Forget Protect And Serve: It's Comply and Submit, Officer Safety Über Alles

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that in my original column, I failed to report a second cop-rampage shooting after the LAPD went on its first shooting rampage, twice hitting a 71 year-old woman and injuring her daughter with flying glass when they shot up their vehicle because the police mistook it for Christopher Dorner's vehicle. Two hours later, in the same area, police again opened fire on a pick-up. This time, there were no casualties. Hours later, Dorner’s actual pick-up truck was found on a forest road near Big Bear City.

Read update of the Dorner case at the Express revealing that California authories are using drones in the manhunt of Dorner.

Privileged Police Perfidy

The police have become a state within a state. Their desiderata – “citizen submission” and “compliance” – operate in tandem with their prime directive – “officer safety” – to trump citizens’ constitutional rights and put everyone at risk of the police.

The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that police officers at all levels of the government have no duty to protect citizens yet the police are permitted special privileges and required to protect government officials and property – government of the police, by the police, for the police. To see the absurd extreme to which this judicial mumbo jumbo has been taken in the real world today, WATCH this video of NYPD cowardice in the face of a brutal subway attack on an innocent transit rider and the extremes to which the NYPD and New York courts went to turn the Constitution upside down so they could make the police sovereign over the citizenry.

The courts have held that it is the job of police officers to enforce the law generally, to investigate crimes and arrest criminals. Yet, the definition of “investigate” and “enforce” have been broadened beyond all reasonable imagining to include “pre-crime,” preventive surveillance, detention, and entrapment, which when augmented by the prime directive of “officer safety,” establishes a state within a state existing to perpetuate itself, expand its own power and place the protection of itself above everything else, superseding and negating individuals’ constitutional protections.

We are on our own for protection. Yet legislatures and the courts want to disarm us.

We must defend ourselves but increasingly governments are outlawing self-defense.

Government is the ultimate Catch-22.

As Steven Greenhut observes at LewRockwell.com, police are given every type of immunity and special privilege to delay and deny legal recourse to citizens seeking recompense for police dereliction of duty and abuse. The state will go to any extreme to keep police officers from having to face any kind of accountability for their actions.

And, when one of their own is attacked, the police go berserk, showing no limitation on the use of public resources to track down the perpetrator and worse, endangering innocent bystanders who might cross the path of their hysterical rampage.

When a cop is killed, there is a standard reaction by the police: Fury and hysteria accompanied by a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later police rampage that consumes enormous amounts of public resources and places ordinary citizens in extraordinary danger as collateral damage. The Christopher Dorner case illustrates this privileged police perfidy perfectly in the police reaction to his revenge killing of several LAPD cops. Dorner, a 33-year-old former Los Angeles police officer and former Naval officer who left behind a nine-page Internet manifesto alleging racism and corruption within the LAPD, apparently has gone on a vigilante rampage of his own to give the police a taste of their own medicine. In rection, California authorities have put on a manhunt worthy of Osama bin Laden. And, they already have gunned down an innocent 71 year-old woman because her automobile matched the description of a car Dorner was thought to be driving.

Quite simply, police in America have become a rogue institution, above the law and committing all manner of crimes under the color of law. The Dorner case resembles gang warfare and is exactly what one might expect when gangsters take over the government.