Come on in, pour something, and let’s talk. The subject of the day is force.
Now the dictionary has 35 different definitions for this simple little five-letter word. Oh my, how much mileage we get out of this word. Everything from: Physical power, to strength, to a body of persons (like a sales force) to value, or significance, to bringing out more colors in a picture… all of them are meanings of this simple little word.
With that in mind, I guess it’s no surprise that this word has played such a significant part in my, and in all of our lives. I’ve been in the armed forces, the police force, used deadly force, forced a resolution, multiplied force, forced a stalemate… So many uses. It seems you can’t get away from force. Our nation was born through the use of force, it survives by the use of force, and will, without a doubt someday die by the use of force.
With that in mind, we’re going to look at some of the proper and improper uses of force recently. I’m going to start with Memphis.
Now, of course, the reason Memphis and force appear in the same sentence is the death of Tyre Nichols and the Memphis Police Force.
I find some really interesting things in this whole disaster. First, we don’t know WHY the members of the task force (that word again) pulled Mr. Nichols over. That part of the video has not been released. That alone makes me really curious. Then we have the question of just what did Mr. Nichols do that generated that level of violence, and finally, we have the question of why the hell didn’t the Paramedics treat Nickols while he was alive? Why did they stand there for over five minutes, and watch him suffer???
I’m going to start with the observation that the history of Memphis and the history of corruption in the US Government are synonymous. Memphis may not be as famous for its corruption as NYC, or Chicago, but frankly, that’s because Memphis is better at it. From the founding of Memphis, and its bribery of the railroad to terminate at their city, becoming the “Memphis & Charleston Railroad,” through the smuggling of cotton during the Civil War and a post-war massacre of blacks by Irish settlers in 1866, on through the Crump Machine politics of the first half of the twentieth century and on into the 60s. To the machine politics of today, Memphis is nearly as badly bent as New Orleans, and without the class of The Big Easy.
Now let’s look at the police unit that the “officers” were a part of. I love the mental gymnastics that they had to go through to get this acronym, get this: Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION.
Holy shit, people. That’s the sort of acronym you use for a Special Operations Executive (SOE) team out of WW II, or some CIA unit in South America where “dead is cheaper than extradited.” That’s NOT the sort of unit name you use for a special task force to reduce crime in a neighborhood unless you WANT the cops in it to see the patrol area as “the enemy.” Look, words have power, and command climate is a thing! That sort of climate is toxic.
That said, I have to wonder, based on history in that city, if this wasn’t a gang hit. Yes, I know, “but the guys that killed Nichols were COPS.” Well, here’s a sad but true fact. There’re dirty cops too, and there are cops in gangs (or owned by them.) When you factor in the number of cops that dogpiled this guy, and the fact that the EMTs just stood by… I’m really wondering if Nichols wasn’t in a rival gang to the one that controlled that area of Memphis and if the cops and EMTs weren’t bent.
All of that is reason to hang the five cops and the EMTs, lacking some far better explanation for their actions than anyone has posted so far. Now, I am sure that Nichols wasn’t pure as the driven snow. His momma’s claims that “he was a good boy that didn’t-do-nuffin” aside, (because every thug life motherfucker’s mother claims that.) I suspect that Nichols was bent. That doesn’t excuse killing him. The lack of violence toward the cops completely negates any claims for the lawful use of force. This was a murder, and quite possibly a hit.
What I DON’T buy, is the claims by “Buy Large Mansions” and that race-baiting bastard Sharpton that this was “about racism.” The claim that “well they’re cops, so they’re white by proxy” that is being sung by the Washington Post, CNN, and the rest of the usual suspects, is ridiculous. Even the WP is forced to admit (down in paragraph 6) that “studies have shown that police officers of color use force less frequently against Black civilians than their White counterparts,” though they finish the statement with “analysts say the improvement is marginal.” Source. Interestingly, the study they link to, says no such thing! Here’s the study. Source. And here’s the money shot: “The study, the most fine-grained of its kind to date, “is really valuable,” says Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law at Columbia University who was not involved in the work. “A lot of other studies out there have tried to use officer race as a benchmark test for discrimination … [but this one] got much more precise estimates of what the police workplace actually looks like.”
