in duty bound to carry them out.
The buck for this one sets squarely on the shoulders of former NOLA police chief P. Edwin Compass, a man well-known for his own opinion of himself, who ordered(with no legal authority whotsoever) that weapons were to be taken from citizens. He is the one who should carry the can for this debacle. I note, however, that he simply traded one job with the city for a different one – he now heads the secuity system for the NOLA public schools. I suspect that he is well-insulated from the consequences of his actions, leaving the officers who carried out his order to pick their spot under the bus.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and many people have this rose-tinted view that a police officer should always stop to rest his head on his chin and take a moment to contemplate all of the Constitutional impacts of the action he is about to take. But it takes 9 people with a lifetime of legal learning to discern the exact meaning of the Constitution and how it applies to the million-and-one interactions that make up human existence – and even they don’t agree about it. If you want average police officers to have the knowledge to pass every order they are given through a constitutional filter and come up with the correct answer, every single time – I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to pay them a lot more, and you may have some troubles recruiting officers who will meet your standards.
llater,
llamas
There is little point in having a constitutional right to keep and bear arms if you surrender those arms to the police when asked to do so, rather than firing back. The Second Amendment is not primarily about crime prevention, it is about the prevention of tyrannical government. Arms are useless for that purpose if the citizenry hands them in when requested by said tyrannical government.
Timothy, I think that the point llamas was (inadvertently?) making is that most cops are ignorant of that aspect of the constitution, which rather goes in the direction Dale is going, although I do agree with llamas that blaming the individual cops is beside the point, as is the NOPD corruption.
llamas,
The ‘following orders’ defense has a long and horrifying history. While I agree that LEOs cannot be constitutional scholars, they totally sure as hell better have a clear idea of when it is appropriate to threaten to kill somebody for not complying with a request. And pointing presumably cocked and loaded automatic firearms at somebody is unquestionably a threat to kill.
I have had a loaded and cocked firearm drawn on me by a cop (it was a beautiful nickel plated model 1911) while I was peaceably minding my own business in a place I was entitled to be. I have no problem with what he did or the procedures he followed. It was (from his information limited perspective) an appropriate action. But that incident bore absolutely no similarity to anything pictured or described in this report.
The exclusive right to use threats of violence and death to compel cooperation DEMANDS an understanding of when and how those powers may be invoked. “Because my boss said so” doesn’t cut it. There are many cases where it does, but deadly force is most definitely not one of them.
I want to hear Sunfish’s take on this. There easily could be much we are overlooking that I might be convinced made their actions legally if not constitutionally appropriate. But ‘just following orders’ is a level of control I will never accept for applications of deadly force.
As to the ones who battered that frail old lady and stole her gun… I won’t give an inch. I’d like those sons of bitches in prison. I don’t give a damn what their orders were or what they though of them. What they did was reprehensible.
If I lived in New Orleans and they walked into a store I owned I would refuse to serve them. MYOB/IW. They are undeserving of the company of decent folk.
And I do seriously damn well mean it.
Midwesterner – I also would like to hear Sunfish on this. IIRC – didn’t he serve in NOLA post-Katrina? Or am I thinking of someone else?
While “I was just following orders” does indeed have a long & horrifying history, it also has a long and hallowed history of being called down as a curse upon the innocent- after the fact. Hindsight being 20/20, an’ all.
“Just following orders” is, in many – no, in most – cases having to do with law enforcement, an absolutely reasonable process for applying all sorts of force, all the way up to deadly force, and a perfectly reasonable defense. I get really sick and tired of hearing people, with that perfect hindsight, accuse officers of misconduct, and , when they respond that they were acting under lawful orders, respond by saying ‘Well! That’s what they said at Nuremberg, so you must be just another Jack Booted Thug!” It’s Godwin’s Law at work.
Law enforcement work requires discipline. Not at the military level, perhaps, but certainly obedience to orders which appear to be made with lawful authority, even if they are not fully understood.
Was the order to confiscate fireams from citizens in NOLA post-Katrina a lawful order? I don’t know. I’ll wager you don’t either I’m pretty-sure it was not – but I could be wrong. Could it have been done better? Of course it could. Did the city drag its feet over returning firearms to citizens? Seems so.
Was any of that the fault of the officers doing the confiscating? I say – most-likely not. And it seems particularly unfair that almost-all of the ire that is being vented over this issue – some of which is nothing more than Monday-morning quarterbacking – is being vented on the officers who did the confiscating and not those who gave the orders. Note that my post is the first to name the commander who originated this order – it seems like everyone is having far too much fun conjuring up their comfortable visions of officers standing up to their superiors, pushing out their chests and declaiming ‘No! Your Orders are Unlawful, I say, and I Shall Not Obey Them!’ All very stirring, no doubt – but what that comes down to is that you want individual officers to decide which orders they will follow and which they will not.
“I was following my orders” can be a perfectly-reasonable justification and defense, Nuremberg or no Nuremberg, and those who castigate officers who followed their orders are just looking for whipping boys.
llater,
llamas
Yes, you named some names. I chose not to as guilt is for the courts to decide and is a matter that would have to be handled by an investigative board, preferably from outside.
Please re-watch that video and the people in it and tell me the were not treated in a way that is inappropriate in America. If officers do not understand the second amendment rights and do not recognize that the rights of free citizens trump their orders, then I’d damn well like to see them behind bars or at least fired. “Pour encourager les autres.”
Let me put it a bit more strongly. What I saw in those videos does not belong in my country. The people who did it do not belong in my country. I do not forgive them for their actions and I do not give them any slack. Especially the shites that beat up on that lady. “Hangin’s too good for ’em” as the old American saying goes.
There was a time in America when people *WOULD* have shot back if the police had come around trying to confiscate weapons wholesale. And rightfully so. Such actions do not belong in America.
There was even an uprising by returned WWII vets in a small southern town that caused some significant amounts of gunfire and ended with the police backing down.
Just to note that incident was not about gun grabbing. (I have the historical article in my files somewhere.)
llamas,
My underlying concern is that these were not LEOs, but that they were, like some of Chicago’s finest, foxes guarding the hen house.
What process do you propose for officers following criminal orders when the system is controlled by law breakers and staffed accordingly? In Chicago, my old home town, the police department apparently hired gang members as cops. With the foreseeable results. I recall years back something similar happening in some jurisdiction in Florida. Miami?
I believe that it is part of the paycheck and certification for being a cop that you know the more important legal constraints on your actions and not count on political hacks to steer you straight. If you as an informed cop find yourself in a corrupt or incompetent department, you must quit and cooperate with investigators. How many times have cops resorted to the argument “ignorance is no excuse. . .”? Well that cuts both ways, civilian to cop and cop to civilian.
Also, nothing I saw or heard in that report suggested discipline. Rather it demonstrated a complete lack of discipline. The receipts point for example. By refusing to issue receipts, those particular cops were clearly avoiding a paper trail. And the process of destroying some guns but not others. Or for that matter, destroying guns at all.
I think what I would like you to open your mind to is the possibility that these were not cops, but rather criminals with badges. It does happen. Admitting and punishing it when it does is what will best serve the cause of professional law enforcement. Under our constitutional and cultural history, the creation of the professional law enforcement industry is something that needs to continuously demonstrate itself as not being a greater threat than what it exists to prevent. And in NOLA, the threat/benefit ratio was distinctly negative.
Llamas is correct that the blame for this clearly unconstitutional policy (and it was later adjudicated to be just that) rests squarely in the lap of the Chief of Police and other senior city officials. He is also correct that in most cases the chain of command must be observed, and police officers (much like soldiers) must obey orders. But that only goes so far.
If there is a single police officer anywhere in the US who does not know that citizens have a Constitutionally-protected right to possess firearms, he is too stupid or too ignorant to wear the badge, and shouldn’t be on the force. And even if you accept such a frightening level of ignorance on the part of rank-and-file officers (who, after all, somehow manage to learn to read Miranda warnings), you’re still left with the methods they used to disarm these citizens. The level of force used on these people was shockingly disproportionate to the need (especially with the elderly woman at the beginning of the clip); wanton distruction of private property was totally unnecessary; and the refusal to give receipts for confiscated property violates every tenet of a free society (clearly they never expected to return any of those weapons, so having the ability to identify the owners was irrelevant in their eyes).
