Police Squad Quotes

At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago's chief of police told a Tribune reporter he'd just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.

My Lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables,' the undesirables have also included street Lesbians; that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my Lesbian self. I must find a way that does not cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays, and banned our books.

I know that small-town silence, I'd run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it's ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it's a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it's dangerous.

My hand was on the door handle when for a split second out of nowhere I was terrified, blue-blazing terrified, fear dropping straight through me like a jagged black stone falling fast. I'd felt this before, in the limbo instants before I moved out of my aunt's house, lost my virginity, took my oath as a police officer: those instants when the irrevocable thing you wanted so much suddenly turns real and solid, inches away and speeding at you, a bottomless river rising and no way back once it's crossed. I had to catch myself back from crying out like a little kid drowning in terror, I don't want to do this any more.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!

Now suspicious, Wills called the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police. The nearest uniformed officers responded to the police dispatcher that they were busy putting gas in their squad car (although they were, in fact, drinking at a nearby bar),

The morale of the Metropolitan Police Force had reached its lowest point during the Ripper murders of the previous year and had not yet recovered. The files of the Whitechapel murders had not been closed as the case was still ongoing, but nobody in London trusted the police to do their job.

to the left, pushing hard into John just as he fired at us. John swerved the squad away as if he could somehow avoid the gunfire. The man fired directly at us, but he was probably over fifty yards away, and the buckshot load rattled harmlessly against the side of our car as we sped north on Larrabee. We

In place of a firing squad, I stare down the barrels of endless interrogation. Why did she not run away? Why did she not use the opportunities she had for escape? Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims? How much of this wasn't really consensual? Let me tell you a story. Not mine, this time around. It is the story of a girl we call after the place of her birth, lacking the integrity to even utter her name. The Suranelli Girl. Forty-two men rape this girl, over a period of forty days. She is sixteen years old. The police do not investigate her case. The high court questions her character. The highest court in the land asks the inevitable. Why did she not run away? Why did she not have the opportunities she had for escape? Why did she say, if need, the conditions were as bad as she claims? How much of this wasn't really consensual? Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand for judgement.

I was sorry to read in yesterday's evening papers that your house was recently burglarised while you were elsewhere propounding the moral virtues of private enterprise. I'm sure you'll be able to see the funny side of it! I expect your mistake was to inform the robbery squad at your local police station that your house would be empty. That's always asking for trouble.

We've been called radicals, terrorists. We've been dismissed as an impossible fringe movement. But now we are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-faith mass movement united in demanding change, in demanding accountability, in demanding that our police, our government, our country recognize that Black lives do indeed matter. (From election victory speech)

When comedian Kate Smurthwaite appeared on the Today program to back up Yvette Cooper's campaign, she urged that the police set up a special squad to monitor Twitter and punish sexist trolls accordingly. But when feminists demand that the police arrest and even imprison trolls to create an online safe space for women, it is they who become the authoritarian silencers of others. They are legitimizing, in effect, 'thought crime'.

By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch of him taped to their windows. Lindsey and Samuel walked in the neighboorhood or hung out at Hal's bike shop. She wouldn't go to the diner where the other kids went. The owner of the diner was a law and order man. He had blown up the sketch of George Harvey to twice its size and taped it to the front door. He willingly gave the grisly details to any customer who asked- young girl, cornfield, found only an elbow. Finallly Lindsey asked Hal to give her a ride to the police station. She wanted to know what exactly they were doing. They bid farewell to Samuel at the bike shop and Hal gave Lindsey a ride through a wet December snow. From the start, Lindsey's youth and purpose had caught the police off guard. As more and more of them realized who she was, they gave her a wider and wider berth. Here was this girl, focused, mad, fifteen... When Lindsey and Hal waited outside the captain's office on a wooden bench, she thought she saw something across the room that she recognized. It was on Detective Fenerman's desk and it stood out in the room because of its color. What her mother had always distinguished as Chinese red, a harsher red than rose red, it was the red of classic red lipsticks, rarely found in nature. Our mother was proud of her ability fo wear Chinese red, noting each time she tied a particular scarf around her neck that it was a color even Grandma Lynn dared not wear. Hal,' she said, every muscle tense as she stared at the increasingly familiar object on Fenerman's desk. Yes.' Do you see that red cloth?' Yes.' Can you go and get it for me?' When Hal looked at her, she said: 'I think it's my mother's.' As Hal stood to retrieve it, Len entered the squad room from behind where Lindsey sat. He tapped her on the shoulder just as he realized what Hal was doing. Lindsey and Detective Ferman stared at each other. Why do you have my mother's scarf?' He stumbled. 'She might have left it in my car one day.' Lindsey stood and faced him. She was clear-eyed and driving fast towards the worst news yet. 'What was she doing in your car?' Hello, Hal,' Len said. Hal held the scarf in his head. Lindsey grabbed it away, her voice growing angry. 'Why do you have m mother's scarf?' And though Len was the detective, Hal saw it first- it arched over her like a rainbow- Prismacolor understanding. The way it happened in algebra class or English when my sister was the first person to figure out the sum of x or point out the double entendres to her peers. Hal put his hand on Lindsey's shoulder to guide her. 'We should go,' he said. And later she cried out her disbelief to Samuel in the backroom of the bike shop.

