"Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent." - Kristian Williams, activist and author
© Reuters/Philip Andrews
Living in a free society means not having to look over your shoulder to see whether the government is watching or fearing that a government agent might perpetuate violence upon you.
Unfortunately, as I detail in my book
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, subjected as we are to government surveillance, body scanners, militarized police, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids, drones, and other trappings of a police state, "we the people" do not live in a free society any longer.
Not only are we no longer a free people but we have become a fearful people, as well, helped along in large part by politicians eager to capitalize on our fears. As Julie Hanus writes for
Utne: "Since the 1980s, society at large has bolted frantically from one panic to the next. Fear of crime reduced us to wrecks, but before long we were also howling about deadly diseases, drug abusers, online pedophiles, avian flu, teens gone wild, mad cows, anthrax, immigrants, environmental collapse, and - let us not forget - terrorists."
Now thanks to an increasingly militarized police force and police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, we've got one more fear to add to that growing list, and with good reason: fear of the police - local, state and federal agents.
Who wouldn't be afraid of police officers who go around shooting unarmed citizens, tasering women - young and old alike, and forcing law-abiding Americans to the ground at gunpoint?
Such was the case when a Missouri police officer shot and wounded an unarmed panhandler. Texas police, during a raid on a home where music was reportedly being played too loudly, repeatedly tasered a 54-year-old grandmother, kicking and punching other members of the household. A 20-year-old Florida woman who was tasered by a police officer while she was handcuffed ended up in a permanent vegetative state and eventually died. And then there was the homeless man who was shot and killed by Albuquerque police for squatting on public land.
Comment: It seems they haven't left! See the following video, 'Mossad agents provocateurs in Ukraine', which states that ex-IDF troops (funded by an "Israeli tycoon"), as well as Mossad, participated (and directed) the original anti-government protests that culminated in the current coup-installed junta:
We wonder if dual Israeli-Ukrainian citizen/oligarch/Dnepropetrovsk governor/Odessa butcher Ihor Kolomoyskyi played any part in this?