I get the impression that these cops enjoyed playing “Judge Roy Bean”, having their word be law. Certainly it was easier for them to bully compliant, non-violent citizens than go after actual looters (who just might shoot back, after all). The behavior of the cops in this video, especially at a time of crisis when the citizens were depending on them, is inexcusable. None of them should be permitted to remain on the NOPD, and the City owes restitution and damages to the people whose guns were taken.
llamas,
Your argument would be legitimate if there were any conceivable context in which confiscation of firearms (or other property) from nameless innocent people could even be considered humane, let alone lawful.
Just because we can see how horrible it was in hindsight, doesn’t mean we couldn’t see it just as plainly in foresight.
“I was just following orders” is a legitimate excuse only insofar as sincere ignorance is an acceptable excuse. It is self-evident that going from door to door treating everyone that one encounters as a criminal is unlawful.
That an emergency condition existed does not matter in the least–no emergency could be so bad that it would be helpful to systematically harass random innocent people.
I can understand if police officers and soldiers must often follow orders when they do not know all of the fine points and moral implications, trusting that their superiors have worked out the moral implications for them. However, some things are just absolutely immoral in themselves, regardless of context, and in such cases, an officer is morally required to disobey, and if a police force can not bear dissent, and it means that the officer must leave the force, then so be it.
I just realized I fell into the trap of referring to “cops and civilians”. Cops are civilians. You have to be in the military, as in DOD, to not be a civilian. The distinction is not a point of semantics, it is a point of law.
Oops. Mea culpa.
If cops were not in fact civilians, they would be prohibited by the Constitution from doing almost everything they do.
And, of course, that would stop them.
Dale – Re the uprising by WWII vets –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
Good quote from one of the rebels:
“The principles that we fought for in this past war do not exist in McMinn County. We fought for democracy because we believe in democracy but not the form we live under in this county.”
Ok, I did some actual research.
Under the laws of LA, there are situations in which the order to confiscate firearms from all civilians would be lawful – the Second Amendment to the US Constitution notwithstanding. If the Governor had declared a state of emergency and given the appropraite orders, then the orders these officers carried out would have been lawful.
I’m not saying this happened – it didn’t – I’m saying that these laws are on the books in LA.
So, right away, the argument that officers should have known, without a shadow of a doubt, that their orders were unlawful crumbles to dust. The Second Amendment is not an absolute, as many here seem to think or wish it to be – there are plenty of circumstances in which taking firearms from citizens is a perfectly lawful thing to do. This could have been another such. It could well be, therefore, that these officers had every reason to believe that their orders were lawful and they were in duty bound to carry them out, by force if necessary.
Some here are declaiming that officers should apply a moral compass to any order they get, and refuse their orders if they do not square with the officer’s moral compass.
Is that what you want? Is that really what you want? Because there are just as many moral compasses, as there are officers. It’s precisely because we don’t want officers passing their own personal judgements that we have these silly things called laws, and why we require officers to enforce them whether they like them or not.
We come now to the complaints that officers were heavy-handed and behaved inappropriately. I’m sorry, but this is (pretty-much) the same chorus that always rises here whenever any officer uses any force whatsover on any citizen. And it is, of course, done in the ever-perfect hindsight.
If the officer was carrying out what he reasonably believed at the time was a lawful order, then he had both the duty and the right to carry it out by force if the citizen would not comply voluntarily. As usual, many here simply will not accept that a citizen is under a duty to comply with an officer’s orders at the time they are given, so long as they are not self-evidently unlawful. Even if they are later found to be unlawful. You don’t get to debate the law with the officer. I know you would love it if it were otherwise, but it is not.
The fact that his orders were later determined to be unlawful doesn’t change that – and yet that is exactly what many are pontificating here. It’s nothing but Monday-morning quarterbacking.
Were some of their actions heavy-handed? Maybe – although I must have missed the sections of LA law where little old ladies are exempted from complying with lawful orders, and where officers are enjoined from using force against them.
Many libertarians never cease to amaze me with their double standards. If a homeowner shoots an intruder dead, and we come to find out that it was not in fact a masked burglar or evil rapist but instead some innocent passer-by or even (heaven forbid) an officer doing his duty, then you will fall all over yourselves to exculpate the homeowner, with fulsome protestations about the reasonable-man standard and the benefit of the doubt and the right to self-defence.
But let an officer carry out his orders and enforce the law as it is given to him to enforce, and one can barely stand in the winds of condemnation. It seems that the definition of a libertarian is ‘one who can always find a reason why the officer was in the wrong’. You all want the officer to have the legal learning of a USSC Justice, the mindreading abilities of a Kreskin, the power to make time and tide stop while everyone sits down for a nice long debate about the exact legal niceties of the case, and of course Superman’s X-ray vision plus the ability to stop a speeding bullet. There’s a strong flavour of hypocrisy in the air, where any stick will do to beat a dog with. It’s the libertarian-default condition – look, bad things happened, it must be the fault of the officer doing them.
Were mistakes made in NOLA, post-Katrina? You bet they were. Were people treated unlawfully? Very possibly. Were some officers derelict in their duty? Without a doubt. Could things have been done better? Most-certainly. But the officers that we see on this video, for the most part, are not doing anything terribly wrong, and in most cases, are not doing anything wrong at all. If you can’t process that into your worldview, then you have unrealistically-high expectations of how life in the real world is going to be, and you are going to be both perpetually outraged and perpetually disappointed when your dreams meet the street. And that is, perhaps, a too-common trait of many libertarians I meet – there is altogether too much joy in being perpetually outraged, the pleasure in what my friend Shirley Norway calls ‘a lovely grievance’. Get over yourselves. If you’re looking for complete, snow-white doctrinal perfection in every single human interaction, please call when you find it and I’ll join you.
llater,
llamas
If you think this is a new issue here you are wrong. We expressed our disgust at the time
The answer to your quandary on the more philosophical question of our support of home owners is really quite simple, and the use of weapons is simply an adjunct to that. A home owner is defending their property; someone going on to that property is invading it and should do so only with the express permission of the property holder or with a specific judge signed warrant for a specific arrest. That is what America used to be about, or at least that was what just about anyone in America would have believed. I am sure, like anything, it was not perfectly followed.
But yes, when a home owner defends their property and shoots someone, the standard is much simpler and more clear cut than that of an agent of the state shooting someone while enforcing their will. A much higher standard has to hold.
Now, it may not be the case in the US as it is today… but it is my belief that it would have been morally right for that little old lady to deny the officers access to her property backed up by force if necessary.
You may chose to live in a world where the State has the right to do whatever it damn well pleases and “don’t you dare lift a finger against us or get snappy about it or we’ll beat the crap out of you”
That is the road to a very unfree society and it is the one we have gone a significant distance down.
Philosophically a cop should effectively be no different than one of your neighbors who comes to your assistance when there is trouble. There should be no different legal protections or different treatment than of any other citizen. Likewise, any good citizen who sees a crime in progress should have exactly the same protections as a state employee when they take out their 1911 and drop the bankrobber.
I refuse to accept that Americans will go along with changes in their society that make it even arguable that a grown man could mess with an elderly woman and get away with it. That is not my society and it is not a society with which I want to have any part at all.
I am not budging. Take those bastards out and shoot them.
Dale Amon wrote, of me:
‘You may chose to live in a world where the State has the right to do whatever it damn well pleases and “don’t you dare lift a finger against us or get snappy about it or we’ll beat the crap out of you”‘
Where the h*ll do you get that from?
I’m sorry, but if your idea of a logical, cogent discussion is to make up sh*t I never said and then berate me for it – I think we’re all done here.
The rest of your argument about how police officers should be considered as no more than helpful neighbours illustrates the delusional aspects of your position better than any words I could say. I’m also particularly impressed by your multiple, gleeful suggestions for the use of deadly force as a proper sanction for mere property crimes.
I’ve been to Laramie, many times – I always remember the sky being blue there, too. Things must have changed.
We’re done here. No minds are being changed. The perfect dream of Libertarianism bumps up against the real world again, and, once again, defending the map is more important than negotiating the terrain. Wish you joy.
llater,
llamas
Llamas. I still don’t agree with you on this issue (as you said, no minds are changed), but I appreciate both your argument and the skill and style with which it is presented. Your posts are always worth reading. Thank you.