I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the Dallas police station in a squad car. On the last block of the ride, people—some of them reporters, most of them ordinary citizens—pounded on the windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the president. I didn’t care. What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever. It was Sadie’s blood.

For as long as he could remember, the Krumbleton police force were known derisively as the Circular Firing Squad, a nickname well-deserved due to their reputation for general incompetence. There were countless examples of them shooting themselves in the foot over the years, whether that be staff misplacing evidence, the mishandling of simple cases, the wrong suspect being freed by mistake, and the one officer who lost two toes during a training exercise when his weapon discharged and he literally shot himself in the foot.

Dr Kingsley was an exception, as he was not officially a member of the Metropolitan Police Force of Scotland Yard. He worked from a lab in the University College Hospital basement and had created his own position as forensic examiner simply because he felt it was necessary. Before he had taken over the police morgue, forensics work had been nearly nonexistent. Bodies had been shipped to poorly run storage facilities where they were lost or forgotten. He was a strange little man and the police gave him wide berth, but his help was invaluable and he was widely respected within the ranks of the detectives.

The squad’s leader, Inspector Martin Roma, had been trying for two months to get the new Police Commissioner to learn more about our group. The NYPD Special Situations Squad is off the official org chart, but has been in existence in one form or another for decades. Formed to deal with the unexplainable world of the supernatural, the head of the squad always reports directly to the Commissioner. When the new mayor had swept into office last November on a platform of social issues, he had fired the old Commissioner and brought in his handpicked replacement. Said replacement hadn’t taken his Department of Homeland Security briefing on things that go bump in the night very seriously.

Now the moment had arrived. Birgit took her place beside him in the command car. She pulled up her large striped cotton dirndl skirt made by her fellow national, Katya of Sweden, and looked around with an excited smile. But to onlookers it was more like the strained expression of a Swedish farm woman in a Swedish outhouse in the dead of a Swedish winter. She was trying to restrain her excitement at the sight of all those naked limbs in the amber light. From the shoulders up she had the delicate neckline and face of a Nordic goddess, but below her body was breastless, lumpy with bulging hips and huge round legs like sawed-off telegraph posts. She felt elated, sitting there with her man who was leading these colored people in this march for their rights. She loved colored people. Her eyeblue eyes gleamed with this love. When she looked at the white cops her lips curled with scorn. A number of police cruisers had appeared at the moment the march was to begin. They stared at the white woman and the colored man in the command car. Their lips compressed but they said nothing, did nothing. Marcus had got a police permit. The marchers lined up four abreast on the right side of the street, facing west. The command car was at the lead. Two police cars brought up the rear. Three were parked at intervals down the street as far as the railroad station. Several others cruised slowly in the westbound traffic, turned north at Lenox Avenue, east again on 126th Street, back to 125th Street on Second Avenue and retraced the route. The chief inspector had said he didn’t want any trouble in Harlem. “Squads, MARCH!” Marcus shouted over the amplifier.

