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Publics rights getting slowly pared back
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Miami Herald
Posted: October 20th, 2014
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard...
Last week, a federal judge told us what we already knew. Namely, that police in Ferguson, Mo. violated the rights of protesters demonstrating against the shooting death of Michael Brown. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry struck down an ad hoc rule under which cops had said people could not stand still while peacefully protesting. Still, ones sense of righteous vindication is tempered by the fact that police felt free to try this absurd stratagem in the first place and by the fact that this was hardly the only recent example of police using the Constitution for Kleenex. Ferguson, let us not forget, is also the town where reporters were tear gassed and jailed and photographers ordered to stop taking pictures. In our unthinking mania for laws to get tough on crime, we actually made it tougher on ourselves, altering the balance of power between people and police to the point where a cop can now take your legally-earned money off your sovereign person and theres little you can do about it. Indeed, at the height of the Ferguson protests, an L.A. cop named Sunil Dutta published in the Washington Post an Op-Ed advising that, if you dont want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Dont argue, he said, even if you believe (or know) your rights are being violated. Deal with it later. Its all well and good that now, several weeks after the fact, a court affirms the rights Ferguson police denied. But thats a poor consolation prize. An argument can be made that rights which arent respected in the moment they are asserted are not really rights at all.
Note: For more on the history of civil rights violations in Ferguson, MO, see this deeply revealing news article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of recent news articles about the erosion of our civil liberties from reliable major media sources.
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