During his campaign for President,
Donald John Trump actively sought the support of outlaw bikers and, much
more importantly, the support of people who identify to some extent
with outlaw bikers, which at last glance amounted to about 59,704,886 of
your fellow Americans.
As we previously remarked, Nothing
better represents the traditional American values of independence,
self-sufficiency, courage, anti-authoritarianism, liberty, blood lust
and the unhindered pursuit of putting food in your baby girl’s belly by
any goddamn means necessary than a biker on a V-Twin motorcycle –
preferably a biker on a Harley with forward controls and ape hanger
handlebars. And bare arms. And a little, American flag decal. And a
Bowie knife. And a couple of tattoos.”
Love Bikers
Last April, a noisy group called Bikers
for Trump appeared and then sometime during the Republican Convention in
Cleveland, they disappeared like Brigadoon.
In May, Trump spoke at the annual
Rolling Thunder rally in Washington,. “Look at all these bikers,” Trump
said, standing in front of a statue of the President who presided over
the nation’s most horrific war, a stone’s throw from the sunken, black
chevron which commemorates the lost and the haunted of a war Trump used
his father’s wealth to avoid. “Do we love the bikers? Yes. We love the
bikers.”
On August 13, Ralph Hubert “Sonny”
Barger, the grey eminence of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and the
current incarnation of Daniel Boone, Hawkeye and Wyatt Earp, wrote “I
for one, am voting for Trump, because it’s time to change.”
For the last two days very many
Americans who ride motorcycles and who do not ride motorcycles but who
feel alienated from and picked on by their government and its agents and
who feel misunderstood by and slandered by the American media
establishment have basked in Trump’s victory as if it was their own. But
it may not be.
Restoring Community Safety
Trump relied through most of the
campaign on his blunt and iconoclastic style which was soaked with
attitude and dry of specifics. Starting yesterday with a report by National Public Radio
that has been copied by a thousand or so news outlets so far, reporters
have been wondering what Trump might accomplish in his first hundred
days. All of the reports have relied on a speech Trump gave about two
weeks ago in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a document released at the
same time titled “Donald Trump’s Contract With The American Voter: My 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.”
Among the ten pieces of legislation
President Trump intends to “introduce…and fight for.” Is the “Restoring
Community Safety Act (which) reduces surging crime, drugs and violence
by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for
programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for
federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle
criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.”
Nobody knows what that means yet because
the “Restoring Community Safety Act” doesn’t appear to have actually
been written yet. But it is possible to make some educated guesses.
Police Militarization
First off, Trump seems likely to reverse the half-hearted limits on police militar-ization President Obama suggested last June.
Many readers here are already aware of the concept of extrajudicial punishment by way of Swat raid in service of an indicia warrant issued by a divorce judge under exigent circumstances in the middle of the night.
Radley Balko of The Washington Post has covered the subject extensively and even published a book titled The Rise Of The Warrior Cop
in 2013. Balko wondered: “How did we get here? How did we evolve from a
country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of
armed, standing government forces – a country that enshrined the Fourth
Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old
notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary – to a country
where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in
battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night – not to
apprehend violent fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce
laws against nonviolent, consensual activities.”
In 2014 the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report called War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.
The ACLU protested: “Across the country, heavily armed Special Weapons
and Tactics teams are forcing their way into people’s homes in the
middle of the night, often deploying explosive devices such as flashbang
grenades to temporarily blind and deafen residents, simply to serve a
search warrant on the suspicion that someone may be in possession of a
small amount of drugs. Neighborhoods are not war zones, and our police
officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”
Police militarization has been going on
for a quarter century. It is almost entirely funded by the federal
government, and the limits Obama enforced seemed modest. No tanks. No
artillery. No heavy machine guns larger than .50 caliber. But police
forces across the country immediately protested being “handcuffed” in
the great crusade against reefer and dissent.
Obama saw police militarization are a
matter that resulted from giving police military weapons. The problem is
that ship has sailed. Police militarization is now a mindset. Whether
Trump embraces that mindset or not remains to be seen. But yesterday the
website PoliceOne.com noticed:
“Trump has gone out of his way to demonstrate support for law
enforcement throughout his presidential campaign. He has been
photographed and videotaped on numerous occasions shaking hands with
officers assigned to his protection detail. Officers have, in turn,
overwhelmingly thrown their support to the president-elect, with the
National FOP and myriad other police organizations endorsing the
candidate in the run-up to Election Day.”
So there is some possibility that Trump and the warrior cops might be on the same wavelength.
Money
Secondly, based on Trump’s rhetoric and the way federal police bureaucracies work, expect a new offensive against motorcycle clubs and other fringe groups like militias and wacky religions.
Federal crime fighting works exactly
opposite of how most people think it works. First the federal cops get
the money and then they invent a way to justify getting more. The Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used to police fireworks,
untaxed cigarettes and moonshine. But the Bureau found it could get
millions more by promising to fight “violent motorcycle gangs.” Most
readers here know what happened next – expensive undercover operations.
Motorcycle clubs were easy to infiltrate because they were mostly based
on the idea of brotherhood. They were easy to criminalize because the
undercover agents always offer to buy drugs and guns for ridiculous
prices. So men literally go to gun stores to buy guns to illegally sell
to an undercover agent for twice the price because it is easy money. And
then they go to prison. And the ATF brags about its numbers.
The classic scam is the “guerilla street
theater” drug deal. Men who need money are offered $1,000 by a trusted
friend to provide a couple hours of “security” at some sort of meeting.