I am afraid you are taking it much to personally. “You may choose to live in a world” is a general statement about many possible ‘you’s”. There are very definitely people who do seem to think that sort of world is just fine. You, meaning llamas, may not be one of them, but it does not mean that such do not exist.
And yes, I do believe deadly force in defense of property is a perfectly reasonable thing. We defended here the actions of a British farmer who killed one person and wounded another who were invading his property. If you do not wish someone on your property and they will not answer to any other means, then an escalation is necessary.
Look at the article on ‘near death’ experiences after this one. One of our commenters did exactly shoot someone who would not leave (and was armed) and put a couple well deserved holes in their hide.
It is not something to do lightly, but defense of property is not a negotiable right.
I would also note that you (llamas) seem to be taking this discussion as a generalization. Most cops in most places are decent. Some are not. These shites in New Orleans are not. That is quite specific.
Anyone who was raised properly does not raise their hand to a woman and knock down an elderly woman. Ever. Period. If grandma is going to shoot you, you say ‘Sorry m’am” and leave or else you stand there and take it like a man. My mother would rise from her grave and smite me dead if I ever even though it.
from llamas:
from Dale Amon:
We are not dealing with mere property crimes here.
Grabbing someone’s laptop off a table at the coffee house as the owner goes to the counter for a refill – that’s a property crime.
Intentionally short changing someone at the drive-thru window – that’s a property crime.
Walking out of a store with some unpurchased merchandise stashed under your coat – that’s a property crime.
But invading a person’s home – that’s different.
You see, ones home is ones castle, a sort of “safe zone” where all persons present are to be accounted for, and there are no nasty surprises. Any stranger occupying one’s home is naturally assumed to be a deadly threat. Thus, a home invasion is more than a mere property crime – it is a violent crime.
I wasn’t in NOLA post-Katrina. The last time I was there was Mardi Gras when I was in college, and I think I was probably part of the problem then.
But seriously…
In the case at hand where a number of officers got violent with an old woman: they weren’t NOPD. They were California Highway Patrol. What are the odds that their training EVER include the nuances of the rights of firearms owners?
I guess I hadn’t really thought of this happening in my own world. In CO, in a declared emergency the Governor can order firearms sales suspended in the effective area, but there’s no law authorizing a general firearms seizure. My own department’s policy manual specifically addresses this also.[1]
I can’t decide how troubling the “no receipt” issue is to me. On the one hand, yes, it was a seizure of property. On the other hand, it’s possible that the seizure was being made under highly-fluid conditions where careful documentation was impossible. This isn’t a normal service of a normal search warrant, where the officer can set up his laptop and spend an hour typing up a return of service before he even leaves the house.
Instinctively I’m on board with the SD Hive Mind that a refusal to give a receipt is prima-facie evidence of theft. However, a decade’s experience has taught me that there could easily be other factors that we’re not seeing, and that I should refrain from judgement for now.
Sunfish gives a gut response: fry the dirty bastards.
Sunfish gives an intellectual response: very disturbing, and let it be fought out in court where we have plenty of time to gather evidence and let a judge deliberate, who isn’t emotionally involved.
For what it’s worth. I think that, if I had been told to go out and seize guns door-to-door, from people not suspected of wrongdoing, under circumstances not supported by the Fourth Amendment, I’d probably tell someone to bite my shiny metal ass, but I also don’t think I work for a department where such an order would be given.
[1] Basically, we can seize firearms if they’re evidence, subject to all Fourth Amendment concerns, or if they’re stolen, or if their possession by the possessor is a crime in itself.[2] We can also temporarily take them off of people when we’re in contact, during a potentially-volatile situation. However, that provision (passed into law in 2003 or 2004 as part of our “shall-issue CCW”) also requires that the weapon be returned immediately, at the end of the contact, unless we have some other legal reason to keep it. (See Footnote #2 for this also)
[2] Typically, such a person will either be drunk or drugged, or will be someone barred from firearms ownership by the 1968 Gun Control Act. An otherwise-legal person is still committing a crime if he possesses a firearm in a K-12 school, or most colleges or universities, or certain limited other public buildings: either they’ll have metal detectors and mall ninjas at each door, or they’ll be Federal property where weapons are regulated by 18 USC 930. In the latter case, we don’t have any in my town and that’s not normally a local matter anyway.
Sunfish:
Thanks for you inputs. I doubt I could find a single thing to take issue with in your description of how you operate in Colorado. It’s reasonable, polite and what one would expect in a free country.
Thank you, Sunfish. I apologize that I confused you with someone else in re service in NOLA after Katrina.
You said:
‘ . . .a number of officers got violent with an old woman . . .’
and I’d modify that to say ‘a short snippet of edited video tape that shows officers using force upon an old woman’. I’m immediately highly-distrustful of this sort of ‘evidence’, especially when it is presented by those with an axe to grind.
Funnily enough, I am much-more disturbed than you are by the alleged refusal to give receipts for confiscated firearms. To me, it smacks of bad faith. Regardless of the circumstances or the legality of the seizures, the officers doing them must have known that they were seizing private property – surely even in in the PR of California they are required to record such seizures? I understand what you say about it being a very challenging situation, but surely an officer acting in good faith would make some good-faith effort to protect the citizen’s interests – even if it is only to say ‘we are working out of the Xth precinct house, the station commander is Lt Y, contact him for more information.’
But maybe that’s just because I’m from the Detroit metro area, where seized firearms have shown up in the most-surprising places . . .
While your description of how things would be done in CO has been immediately lauded as being ‘reasonable, polite and what one would expect in a free country’, I think that you’re probably going to have to clarify that, in the circumstances which you described, if the person whose firearm you are going to lawfully seize does not give it up voluntarily, you’re going to take it from them anyway – BAMN. Even if they’re a little old lady. Even if it means you have to raise a hand to them. I’m pretty sure that CO, like LA, does not have a little-old-lady exemption in her criminal laws.
llater,
llamas
n005: thank you for verbalizing something I only understood intuitively.
But then the little old lady was not only not committing a crime, she was not even refusing to hand the weapon over.
And besides which, the exception for little old ladies is something a gentleman does, automatically and reflexively. I could no more have done what those … er ‘people’ did than I could walk up to a child on the street and kick them. It just ain’t right. It’s utterly unacceptable behavior. I can debate pretty much anything else but that was beyond the pale and unforgiveable.
If there had been a gentleman in the house, it would have been is moral duty to go to her assistance, even if it meant his life. Or at least it would be for someone with my upbringing. I’d have waded in to help her, thoughtless of the consequences.
n005 wrote:
‘We are not dealing with mere property crimes here.’
Well, actually, we are – but perhaps I was not clear. Dale Amon wrote
‘ . . when they take out their 1911 and drop the bankrobber. . . . ‘
and
‘ . . . when a home owner defends their property and shoots someone, . . .’
In each case I read his comments to be specifically advocating the use of deadly force in response to mere property crimes. Perhaps I was wrong – but I don’t think so.
But I see that you also seem to hold this view – by your own words, to wit
‘ . . . Any stranger occupying one’s home is naturally assumed to be a deadly threat . . . ‘
and so I see another mind that’s not going to be changed. Fortunately, the law in everywhere but the most backward regions does NOT support your thinking – as indeed, it should not, since it amounts to little more than an assassin’s charter. I hope for your own sake that you realize this.
Someone else touched on Tony Martin. At the risk of opening the whole can of worms over again, I’ll say again what I said before – what he did was manslaughter, and he got off lightly. How long will it be before those who want their right to self-defence and the means to execricise it will realize that a mentally-disturbed man who shot blindly at an unknown target, and then ran away, hid the gun and lied about what he had done, is probably not the best poster child for their cause?
llater,
llamas
Dale,
Only once ever in my life did my father strike me. I was probably about 12 years old. I talked back to my mother in his presence and, although he was not known for fast reflexes, I caught the back of his open hand across my face faster than I could blink. His (open hand) knuckles hurt but it was the complete uniqueness of the event that embedded the value you are talking about so deeply in me.
