Ferguson: State-Sponsored Lawfare

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.  
-- Dick the Butcher

The Justice Department has released its damning report on the Ferguson Police Department.  Activists seized upon the statistics in the report that show minorities, who make up 67% of Ferguson, have negative contact with police and the judicial system on a much higher percentage.  Actually, that is the weakest part of the report.  Heather MacDonald efficiently bats down the 'disparate impact' argument:

There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17, for example, die from homicide nationally at nearly ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same ages combined, because the black youth homicide rate is similarly skewed. Blacks commit property crimes at about three times the rate of their presence in the national population, according to arrest data.  (Heather MacDonald - NRO) 

More damning are the first-hand reports and hard evidence of blatant racist words and actions by police officers.  Racism exists, even in the halls of government power, but that does not explain away societal dysfunction in places like Ferguson.

The most damning aspect of the report was the trail of evidence leading back to a city hall that conspired to use the police force and municipal court system to squeeze more revenue from the citizenry.  This goes beyond race, and it happens all over America, in small towns, big cities, state governments, federal agencies...

Our judicial system and tort law has been hijacked by government criminal gangs and pirates with law degrees.  They infest our legislative bodies, where they confect incomprehensible legalistic monstrosities and hang them over our heads, like dark banks of pregnant storm clouds, ready to burst and inundate us.

Piss off the man, and he will unleash the thunder and lightning, to the point where if you parked your car illegally in Ferguson (or DC, or anywhere else in America) and failed to pay the initial ticket, the fine will grow out of any common sense proportion and financially swamp you.  The Ferguson municipal code, enforced by its court system, routinely preyed upon residents with such tactics, mostly poor minorities with no power to fight back.

United Police State of America

Does anyone really think that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is any more corrupt than his fellow gangsters up on Crapital Hill?  How many times has Nancy Pelosi ridden in the Google Plane that uses federally-owned Moffett Field?  How many billions has Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein and her husband made off of war profiteering?   Harry Reid?  Need I say more?  The man is crapulent with power, greed and corruption.  Ask anyone from his state.  Nothing happens, no deal gets done, without Reid's blessing.  He enjoys plenipotentiary thumbs-up or thumbs-down on every Nevada project.  Do you really believe he is clean?

Menendez went down because he pissed off somebody powerful, and the thing is, the way our convoluted, incomprehensible legal system works, we're all criminals!  The Law hangs over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.  Every now and then, it fells someone powerful who forgot how the game was played, but it claims its greatest number of victims among the powerless of Ferguson, Missouri, and every other locality across the Police State of America.

Sure, there are racist cops, corrupt cops, cops who get off on abusing their power, but they are the foot soldiers of the lawyers.  Do you really think a pasty-faced Harvard grad in an Armani suit and thousand dollar wingtips is going to attempt to do his own dirty work?  Hell No!  He leaves it to his government-sanctioned enforcers armed with clubs, guns and the full weight of the law, which will drop on you like a piano if you don't comply.
 
A nation of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers...

We labor under the lash of a lawyerocracy.  Our justice system long ago ceased being a natural outpouring of the morals and standards of the people.  It is now a rotten edifice infested with rats and cockroaches who use it to accrete power, abuse others and enrich themselves.

The government of Ferguson has wronged its people by abusing the law and using it as a cudgel to rob its citizens and cow them into submission.  This is not an isolated incident, and it isn't particular to Ferguson.  It is a pervasive, endemic cancer that is rotting the nation and eating the people alive.  Governments at every level have corrupted and perverted the very concept of justice.  Is it any wonder people have lost faith in government, our institutions, and our capricious system of laws? 
     
See also:
The Gangsters of Ferguson - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Washington Post - 12 Key highlights from the Ferguson Report