At the same time, he expressed accurately and powerfully the state of mind of the countless underground fighters dying in the battle against Nazism. Why did they throw their lives into the scale? Why did they accept tor­ture and death? They had no point of support like the Fuhrer for the Germans or the New Faith for the Communists. It is doubtful whether most of them believed in Christ. It could only have been loyalty, loyalty to something called fatherland or honor, but something stronger than any name. In one of his stories, a young boy, tortured by the police and knowing that he will be shot, gives the name of his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad, and the betrayed forgives his betrayer. This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethic; there is no reason to forgive traitors. Had this story been written by a Soviet author, the betrayed would have turned away with disdain from the man who had succumbed to base weakness.

The frightened soul ran into the wine cellar with the steel door. I’m safe, Calloway thought, but he was dead wrong. Railrunner’s claws slashed through the steel door. They cut through the metal like butter. He then began to pull the door off its hinges. Suddenly a smoke bomb fell to the floor, making the place vaporous, but Railrunner’s eyes could see through it. He discovered the flashing lights of squad cars. His eyes narrowed and he growled low in his throat. “Come on out with your hands up!” an officer yelled. Railrunner walked upright towards the entrance. He then pushed the doors off their hinges and stood in the line of fire. “It’s a - roller coaster?” One of the police said baffled, the gun shaking in his hand. Railrunner crossly walked up to the police. They began to fire, their bullets simply bouncing off of him. He then grabbed the front bumper of the cruiser, and tossed it like a toy. It smashed into another car. Railrunner flung an officer out of his way and roared in sheer amusement. Within a blink of an eye he obliterated the small police force.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair sofa—the gallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti-Communist, Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant—began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest—sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to count the strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves—Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.

Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I’d learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then claimed he’d rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that they’d shot Gary Hopkins and said he’d gone for an officer’s gun. And I knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls. And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who’d been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again. At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County. The FBI opened multiple investigations—sometimes in the same week. The police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop.

Provisions for martial law and the institutions to implement a military dictatorship inside the U.S. affect all facets of our society. No persons suffer more than political prisoners, victims of the police state. The prison system reflects the quality and justice of the surrounding society. Tiger cages in Vietnam, islands of torture in Greece, assassination police squads and torture in Brazil, extermination camps in Germany have been powerful and necessary methods of silencing political opponents. Knowing such prisons exist keeps the moderate and frightened from voicing objections to oppression. The same Justice Dept., FBI, counter-intelligence agencies working inside the White House that condoned election sabotage and the “horror stories” come down upon radicals inside the prisons as well as on the streets.

The goal was a U.S. Gestapo. Senator Ervin described the espionage squad inside the White House as a “gestapo mentality.” J. Edgar Hoover refused any part of the gestapo, saying the secret Domestic Intelligence operations “denied our civil liberties.” The Inter-Agency Group (IAG) on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security includes members from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, Counter-Intelligence agencies of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Police Departments.

When America stood on the threshold of World War II, Hoover continued a friendly relationship with the Nazis dominating Interpol, the Berlin-based international secret police. He’d been obsessed with the “Red menace” since 1919, when he took the helm of the Bureau’s General Intelligence Division. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe and other Nazi fanatics were active in Interpol. Even after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Hoover ignored all evidence of Nazi death squads and atrocities and cooperated with the boys in Berlin. When France fell, Hoover exchanged lists of wanted criminals, enclosing autographed photographs of himself. It was not until three days before Pearl Harbor that he called a halt to the fraternization—and then only because he feared his image might be tarnished.

By the end of 2004, U.S. operations in Iraq had been rough enough to antagonize the Sunni population without imposing the draconian methods armies habitually employ to control a population. In the spring of 2006, the coalition was losing on the two major fronts that accounted for most of the fighting. In Anbar to the west, al Qaeda controlled the population; in Baghdad to the east, Shiite death squads were driving our the sunnis, while al Qaeda's suicide bombings continued. Yet, the conditions had already been set for a turnaround without precedent in combating an insurgency. In less that three years, two giant institutions steeped in 200 years of traditions-the Army and Marines-adopted new doctrines and turned around a losing war. This was equivalent to GE and Ford starting afresh in new business lines and turning a profit in three years. A lack of soldiers is frequently cited as the basic flaw after the invasion. This is mistaken. There were 140,000 soldiers, plus 100,000 contractors in support roles, in Iraq in 2003. Adding troops would not have accomplished much because the two-headed command...lacked a plan, a counterinsurgency doctrine, and proper training. With the Pentagon's agreement, Bremer had disbanded the Iraqi Army, and the Iraqi police were ineffective. More American troops operating alone under a doctrine of attack and destroy would have exacerbated the rebellion.