They go to a desert airstrip. They are handed guns and bullet proof
vests. A light plane flies in loaded with cocaine. While they watch
their trusted friend unloads the cocaine and hands the “drug dealer” a
suitcase of cash. They take the money and live and let live. Then the
trusted friend turn out to be an undercover agent who has been paid
$200,000 a year for years to ingratiate himself to his targets. He has
handlers and a chase team. The plane is a government plane. The cash is
government cash, The cocaine is government cocaine. The government
spends $60 million to indict, incarcerate, try and incarcerate again
something like ten guys. Everybody gets paid – the informants, the chase
team, the analysts, the Marshals, the prison guards, the judges, the
guys who clean the bathrooms at the palatial federal courthouse.
The root of this official evil is enormous amounts of money to fight contrived crimes.Trump vows to open the spigots on the money pipes.
John W. Terry
Finally, Trump is a great believer in
something called “Stop and Frisk” which, in practice, means authorizing
police to search anybody in public at any time for any reason.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal
on September 27, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who will probably be the next
Attorney General, wrote: “Stop and frisk is based on an 8-1 decision of
the Supreme Court, Terry v. Ohio. That ruling hasn’t been
overturned or even modified by the court since it was handed down in
1968. Stop and frisk is constitutional and the law of the land. The
majority opinion, written by then-Chief Justice Earl Warren, approved
the constitutionality of stopping a suspect if the police officer has a
reasonable suspicion that a person has committed, or was about to
commit, a crime. If the officer also has a reasonable suspicion the
person is armed, he can conduct a pat-down—that is, a frisk—of a
person’s outer clothing.”
The important words in this quote are “Stop and frisk is based on;” as the rocket ship is based on the hot air balloon.
These meet and greets used to be called
Terry stops and the idea behind them was that if a police detective
investigating a crime reasonably feared that the person he was
questioning was armed, he could cursorily pat that suspect’s outer
clothing to reassure himself that the suspect wasn’t about to shoot or
stab him. A policeman’s reasonable fear of harm was always the rationale
for this exception to the Fourth Amendment. Two years before John W.
Terry lost his final appeal, in a case titled Schmerber v. California,
Justice William Brennan had written, “The overriding function of the
Fourth Amendment is to protect personal privacy and dignity against
unwarranted intrusion by the State.”
Trump’s comprehension of Stop and Frisk
is basic – he seems to interpret it as a police right and he argued on
its behalf during the first Presidential Debate. The practice became
part of regular policing in New York City until it was discouraged by a
federal judge. Trump calls her “a very against-police judge.”
Stop And Frisk
The judge was Shira Scheindlin. The class action case was titled Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.
Scheindlin ruled that the way New York conducted Terry stops was
unconstitutional. She wrote that the city had: “received both actual and
constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment
violations occurring as a result of the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices.
Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated
policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread
Fourth Amendment violations…. The NYPD has repeatedly turned a blind
eye to clear evidence of unconstitutional stops and frisks.”
New York cops did not search people they
were interrogating to protect themselves. In New York, cops searched
for loose joints. The most common reason for initiating a search was
“furtive movement.”
In 2011, New York police stopped and
searched about 686,000 people. About 0.13 percent of them were found to
be in possession of a gun – which according to the Terry
decision, is the whole point of the search. Fifteen percent were found
to be in possession of marijuana. Forty-seven thousand women were
stopped and searched. Fifty-nine of them were found to be carrying a
weapon but the stops resulted in about 3,900 arrests of women for other
violations of the law.
Stop and Frisk as a police tactic has
spread throughout the nation. It has become a way to interrogate people
without cause, record their personal data and feed it into the
supercomputers of the fusion centers network. Police in Florida have
been accused of “Stop and Spit,” which uses the Terry exception to collect DNA from people the police decide to stop.
Chicago
Trump thinks Stop And Frisk will bring
down the murder rate in Chicago, for example. Through August, there were
474 murders in Chicago and an additional 2,358 people were shot but
survived. And the city already stops and frisks people in compliance
with the Terry decision. But Trump thinks Chicago police should be encouraged to be more aggressive. In an interview with Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy in September Trump said:
(Police Commissioner of the City of New
York) “Ray Kelly did a great job, and New York was not in a Chicago
situation, but it was really in trouble. It was in bad shape,
crime-wise. And with all the shootings and everything in it, it really,
they – Rudy Giuliani did a great job as mayor, and they really
straightened things out with stop and frisk, and it was used further by
the next mayor, Bloomberg. Now, they just – recently, not so recently,
but fairly recently they stopped it. But stop and frisk worked. We had
tremendous shootings, numbers of shootings. Now Chicago is out of
control. I was really referring to Chicago with stop and frisk. They
asked me about Chicago and I was talking about stop and frisk for
Chicago, where you had 3,000 shootings so far. Three thousand from
January 1. Obviously you can’t let the system go the way it’s going, but
I suggested stop and frisk and some people think that’s a great idea
and some people probably don’t like it, but when you have 3,000 people
shot and so many people dying, it’s worse than some of the places we’re
hearing about like Afghanistan, you know, the war-torn nations. It’s
more dangerous.”
“I think Chicago needs stop and frisk.
People can criticize me for that or people can say whatever they want,
but they asked me about Chicago and I think stop and frisk with good,
strong law and order, but you have to do something, can’t continue the
way it’s going.”
“How it’s not being used in Chicago,” in compliance with Terry v. Ohio,
“ is – to be honest with you, it’s quite unbelievable, and you know the
police, the local police, they know who has a gun who shouldn’t be
having a gun. They understand that.”