I think a lot of people anymore just don’t have that morality taught to them. And there is an age element. Woman one’s own age are treated with courtesy, but elders are honored. Those days appear to be fading.
Midwesterner:
Would that the “morality” taught by striking a child perish quickly from the earth.
Midwesterner: yep, it was not the matter of it being a regular thing, it was just the reference to the possibility that guaranteed good behavior. I think I only got the ‘red switch”, an old red yardstick, applied to my bottom once. Did me no harm and taught me to respond to my elders. Probably also helped give me the moral compass to go through years hanging out in the music biz without going down the road that some did.
Kids need boundaries. I may be a total atheist but if I had kids they’d go to Sunday school. The religion would not be the point: the knowledge of right and wrong would be. I suspect llamas grew up in a very different environment than I did, because the idea that shooting an intruder was not appropriate just never crossed anyone’s mind. I’m sure people would have preferred to scare them off rather than wound and wound rather than kill, but that was the way it was in small town/rural Western Pennsylvania. Real Jacksonian country.
Anyone who grew up with the values I was taught from being kneehigh to the proverbial would never even consider the thought that Tony Martin did anything that was other than just and proper. If he tried to evade the situation afterwards, that is understandable since the UK is barely still in the column off the free world in my book. The one he failed to kill tried to sue him and the government had to cover the cost…. until an investigative TV journalist caught him out… his ‘disability’ was totally faked.
When someone enters a house uninvited they should be met with a challenge if in doubt. I only advocate shooting them if the situation is dicey. Then it’s a judgement call and I recommend people get proper training. A friend of mine from here in Belfast moved to Florida and on a visit home was talking to me about getting a gun to defend his home there. He did not grow up in a gun culture like I did (I do not consider what the paramilitaries had here as teaching any real cultural values of self responsibility that goes along with self defense) so I gave him a lecture. I talked him out of it not because I was trying to but because I gave him the sort of talk one of the menfolk would have given me as a kid. That you don’t point unless you intend to shoot; if you are going to shoot you had damn will hit what you are aiming for; and if you hit what you are aiming for you had really damn well be sure as possible it was truly a threat. I told him he had to promise me that if he bought a gun, he would go out and get proper training.
There are very deep cultural values here, not just libertarian ones. I didn’t become a libertarian until 2 years after the party was founded; but I was *RAISED* on the values I am espousing here and they are about as old fashioned American values as you could possibly want to find.
If someone had every been stupid enough (there was not a lot of crime in my town back in those days) to break and enter one our neighbors houses, they’d have wound up dead. One of the local policeman lived about 4 doors down the block and he’d have probably been first there to console the neighbor. They’d take a report, carry out the garbage and that would pretty much be it. There’d probably be a short hearing at some point, it would be open and shut and that would have been that.
That’s what I grew up in, and that is what I believe in.
And I forgot to add that it would have been talked about for the next decade because it would probably have been the most exciting thing that happened in the town for a decade up until the time one of the kids who was younger than me came back from Vietnam with a few screws permanntly loosened, went nuts and thought he was still in the jungle and shot a couple people from his upstairs window.
Dale Amon wrote:
‘Anyone who grew up with the values I was taught from being kneehigh to the proverbial would never even consider the thought that Tony Martin did anything that was other than just and proper.’
And then wrote:
‘if you are going to shoot you had damn will hit what you are aiming for; and if you hit what you are aiming for you had really damn well be sure as possible it was truly a threat. ‘
– all the things that Tony Martin signally failed to do. By his own admission, he did not know who was in his home or where they were. He shot blindly, without regard to victims or consequences. He could not aim because he did not know where or what his target was. And the forensic evidence showed that he lied about where he shot from and in what direction.
In short – he made the assumption, that others here are so keen to make, that any person unknown to him in his home was a deadly threat and that he could shoot them as-of-right and without consequences. Of course, it was not so. He subsequently pled dminished responsibility due to a mental defect. How his actions can be held up as being ‘just and proper’ is just beyond me. But the man is dead nonetheless.
(Note how much time is always spent lovingly describing the criminal history and general uselessness of the dead man Barras. A perfect example of hindsight, or what’s sometimes called ‘Wyoming Innocent” – he had it coming. But Martin had not the faintest idea of who it was that he shot.)
Do you actually know anything at all about the Martin case? I ask because the disconnect between your two quoted statements, which came out of one post, is so glaring that I can only assume that you are more-or-less totally unaware of many the facts of the case.
For the record, I am trying to make the distinction between the use of deadly force for the protection of life and limb vs the use of deadly force in response to (anything else). I am all in favour of the former. I am totally against the latter, because I don’t see deadly force as being an appropriate response to something which may be no more than a civil trespass.
There are people here demanding the right to assume that any unexpected stranger in the home may be automatically assumed to be a deadly threat and that deadly force may be used against them as-of-right and without consequences. I do not hold with that, and I take my lead from centuries of common law and from legal giants from Blackstone onwards, who did not hold with that either.
I understand the values that you describe. I’m sure that I hold many of them myself. I just don’t hold with the idea that death is a suitable sanction for what may be no more than a civil trespass – and not even for housebreaking, or burglary. These are property crimes only, and do not deserve a death sentence.
I’m all for giving the homeowner the benefit of the doubt. Absent evidence to the contrary, I’d be more-inclined than not to take the homeowner’s word ifhe sincerely felt a threat to life and limb. But that is a long, long way from giving the homeowner carte-blanche to shoot anyone he finds. The sanction is out of all proportion to the offense, and the potential for deadly error is just far too great.
llater,
llamas
llamas: I would probably disagree with you on a number of points about the level of fear and risk that Tony Martin faced, but unfortuneately I am now running short of time (i do consultancy for a living you know!) and I have rather spent more time on this discussion than planned and if we go off into this one in detail I won’t get my work done! If anyone else would like to argue that corner for me, please feel free.
I hope you understand that I have no ill feeling towards you or have had any intent to insult. This is just a hard debate about deeply held values and I would thank you and everyone here for arguing forcefully but reasonably politely.
Llamas’ description is pretty much my understanding of Anglo-Saxon common law, too: the use deadly force is permissible only when one has a reasonable fear of imminent physical peril. The death penalty is inappropriate for mere property crimes, which is why a bystander cannot lawfully shoot a bank robber who is running away. It’s the reason you can’t install a deadly booby-trap in an empty dwelling: no one’s life is imperiled by an intruder there, trespasser though he may be.
But there is a vast difference between finding someone in your house in the middle of the night and seeing someone take a shortcut across your back yard. In the former case the homeowner is entitled (I would say “of right”) to a presumption that his life is in danger, and to act accordingly; in the latter case not at all. The former is “burglary” (a far more serious crime than “breaking and entering”), while the latter is the “civil trespass” llamas speaks about. (Incidentally, I know absolutely nothing about the Tony Martin case, so I am not addressing it, just speaking in generalities.)
We seem to have gotten a bit off-topic here, haven’t we? That’s part of the fun of Samizdata; conversations take unexpected twists. But you know what? Maybe this isn’t really so off-topic after all. The battery of that old woman by the NO police is analogous to a homeowner shooting a trespasser in his yard: the police officer was in absolutely no reasonable fear for his safety, and the response was so wholly disproportionate to the situation as to shock the conscience of any rational human being. Those animals belong in jail, not on any police force in the US.
llamas,
Things must be a whole lot different over there in Michigan than here in Wisconsin. Around here, if someone breaks into your house while you are in it (and virtually all houses are occupied at night) it is generally assumed you are the target, not your property.
Where homeowners are armed, burglars do not break into occupied homes. Thieves go to a good deal of effort to make sure that no one is home. And the statistics bear this out. If a person shoots somebody who has broken into their home knowing they were home, or refused to leave when discovered, I have a hard time imagining anything negative being assumed by the vast majority of people I know. If the intruder walked through an unlocked door and refused to immediately leave when ordered to, the same would hold. Burglars do not confront potentially armed homeowners. Ever. If someone does they are after more than property.
In the US, outside of gun banned districts, you are safe in your own home from everybody but the police. And I suspect in gunned banned districts police are also more likely to break in. I think our police are far more respectful of people’s property and homes than in any other country. They always have been in my personal experience. Outrage when they are not is a necessary part of preserving that. I think most of us believe these NOLA LEOs were far outside of the norms for anywhere except the known problem areas like Chicago and DC.