When New York City created a special Rape Analysis Squad commanded by police- women, the female police officers found that only 2 percent of all rape complaints were false—about the same false-report rate that is usual for other kinds of felonies. (a a talk given by Judge Lawrence H. Cooke before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York)

When the London police were not concentrated into squads for crowd control, they were dispersed out into the city to police the daily life of the poor and working class. That sums up the distinctive dual function of modern police: There is the dispersed form of surveillance and intimidation that’s done the name of fighting crime; and then there’s the concentrated form of activity to take on strikes, riots, and major demonstrations.

Some of it had to do with perception, Father Bert thought. Tourists knew they were vulnerable on the island. Seeing squads of armed police patrolling the downtown core gave them a sense of confidence and reassured them it was safe to roam the shopping district.

In Detroit, a young man with the last name Gaitlan, approached two patrol officers that were inside of their squad car. The officers were surrounded by a group of children, whom they were showing how to use felon location computer equipment.   Gaitlan then began to ask the officers about how the equipment worked. The officers then decided to show the children a demonstration, and asked Gaitlan for his identification, which he eagerly handed to them.   Minutes later, the young children were able to witness a real arrest thanks to the computer equipment. The police officers quickly arrested Gaitlan, after the computer showed that he was still wanted for an armed robbery in the State of Missouri.

In the past few years, police around the country have built up vast networks of cameras mounted on squad cars and posts that continuously take pictures of license plates, instantaneously enter the numbers in big computer databases and, as a result, quietly track the moves of millions of lawabiding Americans. You OK with that?

Table 1: USA Foreign Policy and Actions — Choices, Options, and Alternatives Assassinations, death squads, and drones Bounties for info/capture Bribery, blackmail, and entrapment Celebration of national “morality” and necessity of torture Collaboration/contracts with universities, scientists, professional organizations Contingent “humanitarian” aid Contingent foreign aid Control UN via vetoes Control IMF and World Bank Cooperate with foreign nations (e.g., military, intelligence) Development of domestic crowd controls (e.g., militarization of police) Diplomacy Drug wars and corruptions Disproportionate support of “allies” and enemification of others Establishment of military bases (more than 900 known foreign bases) Exportation of popular American culture Foreign student/faculty/consultant exchanges Fund development of disguised/pseudo-organizations

God must have been on my side because my prayers were answered in the form of a police squad car that came up and helped me. This was the first time in my life I was sitting in the backseat and not in handcuffs. I didn’t even care that I was naked I just want to get to wherever my sisters were. Instead

Getting shot sucked. That’s probably why I liked having my guns so much. There was something primal about bustin’ a cap in someone’s ass. Shit, that alone could probably explain nearly every case of police brutality out there. “Stop resisting, hippy!” Pop!

On May 4, 1932 (...) the New York Times featured side-by-side front page stories on the world's two most infamous criminals. First, the paper reported that, late the previous evening, a police squad car had whisked Alphonse "Scarface" Capone from the Cook County Jail to the Dearborn Street station, where he and several government agents had boarded the Dixie Flyer, headed for Atlanta and the federal penitentiary there. The adjacent story described the first day of hearings before the federal referee overseeing the bankruptcy of International Match. "Glad to start, he says", was the tagline for the Capone column. the one about Ivar said "Trusted Him Implicitly".

On this voyage, you will witness the marvels that this city has brought the world. It

The deliberate murder of a police officer is an attack on society. When celebrated by the miscreants, it almost defies belief. This book does not make for comfortable reading. It is in fact a very real horror story. Grit your teeth and read it. Patrick, and others who have fallen in our service deserve it.

