Stand With Cops—But Against Police State

By Mark Anderson —

Today, the police, who are responsible for maintaining law and order in the worst parts of the country, have become a punching bag for the mainstream media and professional activists, taking it on the chin as major cities suffer the worst joblessness, poverty, violence and crime in the United States. AMERICAN FREE PRESS stands with those police officers—the good cops who act as the thin blue line between the criminals and the rest of us.

Of course, there are bad police. It’s becoming all-too-common for police officers to “Taser” or otherwise injure or abuse motorists during routine roadside stops gone-wrong. As William Norman Grigg has thoroughly documented on his hard-hitting blog “Pro Libertate,” which tracks abuses carried out by police across the nation, too many police departments act like occupying armies, utilizing military surplus gear thanks to the federal government, while at the same closing ranks and refusing to seriously punish officers who break their oaths of office and callously abuse the citizenry.

Police, as an extension of the law, are only supposed to provide an extra layer of public protection to supplement the inherent right of each citizen for personal self-defense from the common criminal element as well as tyrannical government.

That is why the elected sheriff is the premier law enforcement officer who answers to the voters. So if the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives throws its gun-regulating weight around too much, the county sheriff can, and should, call that federal agency to the carpet if it threatens the Second Amendment or any other constitutional rights of any citizen.

Sheriff Richard Mack of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has expressed it well: The police are not simply the thin blue line to separate order from anarchy. They are supposed to be a firewall between the citizenry and the notoriously heavy-handed federal government—since in our system, the federal government was not intended to embed itself into everyday state and local law enforcement.

Take for example Texas law enforcement and the state guard, which are doing the right thing by monitoring the recent “Jade Helm 15” United States military exercise gearing up in Texas and other parts of the American southwest. Jade Helm has received much attention, leaving Texans and others wondering whether the exercise is a mock-up for martial law, or whether, as the military alleges, it’s merely a home-turf rehearsal for more overseas misadventures straight from the interventionist handbook.

There are still plenty of good peace officers, including county sheriffs, sheriff’s deputies and state, city and village cops who take their public-protection role seriously and endeavor to do good.

When a cop does the right thing, you probably don’t hear about it. Most time, everyday good deeds don’t make the news, while abuses—real or exaggerated—make instant headlines.

The key is to be especially careful what you believe from the mainstream media, since it has performed horribly by trying to incite race wars amid the recent chaos in Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri among other incidents. It’s always best to pursue the facts independently, and be a good citizen who stands up to police-sponsored abuse—but just as importantly lauds police when they do the right thing.

AFP Roving Editor Mark Anderson is a veteran reporter who covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects.