|
MRAPs and “Urban Warfare” in Baltimore |
After the “troops” arrived in Baltimore about two hours later, city police “thanked us profusely for being there, apologized to us for having to be there,” Lewis said during an interview on a local radio program. “They said we could have handled this, we were very capable of handling this, but we were told to stand down, repeatedly told to stand down” as rioters laid siege to the city.
If not for the perfidy of the Baltimore municipal government, Lewis insisted, the police could have prevented widespread property damage. But the police “were essentially neutered from the start…. They were told to `stand down, you will not take any action, let them destroy property.’”
The sheriff insists that he heard those orders himself “over the Baltimore police radio that I had tethered to my body-armor vest. I heard it repeatedly: `Stand down, stand down, stand down! Back up, back up, retreat, retreat!’”
One important detail disclosed but not dwelt upon by Lewis is that at the time he heard those orders he and the other police were not protecting private property. They were defending the infrastructure of the coercive sector – City Hall and, particularly, Police Headquarters.
|
Building his “Q rating”: Lewis on TV in Baltimore. |
Sheriff Lewis is one of the most self-indulgentmedia whores in a profession plentifully stocked with such specimens. Predictably, he has become something of a hero to the Authoritarian Right for reinforcing the narrative that Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake deliberately provided “space” for looters to “destroy” private property.
Yes, the administration of Rawlings-Blake let private property burn once the riots erupted, because that is what city governments and police departments always do in such circumstances. When large-scale violence breaks out within a tax jurisdiction, the first priority of the enforcement caste is to protect itself, those who divide the plunder, and the symbolic manifestations of their “authority.”
The recently published book In Roads: A Working Solution to America’s War on Drugs features a nearly hagiographical profile of Lewis and his successful efforts to “pull in expendable cash hand over fist.” By exploiting every traffic stop as a “consensual encounter,” police trained in the methods used by Lewis can build legal pretexts for drug searches. This, in turn, can result in confiscations of cash and salable property that can be spent on “just about anything under a law enforcement agency’s roof,” exults the author, former Kane County, Illinois Deputy Roy Hain.
Thanks to his acumen in road piracy, Lewis presides over a department enjoying a huge and recession-proof windfall from the prohibition-inflated narcotics industry. His interdiction efforts do nothing to abate drug use, and they actually help boost the profits of the criminals who have captured that market with the government’s assistance. Criminal kingpins on both ends of this arrangement live very comfortably while street-level petty offenders like Freddie Gray are killed by the retail-level gangs controlled by those elites – including the officially licensed gang called the Baltimore Police Department.
|
“Imperial Mission”: Lewis is a global evangelist for prohibition. |
Hain points out that Lewis “travels the country and the world (to include Australia, London, Germany, Russia, and the West Indies) teaching classes to police officers on these tactics and the examples of the fruits of their application. He also designed a seminar for police administrators, to share the importance and potential of this cause, as well as passing on his imperial mission: the refusal to surrender to drug traffickers and engagement of every patrol officer in the realization that drug interception is their responsibility.”
It is worth underscoring Hain’s description of Lewis’s work as an “imperial mission.” That expression is not used ironically, or disparagingly: Sheriff Lewis, who has been embraced by many self-styled constitutionalists for his supposed opposition to federalization of law enforcement, is an unabashed proponent of a globe-spanning prohibitionist empire. The seminars he conducts overseas are part of an international counter-narcotic effort that grows out of a United Nations treaty – the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
Michael Lewis, in brief, is the very model of a federalized enforcer – a preening, self-enraptured, lavishly subsidized functionary in body armor who is indifferent to civil liberties and sees himself as something of a superhero.
“I have the unique ability to distinguish between a law-abiding person and an up-to-no-good person,” Lewis casually boasted to a New York Times Magazine reporter five years into his career as a narcotics enforcer with the Maryland State Police. “I’ve got that supercharged knowledge of the Constitution that allows me to do this right.”
“He can tell if a man’s lying, he says, by watching the pulsing of the carotid artery in his neck,” wrote Jeffrey Goldberg. “He can smell crack cocaine inside a closed automobile. He’s a human drug dog, a walking polygraph machine.”
Actually, he was a low-echelon road agent in the federal government’s war on the Bill of Rights, adept at devising pretexts to stop harmless people and in using the DEA’s index of “narcotics indicators” to build the stop into a warrantless search and, hopefully, a roadside confiscation.
|
Nazi-era German Ordnungspolizei stop and search a car. |
“The goal of Lewis’s unit, the criminal-interdiction unit, is to find drugs, guns, and untaxed cigarettes in the cars of smugglers,” explained Goldberg. “However, in order to stop a suspected gunrunner or drug mule, troopers first have to find a reason in the state’s traffic laws.”
Like much of the evil done in the name of law enforcement, the profiling in which Lewis was engaged with the MSP wasn’t necessarily a product of racial animus, but a reflection of federal priorities. Lewis began his career in 1984, the same year the DEA initiated “Operation Pipeline,” through which he and countless others were recruited and trained to be federal counter-narcotics assets.
|
Yes, they did “Stop and frisk” in Nazi Germany, too. |
Whatever current federal policy might be, Lewis and his comrades will continue using the tactics taught to them by the Feds. The violent cretins who pillaged businesses in downtown Baltimore embody a localized menace. As a federally licensed looter, Lewis has propagated evil nation-wide by sharing his techniques with law enforcement officers throughout the Soyuz.
There is little, if any, practical difference between the system Sharpton has proposed and the one under which we’re living right now.
In similar fashion, the German Kriminalpolizei existed long before the Nazis consolidated their Reich, and continued to investigate crimes against persons and property even after being absorbed into the Party-dominated State Security apparatus.
Under either variety of totalitarianism, the “local” police continued to exist as discrete bodies, and even enjoyed a measure of independence – with the understanding that they would be required to assist the Regime’s political police organs identify and deal with subversives.
When the KGB or Gestapo stretched out its hand to collect or chastise enemies of the state, the political police did so as part of what in our context would be called “multi-jurisdictional task forces.” Maryland’s Pro-Active Criminal Enforcement team (PACE), in which Michael Lewis played a leading role for decades, exemplifies the federalized task forces upon which every totalitarian police state depends.
For the Punitive Right, Baltimore summoned nightmares of federalized “Obamalaw Enforcers” marching in serried rows down Main Street – as if the centralization of law enforcement began with the incumbent president, rather than being inherited and accelerated by him.
Where federalization of law enforcement is concerned, the likes of Al Sharpton have been talking the talk – but Sheriff Michael Lewis and his ilk have been walking the jackbooted walk.
Source:
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2015/05/sheriff-michael-lewis-very-model-of.html
Please Help Support BeforeitsNews by trying our Natural Health Products below!
Order by Phone at 888-809-8385 or online at https://mitocopper.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Order by Phone at 866-388-7003 or online at https://www.herbanomic.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Order by Phone at 866-388-7003 or online at https://www.herbanomics.com M - F 9am to 5pm EST
Humic & Fulvic Trace Minerals Complex - Nature's most important supplement! Vivid Dreams again!
HNEX HydroNano EXtracellular Water - Improve immune system health and reduce inflammation.
Ultimate Clinical Potency Curcumin - Natural pain relief, reduce inflammation and so much more.
MitoCopper - Bioavailable Copper destroys pathogens and gives you more energy. (See Blood Video)
Oxy Powder - Natural Colon Cleanser! Cleans out toxic buildup with oxygen!
Nascent Iodine - Promotes detoxification, mental focus and thyroid health.
Smart Meter Cover - Reduces Smart Meter radiation by 96%! (See Video).