To understand why these incidents keep occurring, it's necessary to roll back several layers of propaganda. The propaganda matrix surrounding police brutality is so thick and so old, that it is extremely difficult to remove all the layers and expose the truth beneath.
Gendarmes have existed in urban areas for centuries. Prior to gendarmes, social order was more vigilante in nature, and the only real backstop behind it was the military. In Germanic countries, law was considered a function of all able-bodied free-men (citizens of good standing) and a group of any 24 men (regardless of training, literacy, certification, etc.) could convene a court with the power to execute the death-sentence by hanging. To be valid (not murder), the court had to comply with some basic standards of witness testimony, and the trial had to reach conviction or clearance of the charge on the same day the charge was brought, although the case could go through the night, if needed. The hanging, if the court voted to convict, had to be done at dawn. I'm going from memory in my previous description, but this is the rough origin of the grand jury in American jurisprudence. It originates in Germanic common law.
As soon as gendarmes began to be used, they have been notorious for their viciousness and disregard for law and human rights. The short version is that gendarmes are the opposite of a lawful organization, since law already pre-existed them. Note that a court of 24 men convened to execute justice have no additional rights beyond anybody else -- they're just regular men agreeing to cooperate for the purposes of the trial. What changed with the advent of gendarmes is that there was now a special class of citizens to whom the law
did not apply. They were above the law, because you were going to need a lot more than 24 able-bodied men to bring one of them to justice, as they would call for help from the rest of their gang, and so go free for whatever criminal act of violence, murder, rape, robbery, arson, vandalism, etc. they had committed. The reason that urban areas preferred to have gendarmes is that it reduced their dependence upon military intervention which is always a much worse remedy than it might sound like. Once the military arrives, the city who has called for help is going to have resources extracted from it until the military becomes bored and goes elsewhere. The amount of disruption to ordinary business is extreme and it's a terrible price to pay to be rid of petty criminals. Not to mention, there are always criminals among the ranks of a military, and these are criminals you can't be rid of. The crimes they commit have no remedy, because a military is not going to punish its own members unless their crimes actually create a risk to the commanders themselves (loss of command, PR disaster, etc.) Short of that, the criminal elements in the military are just going to do what they're going to do and, since the military was already the last-resort, there's nothing that can be done about it except to suffer in silence.
The shift from sporadic military interventions to regular patrols of gendarmes is a lot like the change from tribute to taxation. The collection of tribute was formerly sporadic. A military would show up on the ridge-lines around your town, they would send a delegation to your gates, and they would state their price to leave. The alternative, of course, was the sacking of your city. So, whatever price they demanded had to be raised, or the entire city would be lost. Many cities could not raise the sum demanded, and were razed. Over time, the dynamics became more complex, cities became better at defending themselves and negotiating terms, armies became more "rational" in their demands, but the basic dynamic remained much the same over many centuries and over wide spans of geography. When gendarmes began to be common, the need to maintain these large roving armies (which had to constantly feed themselves, and could even turn against you) was reduced, and this reduced the costs of walling, gating, patrolling, etc. cities. It also reduced the frequency of sackings. Armies became more self-sustaining (by economic support from home base), more directed towards other armies, and less directed towards civilian targets. But the gendarmes needed to feed, as well, and their demands had to be met in a steady stream, not sporadically as in the old days of city sackings. The tribute demanded sporadically and unpredictably, at high cost, was now a steady stream of tax revenues. And the atrocities committed by invading armies -- often acting out hell on earth's stage -- were also reduced. Instead of sporadic mass murder, kidnapping and rape of an entire city, all at once, the gendarmes committed these crimes on a more opportunistic basis and at much smaller scale, perhaps targeting and harassing an individual neighborhood once every few weeks, in perpetuity.
With the rise of the modern nation-state in the late 18th- and early 19th-century, especially in the United States, the government underwent a baptism of moral-cleansing. This moral renovation was not done from the inside-out -- there was no moral or religious revolution that occurred, no spiritual awakening. No, it was a purely external affair... the State was now somehow different, perhaps because of democracy, perhaps because of the separation of the church and State. The State was now rational and good, it was primarily motivated for the good of the Little Guy. It was no longer the plundering franchise of the past. We finally had the right
system of organization, and once you organize something properly, it becomes inherently good and virtuous. Right?
Along with this moral renovation of the State's public image came a transformation in the public discussion about the power of the sword and club. No longer was the sword something wielded by the meathead jocks of noble birth against whatever peasant targets of opportunity they happened to trample upon as they roamed the countryside, showing out for "God and King". No, those redcoat ways of the past were now long gone and, in its place, were honorable men who only wielded the sword for some good reason. That included not only the national military, but also the gendarmes. They now only wielded their clubs for "the common good of the general public." If anything, they were an agent of empowerment of the Little Guy because anybody could make a complaint, even if they were of low status, against anybody, even if they were of high status. Now that everything was properly organized, society would become generally good and virtuous! Right?!
The key insight I have been trying to drive home here, is that the history of military sackings and police brutality has
always been 100% criminal, from day one. A military arriving on the ridge surrounding your peaceful village and demanding payment to leave (or else be sacked) is the
definition of a protection racket. And while the advent and more widespread usage of gendarmes did reduce the incidence of this kind of sporadic terror and racketeering, it replaced it with a more predictable, regular and annuitized version of the very same system.
