The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Armed forces should not interfere in politcs

and that includes paramilitary forces.  The NYPD are definitely a paramilitary force.

This is “how to keep your democracy” 101, along with “don’t allow oligarchs”, and “don’t let money printing get of hand.”

Those in military or paramilitary forces who interfere with politics should be removed from their positions and relegated to civilian life, where they may demonstrate to their hearts content.

I note, also, that NYPD protesters somehow to don’t get beaten and arrested like other protests.

Courtesy of JustPlainDave, I present:

N.Y. ELN. LAW § 17-110 : NY Code – Section 17-110: Misdemeanors concerning police commissioners or officers or members of any police force
Any person who, being a police commissioner or any officer or member of any police force in this state: 1. Uses or threatens or attempts to use his official power or authority, in any manner, directly or indirectly, in aid of or against any political party, organization, association or society, or to control, affect, influence, reward or punish, the political adherence, affiliation, action, expression or opinion of any citizen; or 2. Appoints, promotes, transfers, retires or punishes an officer or member of a police force, or asks for or aids in the promotion, transfer, retirement or punishment of an officer or member of a police force because of the party adherence or affiliation of such officer or member, or for or on the request, direct or indirect, of any political party, organization, association or society, or of any officer, member of a committee or representative official or otherwise of any political party, organization, association or society; or 3. Solicits, collects or receives any money for, any political fund, club, association, society or committee, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

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24 Comments

  1. JustPlainDave

    I have a hard time seeing the NYPD as a truly paramilitary force. I’ve seen a fair number of paramilitary police formations that one can make lots better arguments for – the pre-unification german border police, the Carabinieri, Guardia Civil, Gendarmerie National, elements of the Jordanian national police, etc. Contrary to what some services might appear to believe, paramilitary means something more than having zippy toys and a well thumbed 5.11 catalogue. I’ve never come across a really good definition of paramilitary policing organizations (and interestingly many of the patterns that could previously have served as the basis of a definition have shifted over the past 10-15 years in lots of jurisdictions), but it seems to me that to be truly paramilitary the organization has to at a minimum work at the national level (i.e., not answer to the local political powers) and probably to have military origins.

    More broadly, I’m wary of using “paramilitary” as an all purpose epithet – my observation has been that in western countries, military organizations in the ACP (Aid to the Civil Power) role would probably be preferable to the typical local policing organization “gooned up” with the types of toys that appear when threat levels get high.

  2. ArtS

    I wonder why JustPlainDave is nitpicking over the use of the term “paramilitary” in regards to the NYPD.

    I think that the term paramilitary is rather mild.

    Police forces allowed, practically encouraged, to deal out “street justice,” up to and including execution can easily morph into “Brown Shirt” style intimidation squads, Central American type death squads or some other equally bad but uniquely American alternative.

    JustPlainDave is acting as an apologist for police brutality of the worse sort under the cover of pedantry.

    JustPlainDave and other police apologists can be straightforward and just make his case in favor of police brutality and the politicization and militarization of the police forces so evidently occurring today in the US.

  3. JustPlainDave

    If pedantry means believing paramilitary should be defined as something other than “something well-meaning middle class people don’t like in their backyard” I guess I’m a pedant.

    A little analytical hint – truly paramilitary services wouldn’t have pulled this little piece of street theatre. The “-military” part of their mindset / tradition – not to mention the stronger controls they tend to be subject to – would have precluded it. My broader point is that this situation is actually somewhat *worse* than having paramilitary forces in the most important ways.

    As to whether that constitutes being apologist, well all I have to say is there are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

  4. hvd

    I really don’t care what term is used to denominate the NYC police force. Their behavior speaks for itself.

    This is true every day in every way on the streets of this city and reaches its symbolic apotheosis in this present case of uniformed police officers turning their back on the chief representative of civilian authority – the mayor.

    If there was any doubt that civilian authority is dead in the US of A this should end that doubt. For some of us it is obvious every time a cop is rude to a citizen or as in the cases in NYC, Ohio, Missouri and many, many other places much, much worse. Respect should flow first from uniformed cops to citizens. This is what protect and serve and all of their b.s. mottos are supposed to mean.

