Licence to kill

There is no excuse for shooting and killing an unarmed man, whatever his age, color, physical size, or legal priors. None. Period. The police must be held responsible for their actions. It has nothing to do with race. It is strictly a matter of public policy. Anyone who would argue otherwise is letting their prejudices and paranoia cloud their reasoning. A badge does not give one carte blanc to bully, harass, or control those you've supposedly sworn to protect. Darren Wilson was largely responsible for the situation in which he found himself. According to his own testimony, he was presented with numerous opportunities to calm a developing conflict and time and time again chose instead to throw gasoline on the proverbial fire. Those are the facts, my friend, and they are as straight as a line from point A to point B. No one needed to die in Ferguson. If he's an not-and-out murderer, he's at least a bad cop and should be off the street. His incompetence ultimately cost a life. A trained professional should be held to a higher standard of behavior than a stupid kid with a chip on his shoulder. If former officer Wilson is currently unemployed, it's his own damn fault. I don't hate the man, honestly, but I don't feel sorry for him either.

And, I may add, I have no idea how any of this could possibly be connected to mid-east terrorist groups or legalized abortion except within the disarranged mind of a confirmed conspiracy theorist. Let's get our mental ducks in a row, people, and focus on one subject at a time. The militarizing of local police units is a problem born of both the war on terror and the polarization of economic class and ethnic identity in American politics. Both corporation power and class privilege are effectively guarded by the institutionally accepted right of the police to maim, injure or kill anyone of their choosing without a realistic fear of prosecution, punishment or official public censure. In a perfect world, people behave properly because it's the right thing to do. In the real world, people must be held accountable for their actions; especially those actions performed in the name of the community. Public servants should serve the public and not themselves or their own small group. The job of law enforcement is not to terrorize, rob or control the local population, but to secure property, protect life and assist those in need. In a democracy, public empowerment goes hand in hand with personal responsibility.

Failure to punish the abuse of police power is a license for continued abuse. Law enforcement officials -- being human and fallible -- will inevitably do whatever they are allowed to get away by the the public and their elected representatives. Unless limited by both statute and the desire to enforce statute, the quest for personal power and the desire for group solidarity will almost always trump the public good. In any court room, the most dishonest and dangerous individuals are, more times than not, those representing the state. The more repressive a society, the larger its prison population. Physical control replaces justice as the motivating factor in all interactions between those in power and those in peril. Police states are created out of desperation and maintained out of fear. And the number of petty criminal offenses currently dealt with on a draconian level by federal and state courts is a clear sign of the direction the country is drifting. Darren Wilson isn't the cause of the decline in American jurisprudence, but a symptom of a deeper, more distressing malady now infecting the body politic. His removal -- and the removal of those like him -- is but a first step in the reformation of American democracy.