I did not tell the police my true reason for being there. I did not mention Amy Breslyn. Not yet, not then, but everything might have been different if I had. Meryl Lawrence had told me little about Amy Breslyn, but now those facts seemed to have a new and dangerous meaning. I promised Meryl Lawrence to keep Amy’s secrets mine, so I kept them. And many, I still keep. We passed the black Suburban with its silent, flashing lights. The people on the sidewalk were gripped by the sight of it like mice entranced by a snake. I was gripped, too. The words on the Suburban explained why we were being evacuated. BOMB SQUAD.         To

More recently, a publicity campaign for a late-night cartoon show backfired when it aroused fears of a terrorist attack and temporarily shut down the city of Boston. The “guerrilla marketing” effort consisted of 1-foot-tall blinking electronic signs with hanging wires and batteries that marketers used to promote the Cartoon Network TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force (a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries, and a meatball). The signs were placed on bridges and in other high-profile spots in several U.S. cities. Most depicted a boxy, cartoon character giving passersby the finger. The bomb squads and other police personnel required to investigate the mysterious boxes cost the city of Boston more than $500,000—and a lot of frayed nerves. 99

Roper shrugged, cleared his throat and then swallowed the phlegm. ‘Never liked fish anyway.’ ‘Just pick it up,’ she muttered. ‘Throw it in a damn bin.’ He looked at her for a few seconds, licked his bottom lip, and then turned towards the river and walked away, leaving it there. Jamie stared at it, weighing up whether to pick it up and prove Roper right, or to leave it and admit to herself that it wasn’t that important. She didn’t like the idea of touching something that had been in his mouth, so she left it and followed him. This morning, they did have bigger fish to fry. Whether Roper liked them or not. There was a police cordon set up around the area and three squad cars and an ambulance parked at odd angles on the street. It ran parallel to the water, with a pavement separating the road from the grassy bank that led down to the body.  A bridge stretched overhead and iron grates spanned the space between the support struts, stopping debris from washing into the Thames. It looked like the body had got caught on one and then dragged to shore.  Some bystanders had gathered on the bridge and were looking down, at a loss for anything else to do than hang around, hoping for a look at a corpse.  Jamie dragged her eyes away from them and looked around. The buildings lining the river were mostly residential. Blocks of apartments. No wonder the body had been seen quickly.  There were six uniformed officers on scene, two of whom were standing guard in front of the privacy tent that had been set up on the bank. It looked like they’d fished the body out onto the grass. Jamie was a little glad she didn’t have to wade into the water.  To the right, a man in his sixties was being interviewed by one of the officers. He was wrapped in a foil blanket and his khaki trousers were still soaked through. Had he been the one to pull the body out? It took a certain kind of person to jump into a river to help someone rather than call it in. Especially in November. That made three officers. She continued to search. She could see another two in the distance, checking the river and talking to pedestrians. The conversations were mostly comprised of them saying the words, ‘I can’t tell you that, sorry,’ to people who kept asking what had happened in a hundred different ways. Jamie was glad her days of crowd control were over. She’d been a uniformed officer for seven years. The day she’d graduated to plainclothes was one of the happiest of her life. For all the shit her father did, he was one hell of a detective, and she’d always wanted to be one — minus the liver cirrhosis and gonorrhoea, of course. She was teetotal. The sixth officer was filling out a report and talking to the paramedics. If the victim had washed up in the river in November then there would have been nothing they could do.

brakes as a squad car of grammar police pulls that burgeoning sentence to the side of the road and demands that “like” be replaced with “such as.

As my eldest could tell you, tussling with the Dwarf Police Squad is no picnic.

right through those pretentious horn-rims of his. He never even got to reach for the door. It was over in a matter of seconds—the two most satisfying shots Denny had ever taken. Except, of course, not Denny. Not anymore. That was a pretty good feeling, too. To leave this all far behind. No time for celebrations, though. The car had barely gone quiet before he was out on the sidewalk and back to doing what he’d always done best. He kept moving. Chapter 100 THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS following the hits at the Harman were a full-court press like I’d rarely seen in Washington. Our Command Information Center had traffic checks going on all night; Major Case Squad put both units on the street; and NSID was told to drop all nonessential business, and that was just inside the MPD. Details were operating out of Capitol Police, ATF, and even the Secret Service. By morning, the hunt for Steven Hennessey had gone from regional to national to international. The Bureau was fully activated and looking for him everywhere it was possible for the Bureau to look. The CIA was involved, too. The significance of these murders had really started to sink in. Justices Summers and Ponti had been the unofficial left wing of the Supreme Court, beloved by half the country and foxes in the henhouse, basically, to the other half. At MPD, our late-afternoon briefing was like a march of the zombies. Nobody had gotten much sleep overnight, and there was a palpable kind of tension in the air. Chief Perkins presided. There were no introductory remarks. “What are we looking at?” he asked straight-out. Most of the department’s command staff were there, too. Every

He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane. I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?” He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.” I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.

