Are You Unhappy With Government?

by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: When
Homeland Security Theater Goes Off-Script



“What
does it hurt,” asked
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Florida’s Palm Beach County, “to have
somebody knock on the door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”

The answer
to that question obviously depends on the identity of the “Somebody”
who is making that inquiry. What Sheriff Bradshaw had
in mind
was a strike force composed of deputies, social workers,
and “mental health” professionals from a “Behavioral
Sciences Unit” (BSU) who would be on-call twenty-four hours
a day, ready to be deployed to visit the homes of what the Soviets
used to call “socially dangerous people.” In the Soviet
Union, such people would often be involuntarily committed to a psihuska,
or psychiatric prison.

“We want
people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government,
hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradhsaw told the
Palm Beach Post in describing the BSU, which would be funded
through a $1 million grant from the state government. That grant
hasn’t been formalized, but if the state legislature balks, it’s
quite likely the Feds will chip in: In
a speech last February 6 to the Alliance of DelRay Residential Organizations
,
Bradshaw said that he would prefer to fund the unit “through
a federal grant.”

This is precisely
the kind of pilot program the Feds would find worthwhile – indeed,
it represents a model of “preventive intervention” that
the federal government has been promoting for at least two decades.

In 1993, another
law enforcement personality with roots in Florida, then-Attorney
General Janet Reno, proposed
the creation of specialized units composed of police and social
workers
who would fan out in troubled urban regions, knocking
on doors, conducting “safety” evaluations, and connecting
residents to government “services.”

During her
reign
of terror as Dade County Prosecutor
– in which she displayed
unalloyed viciousness in tearing children from their homes and persecuting
innocent parents
– Reno created “Neighborhood Resource
Teams” teams composed of “community-friendly, highly respected
police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community
organizers, working full time within a narrow neighborhood,”
she recalled in a May 1993 speech to the National Forum on Prevention
of Crime and Violence.

Reno had the
temerity to offer her program as a national model just weeks after
presiding over the April 19 holocaust at Waco, where she and her
underlings provided the indispensable service of annihilating dozens
of innocent children after torturing them for fifty-one days.

Like Reno,
Bradshaw describes the purpose of his proposed Behavioral Science
Unit in therapeutic terms. The objective, he insists, is “violence
prevention” and “referral to services,” rather than
an arrest. To those on the receiving end of that intervention, this
distinction is entirely theoretical: Being taken into custody by
armed strangers is an arrest, irrespective of the semantic camouflage,
and every encounter between the public and the State’s costumed
enforcers is pregnant with life-threatening violence against the
innocent.

It should also
be understood that Bradshaw’s real objective is not “violence
prevention,” but rather civilian disarmament. This
was also explained by the sheriff in his February 6 address
.
The purpose of the BSU, the sheriff said, is to “identify people
with a propensity and inclination to go do violent things and stop
them from accessing firearms.” A
system of preemptive disarmament of people considered to be psychologically
unstable or otherwise “dangerous” has actually been in
place in Connecticut since 1999
. Although it has resulted in
the confiscation of firearms from thousands of innocent people,
it did nothing to prevent the horror that unfolded last December
at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Employing the
services of “mental health professionals” to certify that
people are dangerous to themselves or others would negate the need
for an actual criminal prosecution. And for Bradshaw, the most potent
indicator that a given individual is a “socially dangerous
person” is a hatred for the institutionalized affliction called
“government.”

The man accused
of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords “was telling other people
about how much he hated government and government officials,”
Bradshaw told his audience. The assumption here is that such opinions
are symptoms of incipient criminal behavior. This is why the sheriff
intends to create a 24-hour tipline through which neighbors, family,
friends, and others can inform on people who display such dangerous
attitudes.

“It’s
the same principle that’s used by the Secret Service that’s very
successful,” he insisted. The S.S. has a hotline that can be
used to report impious and supposedly threatening comments about
the murderous bureaucrat who occupies the Oval Office, on the assumption
that blasphemy against the divine person of the Dear Leader is itself
a criminal act.

While Bradshaw
and others of his ilk regard idle words to be dangerous, if not
criminal, they can’t see how people could perceive a threat in the
sudden, unsolicited presence of armed state functionaries on their
doorstep. After all, asks the sheriff, what would it hurt to send
his deputies to confront people who aren’t suspected of a crime?

If he possessed
a particle of honesty, Sheriff Bradshaw would pose that question
to Dennis Gaydos, and listen carefully to the answer. Because of
the kind ministrations of Bradshaw’s deputies, Gaydos is now missing
an ear and an eye.

What makes
his case an even more compelling precautionary example is the fact
that, according
to a lawsuit he filed against Bradshaw
, Gaydos – a homeless
man – had “contacted a local assistance agency by telephone
for the purpose of a referral for residential resources, financial
aid, and general counseling.” While he was on the phone, the
helpful social workers with whom he was speaking made a “referral”
of their own to Bradshaw’s agency, which responded by dispatching
a SWAT team.

