The Cost Of Obama’s Beer Fest Failure Is More Tasered Moms

I wrote a series of posts about the incident surrounding Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. First, it was an illegal and unconstitutional arrest because of the abuse of police power and discretion. Second, irrespective of whether it was a racially motivated moment, it was one from which serious discussion could, and should, ensue. Third, that it was a teaching moment being given short shrift by the clumsy way Barack Obama inserted himself into it and then tried to extricate himself through the bogus "beer summit".

The thing that got me up in arms, from the start, is the undeniable fact that Gates’ arrest was illegal and an abuse of police power. As I described, take Gates’ conduct at its worst as described by the Cambridge police report, and the conduct simply does not meet the elements of disorderly conduct as arrested and charged on under the Massachusetts statute. There was no probable cause or legal basis for the arrest; it was simply a case of contempt of cop, and Sergeant Crowley decided to use the time honored police way of dealing with citizens in such situations, he abused his authority and badge by arresting the citizen.

The only thing unique about the Gates case is that it ended without serious harm to the citizen and it pierced the national conscience. The same base conduct plays out every minute of every day somewhere in the US. But the Gates/Crowley moment appears to have been lost without any intelligent discussion of the rampant abuse of police power and authority. Save for the opinions of Jonathan Turley and Jeff Toobin, which were minimized by MSNBC and CNN television coverage, there was precious little recognition by major media outlets of the root point of police power abuse.

Well, the scene in the video attached hereto is what happens in a society that refuses to address overreaching authoritarianism and unrestrained police projection. Moms with kids in minivans get Tasered and roughed up. In front of their children. Why? Because the cops can with relative impunity. The "Blue Line" circles the wagons around their fellow officers, prosecutors need their cooperation for prosecution and trials in actual major cases, and politicians are too cravenly worried about their next election to care. As Digby says:

If this is what they do when they have a video camera rolling in their own car, what do you suppose happens when one isn’t?

I guess the taser saved the officer the physical effort of hitting her over the head with his baton or shooting her to gain compliance, so that’s good.

No kidding. By the way, Digby writes relentlessly on the misuse and abuse of Taser devices by police around the country and every post is chilling and worth reading.

Jeffe Kaye gave a wonderful quote in the last post that touches on the broader phenomenon:

I think it’s something worse, a continuing creeping totalitarianism. One one side it’s state-sponsored, in the sense of violations of civil liberties, the solidification of the surveillance state, further intrusiveness into private lives and behaviors. On this score, one can find common ground with right-wing libertarians. On the other side, it’s a failure by the civil establishment, who have sided with fear: fear to speak out, fear of the truth, fear of loss of comfort, fear of what will happen to our children, fear of isolation, fear that life will end too soon and we will have missed out, fear of living fully and fear of dying.

And this is the greater discussion we were kept from having by Obama’s personal insertion and extrication of himself in the Gates incident. Abuse of police power and authority is a huge problem in this country and we need to have that discussion. Craven Republicans croon the fraudulent meme about pulling the plug on Grandma; what about the real electrical plugs being fired into Mom?