That was my suspicion too, but I can’t prove it.
Again, CA state troopers half a country away. They may or may not have known which station/precinct/district/whatever they were even working out of. It’s within the realm of possibility that the only chain of command that anybody on scene could actually name is “Captain Ponchandjohn from the LA County CHP division but he’s at the camp nine blocks east of here,” which would be useless in context.
Not that I believe that, but it’s possible and I personally can’t prove otherwise.
If I’m legally justified in relieving someone of a weapon, that’s exactly what will happen, using whatever force is reasonable to overcome any resistance offered, in view of my lawful objective and the totality of the circumstances surrounding. Meaning: if they want to play stupid games then they can win stupid prizes.
However, was the old lady in NOLA drunk? Was she a felon? Were the troopers taking her on a 72-hour mental-health hold? (Troopers doing a 10-96? That’d be good for a laugh[1]) Was the revolver evidence of a crime? Or was she a participant in some sort of interpersonal conflict where it would have been reasonable to take the gun away for 20 minutes pending investigation of her possible role?
I’m sorry, llamas, but I’m just not seeing how any of this passes the smell test. Stepping aside from the issue of whether the level of force used was reasonable: It’s probably just sleep deprivation but I’m not following how the initial seizure of the gun was lawful or reasonable.
[1] For non-US readers, “trooper” refers to an officer of a state police force, sometimes called a State Patrol or Highway Patrol. In much of the US, their role is largely traffic and motor vehicle matters, originating from the 1930’s when it first occurred to someone that moonshiners had to transport the product and could be interdicted on the roads. The reason why I laugh is, my experience has been that they’re generally good folks but at least in the places where I’ve worked they just haven’t had the training or experience with non-traffic matters, such as taking a suicidal person in for a 72-hour evaluation. Although I shouldn’t laugh too hard. When I get a mental health issue dumped on me (which is rare), my first thought is usually ‘how can I dump this on the firefighters?’
Let us come back, then, to the matter of the little old lady in NOLA.
Consider that this event took place on September 7th, 2005. The city was very-severely flooded and temporary repair work on the major levees was not complete. Things were getting worse – not better. The final extent of the flooding was not known or predictable. Conditions in the city were deteriorating rapidly, especially in regard to sanitary and public-health issues, crime and security. The previous day, Mayor Nagin had ordered the forced evacuation of all those ‘holdouts’ in the city who were refusing to leave. The situation was very, very bad and getting worse, not better. I was peripherally involved with some issues having to do with a NOLA client who was trying to recover from the disaster, and I still have the e-mails from a disaster-recovery team that was stuck just north of the Quarter on that very day – they are very chilling indeed.
(yes, I know he was an ineffective and useless mayor, and his order likely had limited effect in law. But he was the mayor and his orders may well have seemed lawful and appropriate at the time. No hindsight is permitted.)
These officers come upon an obviously-frail and very-vulnerable lady, alone in her home. She has food and water, to be sure, but those will avail her little if the waters continue to rise and she is flooded out. She may well have a pistol, but she is obviously, self-evidently in a very poor way to defend herself against criminals if they come – and they may well be drawn, in fact, by the food and water that she has. And the mayor, who has some legal authority at least in what is left of the city, has ordered evacuations by force if necessary.
I could well see – I could very well see – where the officers could make the decision that it was the best thing to remove this lady from her situation – even if she did not want to go. In the midst of such a terrible situation, it might well appear to be the least-worst outcome. The resources were there (and in fact, she and her dogs were evacuated in minutes and removed to safety) and it might very well have seemed better to do something a little bit less-than-ideal in that moment than to have to come back in 2 or 3 or 4 days to get her – only now the street is flooded, she’s stuck on the roof, she has two GSW’s from holding off the the goblins who tried to steal her food, and CG helicopter crews have to put their lives on the line to recover her.
Or – a thousand times worse – she succumbs to the collapse of the city, whether from natural causes or from mayhem, and then we come to find out that these officers were at her home, with all the resources necessary to remove her safely right there – and they left her there? Those inhuman bastards!
In other words, evacuating her then-and-there had nothing but upside. Leaving her there had nothing but downside.
It’s awfully easy, three years later, in warm, dry comfort, to pontificate about what the officers should have done, and to decry them as Jack Booted Thugs for trampling on this poor woman’s rights. But the Perfect, is the enemy of the Good. I suggest that you at least consider the possibility that these officers had not, in fact, travelled voluntarily half-way across the country to offer their services in a living hell-hole just so that they could gleefully exercise their powers to deprive other citizens of their rights, and that in fact what you see is the officers making a very hard decision about what is the best thing to do in circumstances in which every choice they have contains a lot of bad.
The assumption is simply made that her possession of a pistol was the total cure to any and all problems that might ever befall her in the coming days and weeks and months – whio knew how long? Well, I tell you what – I carry a pistol every day, but I don’t regard it as a talisman that will ward off all evil by its mere presence. These officers very-well knew that she was facing a whole host of problems, and her will to stay – even with a pistol in her pocket – might well not be nearly-enough to ensure her survival.
Most of you are viewing this event, as unsavoury as it appears, and judging it as though it had occurred on a leafy suburban street, on a warm fall afternoon, with power, water and gas on and a full complement of uniformed officers on duty to keep the forces of evil away from this nice lady’s home – and then these Jack Booted Thugs break in, beat her to a pulp, and haul her off to who-knows-where – for No Reason! I understand. It is often the libertarian-default mindset to assume malice and/or incompetence on the part of any state officer, and this case appears to offer impeccable proof of that.
If this were your grandmother – what would you think of the officers, who had come to her door with all those resources, ready and willing to help her leave, if they had just left her there? If it had been you at her door, and not the officers – would you have simply said “OK, grandma, we’re going to leave you here if that’s what you want. Call when things are back to normal.”
Would you?
Lift your eyes for a moment from the perfection of the libertarian map, and survey the actual terrain, and now ask yourself – what other decisions could these officers have made? What they found was the equivalent of a person hanging over the edge of a precipice by their fingertips – a person who was nonetheless shouting ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want your help! I’ll be fine! It’s just a flesh wound!’
If you still say that the perfection of libertarian thought requires you to walk away from a person in that condition – then I guess that the perfection of libertarian thought is not for me.
llater,
llamas
No time for big reply… but a libertarian will simply tell you that she is and adult, capable of making her own decisions. In a proper society the police would have come by and made here aware of the direness of the situation, would have suggested a course of action, perhaps even offered assistance if she wished it.
We are now outside the realm of the way things are into the way things should. In the Nanny State, the allknowing government makes those decisions for you and then enforces them by whatever means necessary. There are no adults, only children to be ‘cared’ for.
Llamas, I am happy to stipulate to everything you said in your last post. And I agree with you that the decision to force someone to leave a dangerous situation such as that is not an easy one (my personal predilection is to agree with Dale, that competent adults should make their own choices and take the consequences, but I acknowledge that there is room for debate on that). However, her forced removal from the house is not what I am objecting to in this instance. Watch the video again. She is arguing with the police about leaving, and everything is fine and reasonable, until she tries to ensure them that she will be safe by showing them that she is armed. It is at this point that the police over-reaction occurred: they gang-tackled her, forced her to the ground, struck her, and forcibly took the pistol. She did not threaten them in any way; she was merely showing them the gun just as she had been showing them her stores of food. They were in absolutely no reasonable fear of harm, both because of the circumstances in which the gun was presented and due to her age and physical condition, yet they violently assaulted her. Even allowing for the possibility that they thought disarming the citizenry was lawful (see my earlier post on that point), they should simply have said. “Lady, give us the gun.” No violence was necessary. I stand by my earlier statement: thugs like this, whose immediate instinct is violent attack even where none is remotely warranted, do not belong on any police force in the US.