Gaydos had
established a shelter on a parcel of land behind a church. The pastor
in charge of the congregation had given Gaydos permission to be
there. Shortly after Gaydos called for help, a combined tactical
force composed of deputies from the sheriff’s office and officers
from the Palm Springs Police Department – kitted out in paramilitary
drag, carrying the familiar assortment of weapons, and supplemented
with a helicopter – set up a staging area near Gaydos’s shelter.

Although they
were dealing with a sickly, unarmed homeless man who was not a criminal
suspect, the Berserkers treated the incident as a combat situation.
As they approached the encampment, Gaydos – who was holding his
cell phone – stood up. Without a word of warning, he was shot twice
in the head with rubber bullets. The first round damaged an ear;
the second one destroyed his left eye. The assailants later tried
to justify the head shots by claiming that they had seen a knife
in Gaydos’s hand – but since no knife was ever recovered, this can
be dismissed as a self-serving lie of the kind routinely offered
by police officers after they kill or mutilate an innocent person.

Apparently
satisfied merely to leave their victim partially deaf and partially
blinded, the officers never arrested Gaydos. At the time of this
March 2007 incident, the PBSO SWAT team was under the command of
Lt.
Dan Burrows
, an oxycontin addict who was accused
of stealing pain medicine and a rifle from a terminally ill former
deputy
.

About a year
before the PBSO participated in the assault that mutilated Gaydos,
Captain
David Carhart
, the head of the department’s violent crimes division,
was purged from the force following multiple incidents in which
he broke into the home of former girlfriends. One of them, Tracey
Seberg, filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office – and Carhart
responded by threatening to kill her if she didn’t retract it. According
to Seberg
, Carhart told her that he “felt like God when
in uniform” and thus didn’t believe that he was subject to
the rules that apply to mere Mundanes.

Although Carhart
faced up to 15 years in prison for burglary and stalking, he was
demoted to lieutenant and then quietly dismissed from the department
in a mass layoff, receiving a $120,000 severance package.

Neither Burrows
nor Carhart is presently available for duty with the Behavioral
Science Unit. However, Sheriff Bradshaw will be able to make use
of the services of Sgt.
Brent Raban
, a sociopath who was discharged from the force after
boasting about his habit of beating suspects – and then reinstated,
with the expectation of $150,000 in back pay, through the intervention
of the police union.

Like
the members of a hyper-violent police gang in Milwaukee
, Sgt.
Raban has an adolescent fixation on a comic book character called
the Punisher. This wouldn’t be a problem to anybody else if Raban
hadn’t been given a state-issued costume and official permission
to act out his violent fantasies on helpless people. He advertised
his intentions by accessorizing his costume with a camouflage-colored
skullcap displaying the word “Punishment.”

“It’s
not crime-fighting – I’m dealing out PUNISHMENT!” observed
Raban in a 2009 Facebook
post written while he was patrolling Belle Glade, a city whose
residents are besieged by both private crime and officially-sanctioned
police violence
. Raban wasn’t concerned about facing charges,
he gloated, because “Like a good batterer, I know the areas
that hide the marks well.” In another post he complained that
it had been at least two weeks since he had beaten somebody, and
that this prolonged dry spell had left him “itchy.”

When on-shift
opportunities to beat handcuffed suspects became scarce, Raban found
other ways to indulge what his boss calls a “propensity and
inclination to go do violent things.” On one occasion he parked
his squad car behind a school bus that was decanting young children,
turned on his blue lights, and used his PA system to insult and
upbraid parents who were picking up their kids – most likely in
the hope that one of them would be provoked into offering him an
excuse to inflict “punishment.”

He
was eventually fired after a woman in his neighborhood complained
that he had parked his patrol car on the sidewalk in front of her
home and used his position as a deputy to harass her family. By
that time, Sheriff Bradshaw – who had reluctantly been forced to
have Raban sign a “last-chance contract” – was compelled
to fire Raban. But in Florida, as is the case in most other states,
it is practically impossible to fire a law enforcement officer.

In April of
this year, an
arbitrator ordered Bradshaw to reinstate Raban and pay him back
wages
. According to the people responsible for imposing “accountability”
on law enforcement officers, Raban’s sociopathic behavior does not
disqualify him for service as a Palm Beach County Deputy – which
may well include working with the BSU to visit and take into custody
people anonymously accused of “hating the government.”
After all, what other personality type would be interested in a
job of that kind?

May
6, 2013

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate
blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program
.

Copyright
© 2013 William Norman Grigg

The
Best of William Norman Grigg


Source Article from http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w323.html

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