And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him.
“None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game - but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.Excerpted from "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier.
And under Trump, these powers were expanded in terrifying new ways, as evidenced by the tanks and overwhelming force that met the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. Nixon’s War on Drugs, Reagan’s War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, the post-9/11 security state under Bush, Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit-which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Today’s armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other-an enemy. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny.
0 kommentar(er)