All police, everywhere, are a protection racket. In fact, they are simply the single most powerful and successful protection racket in their jurisdiction.
Are there no good police? Is there no right way to do policing? Well, obviously, there are good police. It seems that most police in most police-forces join for good reasons. It's hard to be sure that there are actually any good public police agencies because their crimes are invariably of a nature that places them almost entirely beyond true investigation. The fact that local police agencies commit crimes is proven by the sheer existence of State bureaus of investigation, as well as the FBI. But, of course, this "perfect system" must necessarily always have a fatal flaw at the last-level of policing: "Who watches the watchers?"
The problem was created when we abandoned the idea that
all free male citizens are qualified to judge, subject to certain conditions required to ensure that actual justice is being done, and not a mere lynching. The involvement of more than 24 men in the old Germanic courts was prohibited, and that's because you get lynchings. Fewer than 24 ran the risk that you would not have among them at least a few wise men or elders to anchor the proceedings and prevent the court from running off into juvenile absurdities. I'm not saying there are no other ways to organize justice, there are other ways, but when you deny that all men are born with a natural knowledge of justice, and that this knowledge of justice is a sufficient basis for judging matters of a criminal nature, you are denying the very foundation of social order at its very root. By creating a "franchise" of specially-privileged men -- whether royals, nobles, military men, or gendarmes -- you necessarily create a two-tier system of justice, and those in the upper-tier of the justice system will always,
without fail, exert total control over the others. All the mass-murdering tyranny of Josef Stalin is baked right into the very root beginning of denying that all male free citizens (adults, of course) are competent to judge and to independently coalesce to form a body of judgment. Justice, law and security become under-produced, over-priced and their quality (truth, justness) becomes deficient, distorted and tyrannical.
This condition (of two-tier justice) has persisted since the dawn of history, and with the rise of "modern democracy" became far worse than ever. This is because the modern "democratic" State retains all the two-tiered-ness of the past, while being baptized in the moral renovation of being "for the People", "for the Little Guy." It's like we were living in a remote village haunted by an evil, serial-killer hiding out in the dark forest. No one ever went anywhere except in a pack, for fear that they would be set upon by the serial-killer and brutally butchered and murdered. But then, one day, he simply walked into town, professed that he had had a moral awakening and he realized now that he had to live for the good of the people. The people cheered and they immediately made him the mayor of their village. As mayor, he immediately began to rewrite all the village rules. "All children shall only walk alone in the woods from now on, there shall be no groups of 2 or more children." Strangely, children kept disappearing... actually, they were disappearing now at a much higher pace than they had in the past. Torn bits of clothing spattered by blood would be found here and there in the woods, and signs that the body had been dragged along by a wild animal. The Mayor ran a campaign to increase awareness of wild animals in the woods. Signs were posted all over, showing the dangers of wild animals. The people lived in abject terror, but their children kept disappearing faster and faster. Of course, the serial-killer/Mayor had had no change-of-heart at all, and his supposed moral revolution was all just a big show to gain the trust of the village and to become elected as the highest authority in the village, so he could change the rules in whatever way would make satisfying his blood-lust as easy as possible. This is an almost exact description of the transition that has happened in politics over the last two centuries -- it is hardly an allegory at all. The mass of the public are dupes and, as incredible as it seems, they have fallen for this obvious trick, lock-stock-and-barrel.
The long-term solution is Jesus. However, in the short-term, there are things we can do to materially improve affairs. Since the civil root-cause of modern tyranny (which is just an extension of old-world tyranny) is two-tiered justice, we need to make changes to laws, administrative rules and court-procedures that mitigate against different kinds of treatment for different people, based upon superficial/statutory labels and categories. If I just walk up to you and punch you in the face, I should go to jail for assault. If I happen to be wearing a badge and gun, or not, is irrelevant. Thus, when the law looks at the fact that I was wearing a badge and gun when I punched you in the face, this is Lady Justice removing the blindfold. It is injustice
on its face. This is not some deep, complex mystery that requires a team of legal PhDs to even begin to understand. No, this is straightforward hypocrisy, evil and injustice in a sense that, properly explained, even a very young child can understand.
THIS IS KINDERGARTEN MORALITY. The fact that we're still getting kindergarten morality wrong at the highest levels of government -- keep in mind that these are people who have their finger on the nuclear button! -- is a testament to the absolute insanity of statism. Statism is idolatry, it is false-theology, it is a false-religion, it is hatred of God and the Bible, it is morally repugnant. Nebuchadnezzar ordering all of Babylon to assemble before his gold statue and bow down to it, is the ultimate picture of what statism is all about. And the final manifestation of statism in history will be the 666 Beast System under the Antichrist. Make no mistake,
the modern nation-state is built on the template and pattern of hell itself, and its chief architect is none other than Satan himself. No Christian should be singing the praises of the modern nation-state, we should be nothing but acid-etch critics of its every single joint and ligament, from head to toe. We must reject every fiber, every cell of its existence; its every breath, its every movement is inherently repugnant to all that is good, true and beautiful. It is, as Thomas Hobbes rightly called it, the Leviathan. He meant that as praise, which shows just how warped and deranged the mind of man has become under Satan's influence. Until the Antichrist is unmasked, the State is the single closest thing that exists to the incarnation of Satan on earth. Everyone who loves God must,
ipso facto,
HATE THE STATE.
If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. (Psa 139:19-22)