By the 1960s, the focus shifted to the civil rights movement, peace activists, and radical students. Red Squads again developed massive systems of files to keep track of the growing movements. While the vast majority of participants in these movements were nonviolent, police used the fact that people were arrested and that violence occurred in connection with these movements to justify surveillance and eventually active subversion; this despite the fact that the arrests and violence were often the result of discriminatory police action, rather than actual criminal wrongdoing.

How long’s the ride?” I asked. Berleand looked at his wristwatch. “About thirty seconds.” He may have overestimated. I had, in fact, seen the building before—the “bold and stark” sandstone fortress sitting across the river. The mansard roofs were gray slate, as were the cone-capped towers scattered through the sprawl. We could have easily walked. I squinted as we approached. “You recognize it?” Berleand said. No wonder it had grabbed my eye before. Two armed guards moved to the side as our squad car pulled through the imposing archway. The portal looked like a mouth swallowing us whole. On the other side was a large courtyard. We were surrounded now on all sides by the imposing edifice. Fortress, yeah, that did fit. You felt a bit like a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century. “Well?” I did recognize it, mostly from books by Georges Simenon and because, well, I just knew it because in law-enforcement circles it was legendary. I had entered the courtyard of 36 quai des Orfèvres—the renowned French police headquarters. Think Scotland Yard. Think Quantico. “Soooo,” I said, stretching the word out, gazing through the window, “whatever this is, it’s big.” Berleand turned both palms up. “We don’t process traffic violations here.” Count

Esteban Ventura Novo rose to the rank of a police Lieutenant Colonel during the Batista regime in Cuba. Feared by many, he became known as the white-suited assassin and was infamous in Havana’s Fifth Precinct. He later moved to the Ninth Precinct where he continued his reign of terror. The University of Havana was closed due to the ongoing revolution and the students feared for their lives. Esteban Ventura Novo was known for the cruel torturing of people and how he dispatched his adversaries. On April 20, 1957 Ventura organized the largest massacre of students in Havana. At the time he sent a squad of undercover police to find Fructuoso Rodríguez, the president of the Federation of University Students and his followers and without hesitation Ventura ordered that they be killed in cold blood. During the second half of 1958, the swinging city of Havana became a dangerous place in which to live. The ruthless but dapper Ventura who started as a police snitch gained his promotions by means of his vicious conduct and the diabolical way he eliminated the so-called “enemies of the state.” Ventura, was condemned to death by Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army but managed to escape to Miami where he and other members of the Batista regime found refuge. Ventura settled in Miami, where he founded a security agency, which was located on First South West Street and Bacon Boulevard. On April 1, 1959, Ventura was granted permission to stay in the United States. He had escaped justice despite the overwhelming evidence against him. Esteban Ventura Novo, the “Man in the White Suit” continued to live a comfortable life in South Florida, until his death at the age of 87.

Who wants to serve in a police vice squad, spending hours peeking into men’s johns to detect acts of homosexuality? Who wants a job as a debt-collection agent, spending his whole day being nasty to people? What sort of person voluntarily serves as a prison guard or hangman? Also, alas, one might ask what kind of individual would want to spend millions of dollars to become president of the United States, never away from the telephone, guarded around the clock by agents of the Secret Service, reading tomes of amazingly uninteresting documents, and being accompanied day and night by a warrant officer carrying a black bag containing the mechanisms to set off the atomic bomb? We believe that all such occupations, dreary or dangerous as they may be, are exercises of high responsibility and even of glory, despite the maxim that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” But what is their actual end and purpose? Towards what is Progress? In fact, what on Earth are we doing? No one has even the ghost of a notion, save perhaps a few simple-minded people who live to smell flowers, to listen to the sea, to watch trees in the wind, to climb mountains, to eat pâté de veau en croûte, to drink the Malvasia wine from Ruby Hill, and to cuddle up with a lovely woman—and such pursuits are not really expensive, as compared with the trillions spent on the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.

But the “seeing” needs to flow in both directions. Citizens also need to really see the men and women of law enforcement. They need to see what police see through the windshields of their squad cars, or as they walk down the street. They need to see the risks and dangers law enforcement officers encounter on a typical late-night shift. They need to understand the difficult and frightening work they do to keep us safe. They need to give them the space and respect to do their work, well and properly.