The only analyst that says the improvement is marginal, is Samuel Sinyangwe, president of Mapping Police Violence. Now call it unreasonable suspicion on my part, but I think this guy has a horse in the race. The left is trying to make this systemic, and bring back the whole ACAB thing (All Cops Are Bastards) and with it “all cops are white.” Horse shit. Is there rottenness in the Memphis PD? Oh, almost assuredly. Does it have anything to do with the Police in general or race in general? Not a chance.
The claims that “This is systemic racism” is an excuse to gouge more money from the system, and denies the agency of the individual man. People are people, there are good ones and bad ones. They have control of their actions. There’s a quote in the WP article that is telling. “All your skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” (from Jason Sole, a community organizer in Minneapolis and former head of the local NAACP) Pardon me, but that sounds to me like he expects special consideration (kinfolk) for his blackness from black officers, and because he doesn’t get it, “well, they must be racist too!”
The claims for the last 50 years that ‘well it’s society’s fault’ or ‘they come from a failed family’, or ‘they didn’t know any better’ or any other duck-billed platitude to free the individual from the results of their actions is a scam. Somewhere in that set of claims, you will find a little statement “if only we spend more money on X this will all be better.”
We’ve been spending more money on X ever since El Blow Job’s “Great Society.” It’s only gotten worse. The time has come to admit that the approach has been tested, and failed.
Moving on…
Before I get into the latest president Biden idiocy, I want to reflect on the “Use of force” in general.
During my time as a police officer, an officer in a neighboring jurisdiction had been hung out to dry by his department, when a prosecutor decided to “send a message.” The officer used his flashlight (we all carried the big Streamlights in those days) to defend himself from an assailant with a knife. He had been writing a citation on the side of the road, and the assailant grabbed the knife that he had in a back sheath and charged the officer. Cop defends against the knife with his ticket book (in an aluminum clipboard) and swings the light he was using to see to write. Well, he hit this guy and unfortunately, hit him in the head, killing him.
The prosecutor charges the officer with manslaughter, wins (loses on appeal) costs the officer his job, his good name, and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The justification? He was not trained to use a flashlight as an impact weapon, therefore, he exceeded his training, and violated the SOPs! (he should have used one of the tools he was trained on, said the prosecutor. This was “excessive force!”) Mind you, he would have been golden if he had shot the guy!
My department requested a meeting with all the lawyers in the D/A’s office. We gave them our duty belts with everything on, so they have “all the tools” (ASP, Taser, pepper spray, radio, “blue guns” (inert shapes) clipboards, and flashlights) we then line them up, have them get in ticket writing mode, (clipboard and pen in hands, flashlight held on the shoulder by the side of their head) walked back 21 feet, and said “I am going to stab you with this rubber knife, I will advance, at a WALK” pulled out rubber knives, and proceeded to “kill” each lawyer. Most of them didn’t even get their hands on their guns before we slashed their throats.
We then corrected their behavior. “DON’T JUST STAND THERE! Get off the line of advance and don’t care about damaging the clipboard, just drop the thing if you have to.” And then we repeated the exercise, and “killed” them all again.
We then reset, and said “you can use anything you have to stop me! If I am coming to kill you, deadly force is authorized, and it doesn’t matter how you apply it!” This time, half of them lived by clocking their opponent with the flashlight while drawing their guns. After that, we heard no more about “well you’re not trained to use that for deadly force.”
The moral of the story is:” Use of force is the use of force. If authorized, due to fear for your life or the life of another, it doesn’t matter how you use force. It can be a gun, a knife, a CAR (yes, it’s happened.), and it doesn’t matter what the guy is armed with, if it can kill you, you can use whatever you have, to defend yourself.”
The second story involves a guy I know, we’ll call him Jim. Now Jim is a big man, both tall (6′6″ or more) and fat (probably went 400 lbs when these events happened) Jim worked in a rather iffy area of Seattle. Jim is not only big, and fat, he’s a trained and very good fighter with swords and other medieval weapons, and a regular Tournament winner, who knows how to put every one of those pounds behind his sword. Jim was at his car preparing to get in it when accosted by five young gentlemen who were a part of the riots that went down several years ago in Seattle. They were all armed with pipes or other blunt objects, and told him that they were going to “Fuck you up, you white ass motherfucker, and teach you to come to our city.”