    This of course started to fall apart when quaint reminders of a far distant past like the Constitution were construed as shackling the “powers” of the cops rather than as being the ground rules for their behavior in dealing with we the people the supposed source of all power.

    Whether they are police, para military, military their first duty is to respect civilian authority. The mayor was elected by the people of NYC and as such is their spokesman. When the cops behave as they are doing they make clear that they, not civilian authority, is paramount. And we all know what that means.

  5. Everythings Jake

    Many probably saw on Naked Capitalism, but in case not:

    David Whitehouse: Origins of the Police

  6. Russ

    Ian,

    A slightly different question, what is your litmus test for when civilians should feel justified in overthrowing a government? By that I mean, could you describe specific actions by a government that should normally provoke such a response? Just curious to hear your views on the subject.

  7. S Brennan

    Everybody’s entitled to an opinion, so let me offer this in response to JPD’s comment:

    “…it seems to me that to be truly paramilitary the organization has to at a minimum work at the national level”

    Didn’t President Obama’s coordination of a simultaneous national take-down* of occupy-Wall-Street’s constitute “work at the national level”?

    *Who could forget Ezra Klein’s gushing column in support of the Police take-down, that said, in essence, “police suppression of occupy-Wall-Street enhances the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”

    That column was, as they say, a real knee slapper.

    I can’t believe posted on Ezra’s, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum’s original blogs…I will forever be shamed by my participation with people who went on to support neo-facist policy.

  8. V. Arnold

    Don’t the fusion centers constitute a national policing?

  9. Paramilitary. Bahh.

    The armed political theatre and threats of police violence against civilian authority and civil liberties hardly constitutes “(para)military” behavior.

    This was just a bunch of armed thugs looting our democracy.

    Granted, they are heavily armed and have state sanctioned power to inflict extreme violence and killing. But, ultimately, they are just a gang of looters, smashing the walls of civil society, grabbing a few shreds of democracy (just a few boxes that are still on the shelf & within the “sell-by” date) and running down the street with it.

  10. JustPlainDave

    I think this is quite a bit different from “coppers are rude == civilian authority over policing is dead”. From what I have seen in your country, coppers are rude because of some very peculiar policing norms lightly layered on top of much more profound class, economic and cultural differentiations. From the inside it’s probably not so apparent to you all, but from the outside, let me tell you, it’s blindingly obvious – you guys are complete assholes to each other. That’s the cultural norm and it ranges across the entire spectrum of personal and political interaction, from a near total inability to say please and thank you, through allocation of social spending. The guy/gal with a gun on his/her hip wielding the authority of the state is not going to somehow be magically different.

    The real issue around lack of effective civilian oversight of policing, I would lay squarely at the feet of the politicians and the electorate. The horse bolts when the rider doesn’t use the reins and your riders have chosen – over something like three decades – not to use the reins. When it comes to the task of oversight, your politicians seem to me to be various caricatures ranging from guys who only write bigger and bigger policing cheques in the name of “supporting the troops” on one end, through to frothing, pseudo-populist power gainers on the other. Folks that I would trust to be thoughtful and “big-picture” enough to oversee this sort of thing are few and far between – and I see no sign that the electorate rewards them at all. Oversight of the use of force is a bitch of a task in democracies and it is particularly so when policing is the best job a 21 year old male with a high school diploma and an honourable discharge could ever hope to get. If folks want this particular knot of issues to change significantly, they have to politically reward politicians who are willing to wade into this swamp of ambiguity and, probably more importantly, they have to encourage kids with “better options” that policing might be a good thing to do with their lives.

    As to whether the types of intelligence sharing and “co-ordination” seen in policing response to the Occupy movement (and in fusion centres more generally) provide enough “federality” to make things paramilitary, I’d have to say no. I spent some time last night reading through the message traffic billed as the smoking gun for the response to Occupy and it’s frankly a pile of chaotic, discombobulated shit. There’s basically no directive authority at all and it’s nearly entirely media communications driven and making sure that no one federal gets splashed with PR shit. Message traffic for real organizations – those with some “there” there and that actually do things – is much different. Everything that I have seen about these formations says to me that they are hugely variable in capabilities (with most being on the low end of the spectrum) and likely not worth the resources that they are sucking down. They certainly do not form an effective paramilitary “backbone”.

