We are slowly counting down the days until Impeachment Two – The Sequel. Not everyone, of course, is onboard with the idea of another Senate trial.
As a former law enforcement officer, I understand the concerns. On the one hand: holding people accountable for their actions; upholding personal responsibility, law and order, and the rule of law; and making a clear statement about the importance of protecting our democracy. On the other hand: not embarrassing friends, relatives, and accomplices of the accused.
This is quite a conundrum.
We used to have discussions like this all the time back in the old stationhouse.
We’d arrest a guy for some pretty serious offense. People had been hurt, property had been destroyed, the orderly workings of our society had been disturbed. We’d have statements from multiple witnesses, tape recordings, and videos showing the crime in actual progress. We’d have prior admissions from the suspect himself talking about how he was planning to commit the crime. We’d have sworn statements from the victims describing the damage that had been caused, and statements from experts about the likely long-term consequences of the criminal act.
A trial, we figured, would be an open and transparent process where evidence would be publicly presented, everyone’s rights would be protected (except, perhaps, for the victims’…), and an impartial decision would be rendered. It would be, in fact, the exact process we have used for hundreds of years to resolve disputes and promote healing. (Not that those results are always achieved, but though it is imperfect, this is still the process we use…)
But then we would hear that the friends and collaborators of the accused were threatening further criminal acts if we didn’t drop the charges. No need for any of that evidence nonsense they’d say. Sure, he did it, but he’s learned his lesson, and besides, no one really needs to know how this all happened, since, of course, it could never happen again. And we don’t think this court is the right one. Time to move on.
Gosh. What would we do?
Well, it was a long time ago and I don’t recall what we did. But it doesn’t really matter, although, somehow, I can’t recall ever having discussions about dropping the charges when a police officer had been killed.
As for impeachment, it is revealing that few, if any, opponents of the process are claiming that Mr. Trump is not guilty of the acts described in the Articles of Impeachment. Rather, they simply want the entire process aborted because – apparently – they believe that revealing additional details of Mr. Trump’s actions or actually holding him accountable might hurt the feelings (or electoral prospects) of people who actively supported a violent attempt to overturn a lawful election.
I do agree with their concern that impeachment is largely political. No doubt about that. If we really believed in accountability, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and democracy, Mr. Trump would be facing indictment on criminal charges, not mere impeachment.
January 26, 2021
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” – Haile Selassie
Recently I was asked why I became a police officer and what advice I would give to a person considering joining a police department. Here’s what I wrote:
Like pretty much everyone else who ever did it, I became a police officer out of a desire to help people. I felt that the most important service that government provided was public safety, and I wanted to participate in that effort.
Nothing that I saw during or after my law enforcement career changed my view.
The first bit of advice I would give to someone planning on entering the field today is to have a Plan B.
Law enforcement is the most difficult, complex, and draining job in America. It is also a young person’s job. Law enforcement is physically demanding, emotionally scarring, and psychologically debilitating. Some people can do it for a career – twenty years or more – but some can’t. The most miserable people I have ever met were middle-aged cops who were financially and emotionally trapped in a job that they had come to despise. It’s a fun job when you are 23, but when you are 43, the foot chases, the wrestling matches, and the endless family fights lose their appeal.
Sadly, too many officers remain on the job, even when they would much rather leave, because they have nowhere else to go. They make decent money as police officers – especially with overtime and part-time opportunities, though those take time away from their families – but they have no skill that’s saleable anywhere else. Private sector police jobs – we call them security guards – don’t pay much better than minimum wage, and movement from department to department is difficult. Agencies will always hire an experienced officer, but they almost always make you start at the bottom of the pay scale. If you’re a sergeant or lieutenant, you will almost certainly have to take a demotion in order to move to another department.
So, you should have an exit plan before you embark on your law enforcement career. Ideally, your plan is another marketable skill or ability that can help you move on if you decide that it’s time to go. You might not need it, but having options is always a good thing.
My personal view is that police departments should recruit more like the military. Officers should join for an initial tour – five or six years – and after that, if it’s working out, the officer can apply to extend their employment. The department can then decide if the officer’s performance warrants continuation. If not, the officer is released with a nice severance package – some combination of cash and educational assistance/job training benefits perhaps – and a sincere thank-you letter.
Second, be aware that the essence of police work is dealing with people. All kinds of people. Not people just like you, and certainly not just people who think you’re great. One of the biggest surprises for me in my law enforcement experience was the number of officers I worked with who didn’t like talking to people. That’s the job. To be good at police work and to find it fulfilling and rewarding, you have to love people – in all their various ages, sizes, shapes, colors, levels of intelligence, personalities, political persuasions, religious affiliations, and economic status. You have to truly want to help them. All of them.
Third, realize going in that you don’t know anything about law enforcement. Despite watching numberless police and detective movies and a million episodes of “Cops,” hardly any Americans know what police work is truly like. And, for the most part, actual cops won’t tell them.
Here’s a quick list of things to keep in mind:
1. You will work without supervision. If that’s a problem – and for a lot of people it is – think twice about a job in law enforcement. You have to be self-motivated and self-disciplined. It is likely that your organization will provide neither.
2. You will be untrained, ill-equipped, and unready for many of the things you will have to do. Police are the go-to government agency to respond to an enormous variety of social, economic, public health, medical, and criminal incidents. Why? Because they are available 24 hours a day and they make house calls. And, of course, in the short-run, from the city’s perspective, it seems cheaper. In the long run it is not cheaper, but that’s not how the city looks at it. Municipal and county budgets have to balance every year, so the city has no interest in hiring the mental health specialists, social workers, youth counselors, mediators, marriage counselors and housing specialists that they really need. They would rather place all those problems on the shoulders of the police. And training, equipping, and preparing the police to handle these issues properly would be very expensive, so they don’t even try.
3. You will be exposed to violence or the threat of violence pretty much every day. Most of the time it won’t be directed at you. but every day you will witness the limitless capacity that humans have for inflicting physical and psychological damage on other humans. Over time, this will affect you in ways that you cannot predict and probably won’t understand. You will almost certainly have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Be ready for it.
4. You are not part of an occupying army. When you are working, the people around you all day are your neighbors. Think of them that way. Hardly any of them really want to hurt you. Most are happy to see you. You have to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean that you need to “dominate” every encounter. Try to treat everybody with respect. The city is not a hellscape of violence and terror when you are not around. Most people are good nearly all of the time. Almost everybody just wants to get along.
January 21, 2021
Photo: Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams joins a prayer circle during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo credit: Cleveland.com
As you know, on January 13, the federal government issued an intelligence bulletin warning of a likely increase in political violence motivated largely by the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
This lie follows years of similar lies by Trump regarding various contests, including the 2012 election of Barack Obama, the 2016 Republican primaries, Emmy award selections, and the number of times Melania Trump appeared on the cover of fashion magazines. In 2016 and again in 2020, before the presidential elections, he declared that if he lost either of those contests, it could only be because the election was “rigged” against him.
While many Democrats and media outlets pushed back against these dangerous falsehoods, virtually no Republicans did. As result, the lies gained traction as any argument could easily be dismissed as partisan hackery or Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Having accepted such blatantly undemocratic and ill-conceived behavior for years, Republicans were content to allow the lies to continue during the months after the 2020 election, despite the fact that neither state election officials nor Trump campaign lawyers could find any evidence that the 2020 election was in any way compromised. At least one Republican official told reporters that there was “no harm” in letting Trump vent his frustration by attacking our democracy itself.
On January 6, we saw the harm.
Now, as armed right wing “militias,” extremists, and many thousands of Trump supporters make plans to disrupt the upcoming inauguration and other lawful government activity in Washington DC and in elsewhere, the US intelligence community is warning that the lie about the election will likely spark violence for many months to come.
We are on the very edge of the precipice.
For five Americans – including a Capitol Police Officer – it is too late now to step back. But we must find a way get off this path before we tumble into the abyss.
Once it begins, political violence is extraordinary difficult to stop. Intelligence analysts already believe that political violence through 2021 is all but certain.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, 147 Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
If we are to save ourselves from a prolonged and terrible period of political violence, we must act now. We need leaders – Republican officials, in particular – to step up and forcefully reject the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
No one else can do this. The protestations by Democrats, political independents, media commentators, state election officials, and others have all been dismissed by the majority of Republicans who remain convinced – despite the total lack of evidence – that the election was stolen from them.
A handful of prominent Republicans, including Trump’s own attorney general and the Undersecretary of Homeland Security, have already said that the election was not stolen. But far too many Republican officials are remaining silent, content to let the clock run out on the disastrous Trump presidency while mouthing insincere calls for unity.
But while Trump’s presidency will end, his deceitful, dangerous, and unhinged ravings about a stolen election will not. There will be no healing while he continues to tear at the wounds he has inflicted.
Somehow, we must convince millions of Trump supporters of the truth that the 2020 election was free and fair. Many are impervious to reason and will remain locked in their dysfunctional belief system. The small cadre of extremists will continue to agitate for violence. But, hopefully, others – perhaps millions of others – may be persuaded that our elections are fundamentally fair and that violence to overthrow election results is wrong.
Franklin Roosevelt said that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate.” Too many Republicans today are committed to following their most fervent voters, even though they know that those they trail are misguided. Even worse, far too many Republicans are content to encourage their deluded base in the hopes of reaping some future political benefit.
As a United States Senator, it is not too late for you to honor your oath of office and take a leadership role in defending our nation’s democratic processes. We need you to state unequivocally that the election was not stolen and we need you to encourage other Republican officials to do the same.
We are far past the point where this fever will burn itself out.
If you have a better idea for quenching these smoldering embers, please take the necessary steps. But inaction is not an option.
Thank you for your attention.
January 15, 2021
See also:
Intelligence report: Capitol riot has emboldened domestic extremists who now pose ‘greatest domestic terrorism threats in 2021’
There is no shortage of articles, posts, tweets, and rants regarding the events of the last week. Many are thoughtful, informative, well-researched, and highly accurate. And some are available on Fox News.
So, I am well aware that no one needs to hear from me about the events in Washington. But I have this page, and I feel like I am supposed to write something every now and then, and writing about anything else right now seems disrespectful to the nation and, especially, to the family of Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who was killed defending Congress.
So here are four observations from the windswept shores of Lake Erie …
1. The Capitol Police were sold out by the incompetence of their own superiors.
While I am no fan of American law enforcement – having served as a police officer for nine years, I know a little about the field – I am especially no fan of American police management. The Capitol Police were unprofessionally deployed, insufficiently equipped, and vastly outnumbered. From comments by officers and from video and audio recordings of the riot, it is obvious that there was no real plan for managing the widely-anticipated protests and no effective arrangements for back-up by other agencies. While incompetent leadership is the norm in American law enforcement, the failures at the Capitol were so egregious that an observer might plausibly wonder if the Capitol Police Department’s effort was intentionally sabotaged. Well, in a year or so we may find out. As for the rank-and-file officers who were abandoned by their so-called leaders, they mostly performed heroically, and though they were forced to surrender the building, they did protect the legislators and staff members trapped inside. Of course, not all officers performed well – ‘selfies, anyone?’ – and a handful of officers are being investigated. But in the total absence of effective leadership, discipline and professionalism will sometimes succumb.
2. We Are Just Getting Started
We are in a terrible place now, and the path back is unclear. While most of the country is aghast at what we have become, a frightening percentage believes that mob action to subvert democracy is OK. Extremists right now are planning a campaign of armed confrontations at statehouses and in Washington DC. There is nothing anyone can do in the short term to discourage these people and prevent further violence. They have been catered to, emboldened, and lied to for years.
In the meantime, we need to look carefully how we got here to understand how we can get out. Every disaster is the culminating point of a chain of errors, misjudgments, malfeasance, incompetence, bad luck, and malign intent. We need to investigate this disaster the way we would investigate a plane crash. It’s not enough to find out what happened that morning, or that week to precipitate the riot. We need a detailed understanding of the root causes of this incident.
3. They Knew
The most discouraging aspect of this entire disaster was the unspeakable cowardice and deep cynicism displayed by 147 legislators who endorsed the action of the mob, validated Trump’s shameless campaign of lies and distortions, and violated their own oaths of office by voting to reject lawful electoral votes with no evidence whatsoever that anything improper had occurred.
Unlike Trump – who is deeply damaged and mentally unfit for any position of responsibility – these legislators are mostly functioning adults. Mere hours after a violent mob had driven them from the floor of the legislative chamber, forced them and their staffs to take shelter in safe rooms behind barricaded doors, and fatally injured a police officer, they voted to reject the electoral votes of several states that Trump had lost, even though they knew that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.
They knew that in early November the Trump administration’s own Department of Homeland Security had determined that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. They knew that DHS Under Secretary Chris Krebs, who had led a review of the election, had called the 2020 election, “the most secure in the nation’s history.”
They knew this and yet, because it was politically expedient, they persisted for months in encouraging the baseless fiction that the election had been “stolen.” Of course, they were careful not to describe in any detail how that theft had been accomplished, since every crackpot conspiracy theory had been debunked and no actual evidence of fraud had been introduced in any of the dozens and dozens of frivolous lawsuits the Trump campaign had filed and lost. Instead, they made fact-free allegations and when people responded to those allegations by wondering if they might be true, they pointed to that response as proof that their allegations were valid. In effect, they entered a crowded theater and yelled “Fire, fire,” and when the crowd surged towards the exits, they pointed to the pandemonium and said, “There must be a problem here if all these people think there is.”
They saw short-term political gain in questioning the results of an election they knew to be free and fair, and ignored the obvious destructive long-term consequences of their actions. Even when short-term political gain was replaced by immediate in-your-face danger – the mob that had surged through the halls of the Capitol had come equipped with flex-cuffs, metal pipes, bombs, and materials to erect a scaffold, complete with noose – they turned their back on their responsibilities to the nation and sided with the rioters.
In a resignation letter from his position on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Jason Schmid wrote:
“The sad, incontrovertible truth is that the people who laid siege to the Capitol were and continue to be domestic enemies of the Constitution of the United States. A poisonous lie that the election was illegitimate and should be overturned inspired so called “patriots” to share common cause with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists to attack the seat of American government. Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms. Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.”
4. The Way Back
There isn’t any chance of “healing” or nationwide “unity” until Republican officeholders – and their enablers in the media and elsewhere – come out and publicly refute the unsubstantiated, fraudulent, irresponsible, and highly inflammatory claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and condemn all attempts to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve political aims. (Which is the textbook definition of terrorism.)
Of course, the poison that is now coursing through our political system will not be drawn out by Republicans admitting that they have been lying to people all along. The damage is too deep, the infection too widespread. By this point, hardly any of the hard-core Trump supporters will accept any actual facts or evidence.
Still, it is a necessary start. “Healing” requires that the perpetrators of the injustice or crime acknowledge their responsibility. You can’t ask to be forgiven if you are unwilling to admit that you did anything wrong.
Distressingly, some Republicans even now are doubling down on their dishonesty. Republicans in several states have already announced their intent to impose additional restrictions on voting because some voters now doubt the security of our elections. Of course, those voter attitudes are not in response to any actual; election insecurity, but are due entirely to Republican efforts to sow distrust and discord.
Oh, sure. In a few weeks Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. It now seems likely that the inauguration – already reduced in scale by the raging pandemic – will be conducted within an armored security bubble. But it will almost certainly take place.
The zealous and utterly misguided “supporters” of Donald Trump – with their overweening sense of entitlement and their delusions of grandeur – aren’t going to be allowed to stop the lawful transition from one administration to another.
But that doesn’t mean that they will accept reality.
And why should they? They have been coddled and babied for years by self-serving officials, media commentators, and pundits. While Trump’s open pandering to their ignorance and bigotry has been singularly destructive, he didn’t start this fire.
Right wing extremism has been a problem in the United States for more than a century. In the 1870’s, President Ulysses S. Grant mobilized federal law enforcement agencies to beat back the rising terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-war south. Throughout the twentieth century, the FBI and local law enforcement penetrated and dismantled dozens of right-wing terrorist groups. Since 2010, the FBI has identified right-wing groups as the greatest domestic threat America faces. No wonder Trump calls the FBI “corrupt.”
But while some law enforcement agencies have taken the right-wing threat seriously, other powerful people and groups have emboldened them, none more so than Donald Trump.
Throughout his presidency, and especially in the fraught months leading up to the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly praised right-wing groups – his “second amendment people” – including self-styled “militias,” for activities ranging from white supremacist marches, to armed invasions of state capitols, to the killing of unarmed demonstrators by vigilantees.
These groups have quickly learned that there are few – if any – consequences for their use of violence or the threat of violence. America’s gun culture, unprofessional local law enforcement, and the craven pandering of politicians hungry for the contributions and votes of committed, if deranged, “patriots” have combined to legitimize and encourage continued acts of intimidation and low-level violence.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol, intended to disrupt the certification of electoral votes and possibly derail Joseph Biden’s lawful installation as president, was simply the next step down a road we have been on for years.
And like earlier steps, this one has been without serious consequences for the people who occupied the Capitol and for the people that abetted them, even though five deaths have been attributed to the incident, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten to death and a demonstrator who was shot by police. In addition, dozens of police officers were injured and several were hospitalized while two explosive devices and a container of Molotov cocktails were found near the Capitol.
A few arrests have been made, more will certainly follow, and a few folks have lost their jobs. But Trump remains, though there are calls for his resignation, impeachment, or removal under the 25th amendment. None of these things are likely to happen, especially in light of the continued support for his clearly false ‘stolen election’ narrative by a significant number of Republican lawmakers and multiple irresponsible media outlets.
Whatever happens to Trump in the final days of his failing presidency, his malign encouragement of his “patriotic” base is certain to continue far beyond Biden’s inauguration. Trump will continue to inflame his supporters with repeated announcements that he – and they – have been betrayed.
Their responses are certain to escalate.
“It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
“The only way you can avoid violence … is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
But Trump and a coterie of cynical and opportunistic Republican leaders are doing the opposite. Just hours after the Capitol was cleared of occupiers, more than one hundred Republican lawmakers voted to reject electoral votes for Joseph Biden that had been legally certified by the states, effectively endorsing the actions of the mob that fought police, broke into the Capitol, and killed a police officer.
Hopefully, the blood of the injured officers and of the protestor who was shot and killed while breaking into the building earlier had been cleaned from the floors by then.
Unsurprisingly, a YouGov snap poll today found that 45 percent of Republicans actively support the occupation of the Capitol and the interference with the work of Congress.
We are on a dark and narrow path that will take us to a place we cannot yet see but that we certainly would prefer to avoid.
Yesterday’s clash wasn’t the beginning of our troubles, and it won’t be the end.
One of the advantages of not having anything useful to do is that I have time to read. Here are a couple of books that I read this past year, or within a year or two, that I found particularly illuminating, informative, or otherwise notable. I highly recommend them.
Death of Expertise – by Tom Nichols
America today is increasingly, “obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance,” writes Naval War College professor Tom Nichols. “Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.”
Nichols notes that there has always been an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American life, but today that undercurrent is a growing flood, sweeping away respect for science and rationality and threatening the relationship between experts and citizens, which is crucial to the health of our democracy.
Good Kids, Bad City – by Kyle Swenson
The criminal justice system is not self-correcting. Errors happen and some people spend many decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
This book tells the story of three young black men, wrongly imprisoned for decades for a murder they didn’t commit. Swenson, who is now a reporter for the Washington Post, was formerly a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Cleveland. During that time, he covered the story of three men who were falsely convicted of the murder of a white man and served more than 30 years in prison before being exonerated and released when a key witness recanted his earlier testimony. Like any other disaster, the wrongful convictions were the result of a chain of errors, accidents, malfeasance, and carelessness on the part of numerous people and organizations – among them in this case, the police, the news media, the prosecutor, the defense attorneys, and the trial judge.
The most chilling aspect of the story is that the three were originally sentenced to death, but only a Supreme Court decision that led Ohio to temporarily halt executions saved their lives.
The Hidden Life of Trees – by Peter Wohlleben
While trees appear silently impassive, they actually communicate and cooperate with other trees and respond to changes in their environment in real time, according to German forester Wohlleben in this best-selling book. Wohlleben relates the findings of numerous researchers who have found evidence that trees are active participants in a dynamic social network that we are only now beginning to understand. While Wohlleben’s book has been criticized by some naturalists for its “oversimplified and emotional” language, his relating of the current science is largely accurate. Readers of this book might think twice before ever again hammering a nail into the living wood of a tree.
Hiding in Plain Sight – by Sarah Kendzior
Kendzior is a researcher who spent years studying dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, where she observed the cooperative efforts of autocratic governments and criminal syndicates intent on looting their countries. Her book describes the Trump administration’s efforts to follow a similar path.
“In 2015,” she writes, “I predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and once installed, he would decimate American democracy.”
In her words, “The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, with operatives all over the world.”
Warriors Don’t Cry – by Melba Patillo
Melba Patillo was one of the nine black students that integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Their story is best known for President Dwight Eisenhower’s deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court-ordered desegregation order. But less well-known are the details of the sustained year-long campaign of harassment and verbal and physical abuse that dozens of white students – actively supported by their parents, community members and some educators and tolerated by nearly everyone else – conducted against the nine beleaguered students. Patillo’s book describes in detail the harrowing year that the nine students endured.
The New World of Police Accountability (Third edition) – by Samuel E. Walker and Carol A. Archbold
It’s not a few bad apples. American law enforcement is structurally, historically, and culturally broken, and real reform will require fundamental changes to police organizations, practices, and culture. That’s the message of Samuel Walker and Carol Archbold, professors who have studied, written about, and consulted with American law enforcement agencies for decades.
Walker and Archbold present a compelling and, frankly, somewhat discouraging perspective on the challenges facing American police agencies today. While not written for a general audience, the book accurately describes the current state of American law enforcement and the need for significant reform.
Social Media
And if you don’t have time to read books, here are a couple of folks whose work on various social media platforms will always be worth your time: Political Historian Heather Cox Richardson and Retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer and political commentator Jim Wright