What an outstanding comment thread. I particularly like llamas’ reasoned opinions because they are quite different from mine but very well reasoned and thought provoking.
llamas, one reason that it does upset me is that I can see in that old lady much of the character of my own grandmother. Although I never recall her having a gun, she had that methodical, prepare as best you can, you are responsible for your own self attitude displayed by that lady. I further point out that the older I get, the more of my life is on the memories and reflections side of now and the less it is on the big plans for the future side. She is at the far end of that scale. She wasn’t just being removed from her house, she was being removed from her memories. Perhaps to never regain them. She was no doubt surrounded by all of the little memory triggers that become more and more important as age takes its toll on our mental filing systems.
Perhaps she preferred to chance her fate in a familiar place than try to start a new life stripped of her past at her age. There is an unwritten rule in our family that has been in place for generations. Nobody dies in a hospital or care facility. Only one out of five of my parent’s sibling that have died so far, did so in a care facility and that is because the massive quantities of painkillers required a Hickman.
With all of the flooding we have had in my neck of the woods this summer, there have been some forced evacuations. Is anybody interested in a thread discussing the moral basis (of lack of one) for the concept of forced evacuations in general? At first I though I never, ever approved, but then I realized there are a lot more situations like children, and mentally not capable of making decisions, not to mention cases where your presence obstructs other people’s safety or property. . . And the whole definition of ‘informed consent’ becomes an issue. Or perhaps have we had our fill for now in this thread.
Laird – fair enough, let’s go with that.
You say that the officers were
‘in absolutely no reasonable fear of harm, both because of the circumstances in which the gun was presented and due to her age and physical condition, yet they violently assaulted her.’
I don’t agree.
Officers are taught – rightly so – that the presence of any firearm is a potential threat – because it often is. And in the situation in which the officers found themselves – in a city crumbling before their eyes, with armed criminals and looters reported everywhere – an armed person would automatically raise more suspicion.
I carry a pistol, every day. State law requires me to tell that to any officer that may have reason to contact me. And I will. What I will not do is produce it and say ‘Here’s my pistol!’. That’s asking for misunderstandings. I think that’s what happened here.
As to her age and condition – bunkum. Colonel Colt made us all more-or-less equal. The threat is the pistol – the age or condition of the holder makes almost no difference.
I don’t agree that she was ‘violently assaulted’. That suggest a brutal beating. I say she was ‘forcibly restrained’, and only for the purpose of disarming her. She was filmed moments later, apparently more-or-less unharmed – that pretty-much disposes of the ‘violent assault’. I know that her Federal lawsuit subsequently claimed more-serious injuries but those are not evident (to me) on the video recording.
What happened here :
– the officers came to her house because they were looking for people to tell them that the city was being evacuated, that the problems were getting worse not better, and to help people evacuate. They had orders to evacuate anyone they could – orders that they could reasonably believe were lawfully given and were to be carried out. Note that they were already tagging bodies at this point, so there’s little question but that things were getting very, very serious indeed. Ms Konie may not have realized just how bad it was getting.
– she refused their help.
– they made the assessment that it was in her best interest to evacuate regardless of her own opinions, for all the reasons I described above. She disagreed, there was an escalation in which she physically produced a pistol, the officers misunderstood her, and decided to disarm her and then evacuate her.
Note that they didn’t take her gun and leave her to her fate. They took her gun and then they evacuated her and her two dogs to safety. They did, what they came to do, having made the decision that that was in her best interest. Contrary to the map-readers here, individuals don’t always know, or do, what is in their best interest. Officers still try to prevent people form killing themselves, even though they have decided to do so and it is their right. Would you want them to stop?
Was that the right decision? Well, how many terabytes of bandwidth do we have? I say it was not the worst decision they could have made. The alternative – leaving a frail, older lady alone in her home, no power, no telephone, no means of escape, with a limited supply of food and water, just 3 or 4 blocks from both the river and the still-rising water (look at the maps), with armed looters and criminals on the loose, had to be worse. What was the upside? Her rights would remain pristine and unviolated?
And indeed, she and her dogs survived and returned to their home. The outcome was good – better than it was for some 1400 other less-fortunate souls. I say that what they did was among the least-worst of the decisions they could have taken. Should force have been used? Maybe there could have been better ways. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. And neither were you.
At the risk of putting him on the spot – Sunfish?
What would you have done in this situation, having regard to the totality of the circumstances?
To make it easier, I’ll ask a second question – had she not had a gun (at all), but all other circumstances were the same, what would you have done?
In either case, would you have used force to implement your decision, whatever it was?
llater,
llamas
Well, you’ve narrowed down the point of our disagreement. You wrote:
I submit that the second sentence is a gross mischaracterization of the events. Try this one instead: “She disagreed, and tried to explain all the reasons why she should be permitted to remain in her home. In the context of that explanation she displayed all her stores of foodstuffs and stated that she would be perfectly safe from looters because she was armed. She then got our her pistol to prove her assertion, at which point the police escalated the situation by physically assaulting her in order to take her gun, after which they evacuated her.” I think, based on the evidence of the video, that is a far better characterization of the events.
Slamming her against the wall, and then forcing her to the floor under the weight of some very large bodies, isn’t “forcible restraint”; it’s battery. I won’t accept the justification of “that’s how they were trained” for the thoughtless and unnecessary resort to violence. (If that’s really how they were trained, that training must have consisted primariliy of watching Rodney King videos.) Situations matter, and police are (or should be) trained to think. When society delegates to police the legal right to the use of force, implicit in such delegation is that it be judiciously applied. Clearly, this group failed that test.
I think I’ve made my point as clearly as I can. I don’t think there’s anything to gain by my continuing to flog this dead horse, and I don’t think either of us is going to persuade the other. It’s been fun.
Later!
I looked back into my Katrina-related e-mail folders, just out of interest.
It was on September 24th that I first met Don (not his real name). Don is an African-American, sometime-resident of the 9th Ward in NOLA. He’s in his 50s, and he happens to be a gay man (that gets important later). He had a good, white-collar job in the downtown area. He decided, when the storm was coming, to stick it out in NOLA although he had the means to escape, because he had elderly relatives who would not leave.
He was rescued from the second storey of his home by some form of LA law enforcement, along about September 8th, I guess, and extracted to the NOLA airport before being relocated to Houston. He left a toe in a MASH facility along the way – he’s a diabetic, and his insulin went south real quick. In Houston, his employer found him and flew him far, far away to resume his work. When I met him first, he had clean clothes, a new apartment to stay in, and his old job and paycheck back. He was some bemused. . . .
He only told me a little about what he went through for those 8-10 days, but it sounded completely horrific. The speed and completeness of the flooding, the immediate rise of ‘tribes’ of criminals and looters (he said he was especially fearful for his safety because of his orientation), the complete cessation of any semblance of ordered civilization. It was 10 days in relentless hell.
He said, quite candidly (as did others), that he’d stayed in town for other storms and had discounted this one. He was completely blindsided by the speed and completeness with which civilization was simply washed away. And he told me that if he’s had even the slightest idea of what was going to befall him, ‘you’d a had to beat my ass off’n that bus!’ (His automobile was stolen almost-immediately).
Maybe – just maybe – we might want to consider that these officers knew a little about the sorts of things that had already befallen people like Don, and that this gave them a slightly-different and more-realistic take on Ms Konie’s protestations that she was fine and didn’t need their help.
I’m just sayin’.
llater,
llamas
llamas, this whole thread has been interesting in particular because it strikes so deeply into the values I hold dear. Practically everything I most despise about government was exemplified by that short video. The philosophical context behind it really has to do with the issue of who is in control of my life. Is it me? Or is it any tinpot dictator (elected or otherwise) and their enforcers who deign to make those decisions for me.
It is part and parcel of being a free man that I get to make bad decisions and suffer the consequences. That’s life. In those circumstances I may or may not have evacuated… but it would have been my own decision… if I had decided to stay, I’d have found a way to lay low and not be found if I had any warning at all about what was to come. In short, I would have disobeyed had it been my decision to do so.
Situations like this make me think of Harry Truman. Not the President, the elderly man who stayed with his property in Mt St. Helens. He died with his home and property… but he died a free man. I hold him in high respect for that. I also have somewhat more respect for the officials in Oregon because they respected his wishes and his rights as a free man in a free society.
I will never, ever, accept that the state has this sort of right over me. It is my life and my decision.