But the “seeing” needs to flow in both directions. Citizens also need to really see the men and women of law enforcement. They need to see what police see through the windshields of their squad cars, or as they walk down the street. They need to see the risks and dangers law enforcement officers encounter on a typical late-night shift. They need to understand the difficult and frightening work they do to keep us safe. They need to give them the space and respect to do their work, well and properly. If they take the time to do that, what they will see are officers who are human, who are overwhelmingly doing the right thing for the right reasons, and who are too often operating in communities—and facing challenges—most of us choose to drive around.

In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state.

There was a sign on the wall of the squad room in capital letters that read “GOYA KOD.” This acronym reminded detectives to “Get Off Your Ass, Knock On Doors.” Occasionally, but rarely, people might come to the police with information, but they tend to be more cooperative when interviewed at their residence or stores.

No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shoot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.

As a former CIA operative, I've heard a lot of statements that have chilled me as though I had a foot-long icicle down my throat while sitting naked and wet on an ice floe. (By the way—don't go to Greenland. Ever.) Things like, Open up! It's the police, and we have a flamethrower! and Tell me the code or I'll have to use this pair of pliers on your eyelids. All terrifying under normal circumstances, but throw in the Iranian secret police or a Venezuelan death squad dressed as circus clowns, and they have a smidge more gravitas. But nothing…nothing compares to what I was just told. "What do you mean we have to sell cookies?" I asked Kelly with a slight tremble in my voice. "To people? On purpose?

Villalobos had always been eager to work in law enforcement. When he was in high school, he assembled a group of boys from all grade levels and invited them to his house every Wednesday. Villalobos’ club revolved around hunting down fugitives on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He led weekly research presentations that narrowed the list down to felons who were suspected to be within fifty miles of their vicinity. Villalobos held exams for his club members, testing their knowledge on how to react if they caught a criminal. He also trained them to identify what the criminals looked like with certain disguises and how to predict their next crimes and behaviors. All the boys were into it. And they trusted their leader. The amateur intelligence squad never caught any top criminals but inadvertently located the whereabouts of several robbers and proudly shared their intel with their local police station.

Somewhere in Texas, in 1931, they were passing by a church on Sunday morning when the sheriff appeared. Squads of just deputized police agents pushed them toward the church, then surrounded the people who poured out of the church, all Mexicans. “Damnitall,” said Archille, “they think we’re Mexicans.” They were swept up in one of the hundreds of Depression-era raids in which over a million Mexican workers, many of them citizens, were rounded up and shipped across the border. Texas didn’t like Indians any better than Mexicans, so their papers didn’t help. Working on the harvest crews, both Thomas and Archille had learned to be elaborately polite to white people. The surprise worked better up north. Sometimes it set them off down here. “Excuse me, sir. May I have a word?” “You’ll go back where you came from,” said the sheriff. “We’re from North Dakota,” said Archille. His easy smile didn’t work on the sheriff. “We’re not Mexicans. We’re American Indians.” “Oh really?

I hate … and I will wreak that hate upon him”; and in Ahab’s mismatched confrontation with his decent but weak first mate, Mr. Starbuck (now of coffee-bar fame), there seemed a prescient anticipation of Yeats’s twentieth-century lament that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Like those horrific charismatics—the Generalissimo, the Führer, and Il Duce—Ahab had his private squad of secret police, five “dusky phantoms” chosen for their proficient delight in killing, whom he keeps hidden and hungry, as if they are a pack of carnivores left to starve in their cage. Once released, they leap to the chase whenever he spies a breeching whale that might be the one he is looking for. By the early 1950s, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James could describe Moby-Dick as “the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.

What are you doing!?” I shriek as Nero speeds away from the cops. Two squad cars chase after us, sirens wailing furiously. The police are driving Chargers, basically the most aggressive cop car ever built.

I will never understand why a group of police officers act as a firing squad on their victim.

Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.

