Crazed Cops, "Fallen Heroes"

by Alexander Cockburn

The police chief of Los Angeles, Bernard C. Parks, announces his department's reckoning that 99 people were framed by disgraced ex-officer-turned-informant Rafael Perez and partners. Parks is calling on District Attorney Gil Garcetti to dismiss cases "en masse."

Illinois Gov. George Ryan suspends his state's imposition of the death penalty, declaring that he "cannot support a system which has proven so fraught with error." Since 1977, Illinois has executed 12 and freed 13 from Death Row after their innocence had been conclusively established.

In New York, four officers are going on trial for fatally riddling an unarmed man, Amadou Diallo, with 41 bullets.

A generation's worth of "wars on crime" and glorification of the men and women in blue have engendered a culture of law enforcement that is all too often viciously violent, contemptuous of the law, morally corrupt and brazenly confident of the credulity of the courts. In Los Angeles, prosecutors and judges chose to believe Perez and his partners as they perjured themselves in case after case, year after year. In Chicago, police ignored witnesses and discounted vital testimony as they bustled the innocent on to Death Row. In New York, a plain-clothes posse of heavily armed cops roamed the streets, confident that their lethal onslaught would receive official protection, which it did, until an unprecedented popular uproar brought the perpetrators to book.

These aren't isolated cases. There isn't a state in the union where cops aren't perjuring themselves, using excessive force, targeting minorities. Those endless wars on crime and drugs -- a staple of 90 percent of America's politicians these last 30 years -- have engendered not merely our 2 million prisoners, but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of homicide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers. Time and again, one hears stories attesting to the fact that they are ready, at a moment's notice or a slender pretext, to blow someone away, beat him to a pulp, throw him in the slammer, sew him up with police perjuries and snitch-driven charges, and try to toss him in a dungeon for a quarter-century or more.

I'm in regular touch these days with a Haitian in New Jersey named Max Antoine. In 1996, Max had the misfortune to question the right of three Irvington cops to "act like the Ton Ton Macoutes." Max, a paralegal, remarked this to his sister Marie while the three cops were in the midst of a 2 a.m. warrantless rampage through their house, yelling at partygoers to leave, and shoving them around.

Max, believing that he had come to the land of constitutional protections, told Marie to write down the cops' badge numbers so he could file an official complaint. This was poor judgment on Max's part. On the account of many witnesses, the cops smashed Max with a nightstick, kicked and beat him, shoved his head through a glass door, sprayed him with burning chemicals, tossed him in a cell for two days, and denied him medical attention. Max was left with a fractured eye socket, a broken jaw, bowel and bladder damage and spinal injuries. He went through 17 surgeries, is now paralyzed below the waist, depressed, suicidal and saddled with huge medical bills.

Reportedly having thus effectively destroyed his life, the Irvington police charged him with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. A few weeks ago, on the verge of a trial, the prosecutors dropped the charges. Max's civil suit against the police is pending. The Justice Department has declined to take an interest.

A lot of cops are walking time bombs. Even soothing words spoken to them in a calm voice can spark a red gleam in their eyes. God help you if you're black. The other day, a black man in Los Angeles described the time he spent each day figuring out routes across the city to reduce his chances of getting pulled over, maybe beaten, maybe framed, maybe imprisoned.

Police work is far from being one of America's more dangerous occupations, but cops assiduously cultivate that impression. Police funerals are getting to be on a par with the obsequies of European royalty 50 years ago. Recently, two San Francisco policemen crashed in their helicopter during a routine maintenance flight. Their funeral was attended by a huge throng of police from across California, state officials and the mayor of San Francisco. Would a city engineer or maintenance woman get this kind of send-off, even if their jobs demonstrated a higher statistical risk?

The press feeds obsessively on these "fallen hero" rituals. On Jan. 12, in Unity, Maine, 6-year-old triplets died in a house fire. County Sheriff Robert Jones, also a part-time fireman, was filling a tanker with water a couple of blocks from the blaze when he collapsed and died. It was his 48th birthday. He got a hero's send-off, with massed ranks of state cops in attendance. True, Sheriff Jones might have been on the brink of bold deeds, possibly even entailing the supreme sacrifice, but that seems a frail peg on which to hang a state funeral unless we see it as a demonstration ritual designed to protect the cops' budgetary appropriations and boost their overall image.

The price for decades of this myth-making and boosterism? It's summed up in the absurdity of the recent declaration of the U.S. Supreme Court that flight from a police officer constitutes sound reason for arrest. Actually, it constitutes plain common sense.