Also note that betwen 1989 and 1994 I lived in a literal war zone. I’ve sat in a pub after hours with musician friends and bar staff when the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Was the next day going to be the start of a bloodbath? Were the two sides going to back off or take us all to hell? I’ve looked down the barrel of more types of firearms than many people have ever even seen. I won’t even go into situations where nothing happened but the wrongs words could have meant I just ‘disappeared’.
I still hold to my values. I am a free and sovereign individual and I do not accept the state as the giver of knowledge of Right and Wrong.
I hope she won her case by the way. Had I been her I’d have not just gone for cash recompense… I’d have tried to make an object lesson out of it.
Explain the situation. Ask politely. If the person chooses to not take the sage advice given, politely leave them to their own fate.
At the end of the day, it is their fate and they are the captain of their own lives… if they live in a free country.
Dale Amon – well, I pretty-much understood your position – I just can’t agree with it.
It’s all very well to say that we should all be the captains of our own fates, and that the state should levae us alone to suffer the consequences of our decisions if we so choose.
But if we order our society that way, the inevitable losers will be those who are weaker, less able, less resourced or less informed. Like Ms Konie. Regardless of what happened to her, I think you might agree that her desire to remain in the situation she was in would very likely to have led to a very bad outcome for her had she not been evacuated. As it did for thousands of others.
That’s a high price to pay for your theoretically-ideal society. It’s all very well for you to declaim that you will pay the price for your own mistakes – but it’s a little hard on those others who you will force to pay the price for theirs. You want above all else for the state to let you alone – others, maybe not. Why is your desire more-valuable than theirs?
Your description reflects a subtle undertone that I often see here and in other ‘libertarian’ milieus, namely, that ‘true libertarianism’ seems to be of the greatest benefit to those who have plenty of resources and plenty of intelligence.
If you don’t want officials of the state telling you what to do, then you must also accept that they cannot bear a duty to protect you from harm – including, perhaps, harm that you choose to do to yourself. That’s fine and dandy, if you have plenty of resources, plenty of intelligence and plenty of information. But when those go away – when you’re not capable of deciding for yourself, when you don’t have the data to make an intelligent decision, when you don’t have the resources to protect yourself – you are inevitably going to the be the loser when you come up against those who are stronger, smarter, better-informed or better-resourced. This is, put bluntly, social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest. Sorry – not going for that.
llater,
llamas
I’m only suggesting you leave those who do not want help alone. Perhaps they will be ones who are better prepared and better able to fend for themselves. It seems likely people who are not prepared, or who do not form community or neighborhood groups would wish to accept the help. I do not see the problem.
If I refused help and made it stick, perhaps by making sure I was not found, would that make me a criminal in your eyes? Just curious.
The problem I see with your stand is that there is a huge and steep glassy slope that leads to a State which believes it has all the answers on life the universe and evertying and therefore is bound morally to make sure you do what is best for you, like it or not. That is the road to slavery and we are so far down it that I sometimes wonder if it even possible to save the country.
I have heard of a PR ‘trick’ used to persuade people to evacuate and at the same time give police some cover from condemnations for allowing people to remain. They ask people to sign a waiver acknowledging that nobody will be endangered to rescue them if things go wrong and they ask the people to provide next of kin and contact information so that they (the police) can have a means of determining the person’s status at a later time.
I certainly have no problem with that approach, given the reality of our lawyer-infested nation. You need waivers to do just about anything interesting.
If it gives a few more people a feeling that staying is not for them, that’s fine too. It’s liberty I want to preserve. That by no means implies that giving people good information that you believe their actions are a bad idea is a wrong thing to do. It’s your duty in fact. If after that, they sign on the line, that is just the act of a free citizen accepting that their own life is their own responsibility.
Funny thing though… my great grandparents would have thought anyone who didn’t understand that was a bloody fool.
I don’t know Louisiana. I don’t think forced evacuation is legal here. Which means it’s unlikely that I’d have ever seen her gun from my understanding of this situation.
As for after I’d seen the gun what would I do, see my previous post. Unless I have one of a few legal justifications for seizing it, I’d have to return it at the end of the encounter.
“Ma’am, you do understand that, if you stay, there is no help available? If your house burns down and you have a heart attack, no help will come. You understand this? And you still want to stay? Well….good luck.”
One idea that occurred to me: an arrest for brandishing (we call it something else in my state). Book and release her. Specifically, book her in some location nowhere near the storm danger area and release her out the front door next to the Red Cross/Salvation Army evac center. And then lose the offense report before her first court appearance. No report means that the charges get dropped entirely.
It’s dirty and chickenshit, and I don’t even know why I bring it up. It’s not how I roll.
The whole thing reminds me of my EMT training. You can’t force medical care on a competent adult who doesn’t want it. I had a guy showing a classic heart attack presentation look me in the eye and tell me that he thought I might be right when I told him he needed care, but that he didn’t want it and didn’t consent. I told him that, if he did not receive medical care RFN, he would die and soon. And he still refused.
He was an adult. He was alert and oriented to himself, his location, and his situation. And he didn’t want medical care. What, in this situation, is the correct thing to do?
(Hint: it may have been technically correct but I didn’t like it worth a damn.)
You can’t force people to be smart. Llamas, with your background you of all people here should know that just as well as I do.
FWIW: there were pretty good reasons to evacuate, as you mention. The wheels came off entirely that week. However, evacuate where?
The Superdome?
Llamas:
But ‘others’ in this case is that old lady, and she did want to be left alone! You seem to think that just because a person is old, they should be treated like children. But they are not children, llamas, they are adults, just like you and me, only older. The only case I can see where an action such as these policemen took could be justified is if they had a very goo reason to believe that the person is mentally incompetent. Unfortunately, to many people old age seems to be synonymous with mental incompetence. I find this attitude very offensive. There are also many people who seem to think that decisions taken by other people that go contrary to the conventional world view are signs of mental incompetence. I find this less offensive, but very very unwise.
I don’t think that these cops were thugs, I have every reason to believe that they meant well. But I am thoroughly convinced that they were wrong.
Dale Amon wrote:
‘The problem I see with your stand is that there is a huge and steep glassy slope that leads to a State which believes it has all the answers on life the universe and evertying and therefore is bound morally to make sure you do what is best for you, like it or not. That is the road to slavery and we are so far down it that I sometimes wonder if it even possible to save the country.’
On that, we can agree, without reservations. I’m well aware of the slope, and its CoF, and I share your concern. I guess I am more hopeful that a middle way can be found/rediscovered that make the best allowance for both points of view.
Sunfish wrote:
‘One idea that occurred to me: an arrest for brandishing (we call it something else in my state). Book and release her. Specifically, book her in some location nowhere near the storm danger area and release her out the front door next to the Red Cross/Salvation Army evac center. And then lose the offense report before her first court appearance. No report means that the charges get dropped entirely.
It’s dirty and chickenshit, and I don’t even know why I bring it up. It’s not how I roll.’
Indeed – dirty, chickenshit – and effective. I knew that you would have some such approach in the back of your mind – that’s why I asked!
As you say, you can’t make people be smart – but sometimes you can (and should!) help them to be that way. And help comes in quite-a-few forms.
As to the evacuation question – on the day this happened (09/07/05), the Superdome had been completely evacuated for 3 days, and extraction routes directly to the NOLA airport and to points elsewhere were up and running well. Ms Konie was evacuated that same day, to South Carolina.
The rest of his post shows why we should all hope for more officers like this.
Alisa wrote:
‘You seem to think that just because a person is old, they should be treated like children.’
Not at all. Your comment reminds me of a man that I once met who said ‘You’re only doing this to me because I’m black!’ No, sir, I’m doing this to you because you’re a thief.
If you read my posts, I think you will find that I really do not refer to her age, except when using the ‘little old lady’ formulation that everyone else is using. In fact, I specifically disagreed with one poster who made refernce to her age as having some bearing on how this event should have been handled. So please find another stick to beat me with – especially when you know that her (reported) age is not-so-very different than mine.
Dale Amon also wrote:
‘It’s liberty I want to preserve . . . ‘
Well, don’t we all? But I remind you that the seminal treatise on the matter also refers to the rights to life and the pursuit of happiness, and I’m just hoping that we can find a way to preserve those also – even for those whio may not be able to seetheir exact way to them in the circumstances.
