Slouching Toward a Police State by Matthew Hart

Matthew Hart writes:

On the evening of May 19th, in the course of a purported investigation into drug trafficking at a local homeless shelter, two Oklahoma City police officers handcuffed a woman and tasered her to death because, as a police spokesman said, "the officers felt that she was not under control." The victim, a 35-year-old homeless woman, resided in the shelter with her husband while recovering from a drug addiction. She was not involved in the initial drug investigation, yet apparently began to scream and attacked one of the officers. After attacking a second officer, she was "taken to the ground and handcuffed." At this point, this 35-year-old female crack addict, handcuffed and on the concrete, still represented a great enough danger to two heavily armed male police officers that they deemed it necessary to electrocute her fatally. This murder earned the two officers paid administrative leave...

From seatbelt laws and speed limits to anti-drug and anti-smoking laws, who really believes that the State’s interest lies in saving us from ourselves? Law number one should be "no victim, no crime." Increasingly obvious is the fact that, far from protecting and serving the people, the police exist everywhere and always to protect the State and its ill-gotten gains from the people, and we pay them to do it. In the course of "protecting the people" from free and private transactions between consenting adults, these two officers murdered a woman guilty of what amounts to a lack of control...

These are but two local examples of what amounts to a major problem with state-subsidized "law enforcement." Where may innocent victims of this rampant abuse of power turn for justice in this day and age?

... few view the abuse as it really is. Indeed, most seem to applaud the work of the nanny state as it strips us all of the right to do as we see fit absent the trespass of others’ rights to do the same. On this march toward our own undoing, will we watch wordlessly as our fellows are overrun by the massed machinery of the State?

Slouching Toward a Police State by Matthew Hart