The revolution is led by pigs with a vision of an egalitarian utopia free from tyrannical human beings, but their ideals are gradually abandoned as power goes to their heads and they become cruel and greedy. They decree that only pigs are allowed to eat the apples grown in the orchard (nutritionally essential for a pig’s brain, they claim), and they breed a terror squad of dogs to police the hens, sheep, cows and horses living on the farm. As the pigs take on the luxuries of the humans they fought to overthrow—sleeping in the farmhouse and swilling whisky—the other animals die of overwork and starvation. Orwell had based Animal Farm on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Stalin’s fearsome drive to collectivize the Soviet Union’s farmland, resulting in the death of millions of peasants.

Tokhtakhounov was indicted and arrested by Italian police on charges of conspiracy to rig the competition. For months the FBI worked with the Italians and with Interpol to get him extradited. Before long, word came to the squad that a Russian oligarch had pledged two hundred million dollars to get Tokhtakhounov out of jail. Next thing we knew, his release was ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. He was gone, in the wind, back to Russia, where he has been living openly. (And from there, he allegedly continued to run criminal enterprises in the United States. In 2013, Tokhtakhounov was indicted for money laundering in connection with an illegal gambling ring that operated out of Trump Tower. Several months after this indictment, Tokhtakhounov was a VIP guest at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow.) We’ve never had a chance to get him again. In the scheme of things, the evident corruption behind a figure-skating medal may seem trivial. But for me and for a lot of guys on our squad, this was a critical turn of events. One of our worst fears was that the top tier of the vory v zakone would use money to undermine Western institutions in which many millions of Americans have reflexive faith. That fear had now been realized, and we asked ourselves what institutions might be next, and we asked whether any American public official might be susceptible to a two-hundred-million-dollar bribe, and we asked whether democracy itself might become a target. HOW WE WORK Enterprise Theory Muddy Wingtips Most FBI investigations are conducted by the Bureau’s criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence divisions.

The SS and local Ukrainian collaborators discovered a series of mass graves of Ukrainian rebels that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had murdered in Lvov, Vinitsia, and Dubno, near what is today the Ukrainian-Polish border. The Germans aggressively publicized the NKVD killings to divert attention from the new executions undertaken by their own Einsatzkommando squads.2 The Soviets vehemently denied the German claims, but the Germans turned out to be telling the truth about the NKVD murders, even as they lied about their own.

Upon returning home to his country club estate, still clad in panties, he was greeted by a small army of local police in squad cars who placed him under arrest.

Moreover, the air and water here by the Dome are clean and safe. I don’t know where Mr. Pandini is finding these scientists of his, but I sure hope that it isn’t from the same place where he’s hiring his restaurant employees.” Burn, thought Zengo, remembering his first case, when the Platypus Police Squad discovered one of Pandini’s barbacks at Bamboo was selling illegal fish.

Well, your timing is impressive,” said Zengo as he fumbled to secure his safety bar into place. “How did you do that, anyhow?” “Simple physics!

The police department’s focus is on the FBI’s Crime Index; those are the seven crimes that are reported monthly to the FBI: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny theft, and motor vehicle theft.

People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities.

I started crying hysterically as I watched them put her in handcuffs and whisk her away in the back of a squad car. I was deeply upset by what I had witnessed. I mean, I was only ten and I had just seen the police beat my mother in the face. From that moment on, I would harbor a serious dislike of the police. The next few weeks were a blur of

I started crying hysterically as I watched them put her in handcuffs and whisk her away in the back of a squad car. I was deeply upset by what I had witnessed. I mean, I was only ten and I had just seen the police beat my mother in the face. From that moment on, I would harbor a serious dislike of the police.

It is an insult to the many victims of political undercover policing that the police who are responsible for serious human rights abuses have been allowed to cover up the truth and withhold information from those they abused. The public inquiry should release as a matter of urgency the cover names of all these political police and also the files they compiled on campaigners, so that those spied on are able to understand what happened and give relevant evidence to the inquiry.

For example, Israel supported the police forces of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rice during the Cold War when the US Congress had blocked US agencies from officially doing so. Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s.

Along the way they will be preyed upon by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities, maras and random rural gangs, robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped—an estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local police and other authorities and of treacherous coyotes, so that their families back home or awaiting them in the US can be extorted; meanwhile the captives are tortured, raped and sometimes massacred. Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from “La Bestia”; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the “death corridor” of the migrants’ trail.

That would be the last thing Professor Hopkins saw on the pier that night.