Once again – were Ms Konie’s rights violated in this incident? Probably, to some extent.
Is she yet alive and well and not-much-the-worse for this experience? It would seem so.
Did many other persons similarly-situated as Ms Konie die, or suffer great and permanent losses? They most certainly did.
Can we at least agree that what the officers did (right or wrong) at least had the effect of reducing the risks that Ms Konie was facing – risks that the officers likely knew about, and she likely did not?
And so can we at least agree that the officers were perhaps not primarily motivated to be ‘storm troopers’ and ‘warriors without a clue’, and that what they were actually trying to do was make the best possible outcome in a situation where all possible outcomes contained more-or-less badness?
I’m just askin’ . . . .
llater,
llamas
Llamas, true, you did not refer directly to her age, but you keep talking about people who are ‘weak’, who are ‘in a very poor way to defend’ themselves, not to mention people who are stupid. Well, this little old lady may well have been stupid after all – so what? It is her life – and even death. In general, with each comment you make, all these separate statements add up to make an increasing impression that you tend to think that it is the role of society to protect people regardless of their wishes, and even to protect them from themselves. So I apologize for being presumptuous about your approach to old people, but it doesn’t change my point.
Alisa wrote:
‘Llamas, true, you did not refer directly to her age, but you keep talking about people who are ‘weak’, who are ‘in a very poor way to defend’ themselves, not to mention people who are stupid. ‘
I wish you would stop putting words in my mouth. I never called anyone ‘stupid’, least of all the lady in question.
The only use of the word ‘stupid’ in this entire thread is in a post by Sunfish, and while he appears to be the copper that I hope I was, he ain’t me and I ain’t him. If you are bound-and-determined to use what I said to bverate me, please try to at least find out what I said.
You then wrote:
‘In general, with each comment you make, all these separate statements add up to make an increasing impression that you tend to think that it is the role of society to protect people regardless of their wishes, and even to protect them from themselves. ‘
Sometimes – yes. The alternative descends to what I said before – survival of the fittest – and I’m not going for that. There will always be those who will need society to afford them some level of protection, even against their own wishes – either protection from themselves, or protection from others. Children, those of diminished competence, the weak, the frail and what (for want of a better term) I would call ‘easy marks’.
Libertariansim all-too-often assumes that everyone is capable, competent and honest. Unfortunately, as I know from my own life experience, it is not so, and there are always those who are less-than-honest who are looking out to get over on those who are less-than-competent. As Dale Amon suggested, sometimes society (which is, after all, merely a projection of Us) needs to act like a good neighbour, and to me that means to step in to help those who cannot (for some reason) do for themselves – whether or not they want to be helped.
I’m sorry if that makes an inkblot on the pure and unsullied map of Libertarianism.
llater,
llamas
Llamas wrote:
So you’re an “ends justifies means” guy. There’s where we part company. You’re already too far down that “slippery slope” for me.
Laird wrote:
‘So you’re an “ends justifies means” guy.’
Sometimes.
If the threat of negative outcomes is very great, and the negative impacts of acting vs not acting are trivial and transitory enough – yes, I’ll apply the means to achieve the end. especially if the negative impacts can be effectively corrected later.
And – guess what – so will you.
If you see a man falling into a river, I hope your first instinct is to go to his aid – even if he is yelling at the top of his lungs ‘Leave me alone! I want to die!’ The infringement upon his personal sovereignty is trivial and transitory when compared to the negative consequences of not acting.
It’s entirely a matter of degree. Had these officers behaved this way towards this little old lady in normal circumstances, I would be at the head of the line to condemn them. But these were not normal circumstances – far from it – and for that reason I am inclined to be much-more understanding of what they did. certainly enough to condemn the use of inflammatory terms like ‘storm trooper’.
We’re both on the same slippery slope – we’re just at different places on it and (I think) not so very far apart.
llater,
llamas
llamas: damn, I was sure that you have repeated Sunfish’s description of some people as ‘stupid’ while agreeing with him – sorry about that. Too many comments…
Anyway, what Laird said. And it has nothing to do with libertarianism, as far as I am concerned. That was always my gut approach, long before I have even heard of libertarianism (which was not all that long ago).
Suicide is a trickier one. From what I gather, for many people who attempt suicide for the first time, it is a way to call attention of the people in their social circle to their emotional distress. These people don’t really want to die. So yes, if I saw a person standing on the edge, I would certainly make every thing in my power to prevent them from jumping. But, if someone I knew would keep trying again and again, no matter what, I would probably come to the conclusion that they no longer wish to live, and I would let them go.
This lady did not seem suicidal, did she? She was simply willing to take her chances and stay in her home, which is very typical with old people. We take our chances with life every day, but it doesn’t make us suicidal.
And I did say that don’t think that those cops were thugs (at least I have no reason to believe they were), although I do think they were wrong. Being wrong is part of being human, especially in a situation like that one. But they still were wrong, and so are you.
llamas and I
And illegal, I suspect. I don’t have it in front of me, but I can’t see it being anything but a civil rights violation to grab someone up with no intention whatsoever of commencing a prosecution, for some purpose not related to the arrest and not justified somewhere else in the law. After all, she did not appear to meet the criteria for a mental-health or detoxification hold, and was too old to be a child welfare case.
Not to claim angelic status here and asbestos suit on: there are circumstances where I would consider exactly what I said as a reasonable course of action. Those circumstances have very, very little to do with the situation at hand with Ms. Konie.
Look at my example about the heart attack patient. In llamas-topia, what would you have done?
There’s a line between “leave them alone” and “interfere or intervene.” I’m trying to understand where you draw it and not having much success.
That got me in trouble once. “You only stopped me because I’m Mexican.” I replied, “You only said that because I’m not.”
It’s her life and her pursuit of happiness. So far, you’re the only person who appears to be calling for interference in her enjoyment of them. It seems to me that preserving her rights requires sticking one’s hands in one’s pockets.
Sunfish,
I can think of a case where a cop is justified (or anybody else for that matter) getting ‘creative’ or breaking the rules.
A neighbor of ours was to be married. He and his fiancé were probably in their early thirties and it was to be a very small wedding. Their friends all came over to their house the day before and they had a party in which the guests of honor got rather wasted. But they were in their own home and not going any where.
As best they can figure out from later, somebody left a large self supporting candle burning on the coffee table next to where he was sleeping/passed out. His wife to be was in a bedroom in a similar state. She woke up in the night to a burning house and still very impaired, didn’t know what to do so she climbed out a window and drove to a friend’s house to get help. Several miles. The friend immediately called the fire department and returned to the house. As the woman began to sober up some, it dawned on her what was happening. The house was totally involved and she tried several times to go in for him. I watched one cop threatening to arrest her for D&D and he finally locked her in his squad because they were afraid she would slip past them. There was clearly no chance of her having been able to save him. It was long past that point before the fire department was even called.
I doubt the cop ever intended to charge her with anything when he locked her in the car. She was on property she was entitled to be on, she was entitled to enter the house, and wasn’t really disturbing anyone. He eventually released her into the custody of her friend. I doubt anyone here would have done any different faced with the probability of her, still impaired, running into the house that was beginning to collapse it was so far involved.
Having stood on our property line, within hearing distance of this event while waiting for good news that he was okay (not to be), I have some room for llamas position on this topic. I think it all comes down to ‘informed consent’. That night, whether from alcohol or emotion, she was quite clearly not capable of informed consent for the consequences of what she was attempting to do. I do not believe that police have any privileges whatsoever in these cases, they are, to borrow from the 1st Earl Mansfield and from Peel, acting as any person should. They simply have better equipment and training to carry out a very civilian purpose.
The ‘little old lady’ in the hurricane appeared to me to be fully capable of informed consent. I will grant that it is possible that factors we don’t know challenge that. But in the NOLA case, everybody’s predictions were speculative. In the case of a jumper or the house fire, they are not.
The test I believe, is whether a private person(s) doing the same thing would be held free from blame for doing that exact same thing. If it cannot pass that test, then police/government should not be permitted the power. I don’t think that the taking of the little old lady’s gun and forcibly removing her from her home, had it been done in the exact same manner by civilians would be the cause of any debate at all. Everybody would be baying for their heads. But I could be wrong about that.