Jim did not have a gun on that day. But he did have his fighting gear in the back seat because he was going to fighter practice after work. Jim grabbed his fighting sword (a piece of 2-inch thick rattan with a basket hilt and taped up so that if it breaks, which they do, pieces don’t go flying) He then proceeds to give the nearest assailant an open fracture of his femur with a single blow. The rest of this guy’s crew got one look at that, and suddenly remembered appointments across town that they were late for, leaving him screaming and bleeding in the street. Jim quickly got in his car and got the hell out of there. Jim no longer travels anywhere without a firearm.
The moral of this story is: Unless you’re badass enough to break a guy’s bone, leaving it sticking out of the side of his leg, and have an impact weapon capable of doing that ready to hand… If you are assaulted by people who mean to do you harm, you better have the means to defend yourself, or you will die. Jim is such a badass, and yet now carries everywhere, because the next time, they might not take “no” for an answer, even if that “no” is delivered in a very graphic format. He told me that he wasn’t sure even after he broke the first guy, that they weren’t going to kill him.
I related these stories to give you something to reflect on as we talk about the President’s speech.
Our Meat Puppet in Chief gave a little talk on MLK day, that resurrected some force statements that he’s mumbled incoherently before. First, of course, there was the non-compos-mentos moment while singing “Happy Birthday” to Reverend King’s wife, where he forgot her name, and addressed her as Valvey. (her name is Arndrea Walters King.) Of course, he tried to gaslight the world, claiming that “when I took over the economy was flat on its back and gas was over $5 a gallon… Continued with calling the opposition party “Fiscally demented.” Wow, Joe, uh, that’s a little rich coming from someone that can’t even read a fucking teleprompter.
But the pieces I want to address are more on (or moron) the use of force, both by police officers against criminals and by the government against citizens.
First, there’s Joe “Just fire a shotgun into the air” saying “We have to retrain cops as to why should you always shoot for — with deadly force. The fact is, if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that.”
Joe, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. This ain’t a 1940s Oat burner movie, where the guy in the white hat can shoot the gun out of the hand of the evil guy in the black hat. That’s just not the way it works. The best marksmen in the world, if presented by a man with a gun, at pistol range isn’t going to try for the moving target that is the gun hand. They’re going to shoot center of mass, like they’ve been taught, and have taught others, shooting to stop.
Let us take a brief look at the use of force rules for Deadly force. Source; 10 CFR 1047.7
§ 1047.7 Use of deadly force.
(a) Deadly force means that force which a reasonable person would consider likely to cause death or serious bodily harm. Its use may be justified only under conditions of extreme necessity, when all lesser means have failed or cannot reasonably be employed. A protective force officer is authorized to use deadly force only when one or more of the following circumstances exists:
(1) Self-Defense. When deadly force reasonably appears to be necessary to protect a protective force officer who reasonably believes himself or herself to be in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm.
(2) Serious offenses against persons. When deadly force reasonably appears to be necessary to prevent the commission of a serious offense against a person(s) in circumstances presenting an imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm (e.g. sabotage of an occupied facility by explosives).
(3) Nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices. When deadly force reasonably appears to be necessary to prevent the theft, sabotage, or unauthorized control of a nuclear weapon or nuclear explosive device.
(4) Special nuclear material. When deadly force reasonably appears to be necessary to prevent the theft, sabotage, or unauthorized control of special nuclear material from an area of a fixed site or from a shipment where Category II or greater quantities are known or reasonably believed to be present.
(5) Apprehension. When deadly force reasonably appears to be necessary to apprehend or prevent the escape of a person reasonably believed to: (i) have committed an offense of the nature specified in paragraphs (a)(1) through (a)(4) 1 of this section; or (ii) be escaping by use of a weapon or explosive or who otherwise indicates that he or she poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the protective force officer or others unless apprehended without delay.
1 These offenses are considered by the Department of Energy to pose a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm.