  11. CMike

    V. Arnold makes an interesting “quacks like a duck” point. [LINK]

  12. Tom Halle

    JustPlainDave – where, pray tell, are you writing from?

  13. jerry denim

    A couple of summers ago I watched an older sunburnt granny in a bikini venture out onto one of the jetties at Rockaway beach with a 16 ounce Budweiser in hand and a Kool 100 dangling from her lip. One of those completely obnoxious college-aged, cocky-as-hell lifeguards set off after her; blowing his whistle, screaming profanities and such and she appropriately gave it right back to the little prick. Well our little hero in red shorts had his feelings hurt because granny on holiday did not respect his authority. The lifeguard then calls up the brave boys in blue for reinforcement (this is where this story gets weird) and lo and behold if inside of 10 minutes the NYPD sends no less than TWO UH-60 BlackHawk helicopters, THREE scary looking Navy-seal type gun boats and at least THIRTY black body-armor clad paramilitary (yes PARAMILITARY, I said it) style police with fully automatic weapons to subdue the 68 year old enemy of freedom smoking a Kool and having a Bud on the jetty in a bikini.

    The NYPD is a paramilitary force that is armed as such and just itching to go to war on somebody. They also apparently have tax dollars streaming out their ass and don’t mind burning great piles of money on a nice summer afternoon. Multiple Black-Hawks and gun boats for a disorderly conduct citation? Wow.

  14. bob mcmanus

    A slightly different question, what is your litmus test for when civilians should feel justified in overthrowing a government?

    Whenever they want to and whenever they can. It’s called democracy, power to the people, right on. Seriously, gov’ts derive legitimacy from the people who don’t need no stinking justification. The “whenever they can” is the part that measures costs and benefits, and probably implies a supermajority of citizens.

    A trickier question involves a coup, vanguard, or other small minority, and most revolutions usually devolve down to what participants feel correct in doing. I personally don’t believe gov’ts groups or movements have any morality greater than the sum of their constituent individuals.

    So I tend to disagree with Ian. The police or the “I Can’t Breathe” protesters can do what they want constrained by what they can get away with. Politics is outside the law.

  15. Lisa FOS

    This is just a continuation of long term trends.

    The Prison State of America by Chris Hedges
    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_prison_state_of_america_20141228

    The ‘wet dream’ of many in the elite is this sort of ‘corporate totalitarianism’. With each piece of the puzzle being steadily put into place (that includes the TPP and TAP).

    The economic elites and national security/military/police/etc ones (NS for short) are in lockstep over this. Each gains what they want, money for one, power for the other.

    The sheer momentum built up over this is virtually unstoppable. This is despite the inherent contradictions. An impoverished population cannot buy anything while the NS state depends on massive amounts of taxpayers money, which since the elites don’t pay taxes and the general population gets ever poorer then it is a self defeating system

    Though it could take decades for it all to play out, in the end the economic elites will pull the plug on the NS ones, or the NS ones will attack the economic elites.

    Meanwhile ordinary people will be squeezed between the two, subject to ever greater NS totalitarianism and economic repression from the two predators elites.

    So, unless there is a total collapse in the near term, or some sort of miraculous turn away from the trend, then the future is very bleak for ordinary US citizens (and in countries that follow this US model).

  16. JustPlainDave

    If you were looking at UH-60/S70 airframes, by definition you weren’t looking at the NYPD – they don’t operate the type (pubs say they run a mix of 412s in the medium role and Augusta 119s [transitioning to to 429s] in the light role). Similarly, if the boats were running mounted guns, I don’t think they were NYPD – haven’t seen anything NYPD with mounts, but the USCG runs large numbers of identical hulls with M240s mounted.

    FWIW, I write from Canada, a relative paradise of politeness, proper spelling, and the Oxford comma.

  17. S Brennan

    OT,

    But a [?]/comment & NSA/Pravda-esque alert; YouTube’s RT- Gorbachev-“US Needs Perestroika” seems to be blocked by [?],my whole system goes down and needs to be rebooted when I try to access it…but works fine for everything else. Can anybody [USA] access RT- Gorbachev-“US Needs Perestroika”?