(b) Additional Considerations Involving Firearms. If it becomes necessary to use a firearm, the following precautions shall be observed:
(1) A warning, e.g. an order to halt, shall be given, if feasible, before a shot is fired.
(2) Warning shots shall not be fired.
With the exception of the bits about nuclear weapons, that mirrors the use of deadly force rules for every police force in the nation.
Joe wants cops to “shoot the bad guy in the leg.” Joe, I’ve been shot in the leg. (Well, in the ass, but that’s a different story.) It didn’t stop me from being able to shoot back. The only thing that stops someone from being able to shoot back, is shooting them in such a way that they can not continue to return fire. That means a debilitating shot. Either something that causes enough blood loss that the human hydraulic system no longer works, or something that turns off the neuro-system. (Either by pain overwhelming the system, or by completely shutting it down, IE dead.) Go up and review that deadly force piece again. I’ll wait.
Back? Good. If the person getting shot at has crossed one of those lines to the point that deadly force is authorized, you MUST stop their actions, or you or someone else is going to die. A shot in the leg ain’t gonna cut it. Maybe if you are a civilian, maybe it will cut it.
Jim got LUCKY that the gentlemen who accosted him lacked the courage of their convictions. Honestly, he probably could have taken them all, I’ve seen him take on five squires at once and win… But if one of them had gotten lucky and hurt him, he would be dead when the others piled on. He had no chance of taking them into custody. If he had been a cop, he just let four armed individuals that have expressed a desire, will, and having means, to hurt or kill innocent individuals free to do their worst. In short, he would have failed to serve and protect. That is a cop’s job: Keep people that are willing and able to hurt people, from doing so. Sometimes that involves force.
So that’s Joe on how to deal with criminals. Shoot em in the leg and hope they won’t shoot back… But there’s another Joe, when it comes to the use of force.
There’s the Joe that wants to deal with your fellow citizens. Specifically your fellow citizens, or you personally, that own an “assault weapon” which he has on several occasions identified as ANY SEMI-AUTOMATIC FIREARM.
This Joe, is, well, a bit more pro “use-however-much-force-is-required” and says “I am going to get assault weapons banned” because “I did it once, I’ll do it again.” Going on to say: “There’s no social redeeming value. Deer aren’t wearing Kevlar vests out there. What the hell do you need an assault — no, I’m serious. And ban the number of bullets that go in a magazine. There’s no — no need for any of that.”
Wut? (picture a mentally challenged person here) “ban the number of bullets that go in a magazine?” what the fuck does that mean?
To go on, He revisits something he’s said several times before: “I love my right-wing friends who talk about “the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots.” Give me a — if you need to worry about taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s. You don’t need an AR-15. I’m serious. Think about it.”
So, when dealing with criminals, shoot them in the leg. When dealing with people who refuse to give up legal firearms, bomb them with F-15s, got it? Now, this is at least the fourth time he’s threatened to use the military against citizens over the second amendment. There are at least 20 million Americans in possession of AR-15s alone. But hey, they’re the enemy, right?
Well, Joe, you’re right. An AR-15 can’t fight an F-15. Just like an AK-47 can’t fight an F-15. Why do I bring up AK-47s you ask? Oh, come on, Joe, you remember them, they’re the chosen weapon of the Mahajan.
You remember them?
The guys that made you run out of Afghanistan with your tail between your legs, leaving billions of pieces of gear, from fighter jets to main battle tanks to rifles and radios behind?
Joe, those guys didn’t have fighter jets either.
But what they did have is the backing of enough of the population, and the ability to keep the guy that fixes the fighter jet from getting to the hanger.
The guy that drives the fuel truck didn’t make it in either.
The pilot quit and joined the Mahajan. Suddenly your jets are worthless because the people that fly and maintain them are either on the other side or dead.
That’s what happened when you tried to take on a bunch of people that were not willing to be cowed, not willing to be converted and were just too stubborn to quit. I speak of course of the Afghanis, I don’t know anyone else like that (he says, tongue firmly in cheek.)
When our president wants us to avoid at all costs killing people that are shooting at cops or otherwise doing something that authorizes deadly force but is more than willing to use fighter jets to put down people that aren’t willing to go along with his social engineering??? That just might be more of a problem than “systemic racism.”