    Thanks…

  18. Lisa FOS

    jerry denim: and the difference between them and the Brown Shirts are? More firepower basically.

    These are not ‘accidents’ this is downright oppression. A ‘boot stamping hard’ and all that.

    If you are a small person…then that boot stamps real hard for the smallest infraction. If you are a big person…then you are immune from all laws. The perfect corporate totalitarian (sometimes called fascist) mafia state.

    Best forecast, from the 60s/70s of current US society was the novel Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. Read it…..

    Going to get worse….lots worse……

  19. Jerry Denim

    “If you were looking at UH-60/S70 airframes, by definition you weren’t looking at the NYPD – they don’t operate the type (pubs say they run a mix of 412s in the medium role and Augusta 119s [transitioning to to 429s] in the light role). Similarly, if the boats were running mounted guns, I don’t think they were NYPD – haven’t seen anything NYPD with mounts, but the USCG runs large numbers of identical hulls with M240s mounted.”

    Your fancy internet glasses let you see all the way from Canada to Rockaway beach JP Dave?

    Reflecting back on that day my memory may be a bit off on the type of helicopters, I’ve never really been a helicopter guy, but they definitely weren’t your standard issue police Bells. Both had that Marine/Navy look to them. Maybe they were Augustas or maybe they were some type of Sikorsky like I said operated by a classified NYPD terror force unit that smarty pants internet prowlers like yourself can’t read about on a Wikipedia page. Kinda like Ray Kelly’s anti-aircraft weapons he likes to mention but not talk about. And yes, the boats had big mounted guns. They weren’t white and orange either, and no I wouldn’t think you would see many of those in Canada.

  20. JustPlainDave

    Jerry, one thing that you frequently hear out of int people is that about 90% of required intelligence is open source (I’m a bit suspicious of the exact precision of this number because it’s never been backed by any methodology I’ve been able to find – and a substantial percentage of the folks that have ever said this to me said with their very next breath that the percentages of the open source intelligence in *their* specific int sub-speciality was much lower [i.e., they were special] – that said, whatever the number is, it’s large). One of the first things that folks do when they hear something new is to confront it against the pubs and open source material for integration. For analysts who can integrate a lot of information quickly, these sources contain a lot of useful nuggets – such as the fact that Ray Kelly’s air to air weapon is a helo with a door mounted Barrett .50 (USCG runs the same system very effectively against the small boat threat, but against aircraft I wish them the best of luck) and the relevant potential players run a mix of monochrome and red/white hulls in this type. What colours were all these?

  21. jump

    jpd
    Perhaps you would have better reception to your comments if you dropped some ‘u’s , didn’t worry about commas so much, worried less about facts, and maybe were a little less polite about the whole matter. Just sayin 🙂

  22. Kidney Man

    [accidentally hit submit while composing–sorry]

    I watched “Beverly Hills Cop” for the first time recently. It’s interesting how BHC craftily ju-jitsus liberal impulses–Axel Foley is portrayed as the scrappy underdog fighting a rigid system, and he does it by repeatedly flouting the very sorts of restrictions on the arbitrary use of state power that are supposed to protect the scrappy underdog from the rigid system.

    Foley ridicules the L.A. police for holding each other to the law rather than following a “blue code” (though I’m profoundly dubious as to whether the LAPD ever actually behaved this way–and I note that the opening narration of “Person of Interest” takes a very similar tack). The warrantless search that leads to the climactic gun-battle is justified by a “ticking bomb”-style scenario, one that doesn’t really hold up to close scrutiny.

    It seems to me the “slippery slope” isn’t always a fallacy, and that the “outlaw cop” genre of the early ’80s was the start of the trend that led up to the sort of authoritarian pornography that dominates the media now.

  23. Tom Halle

    JustPlainDave,

    My second mission in life, when not focused on my citizenly duties defending our great national and global institutions against subversion from the reactionaries, is to stand up for the Oxford comma. It looks right, it reads right, and it is the right thing to do. 🙂

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