Draw pistol, aim at foot.

I grew up in a police-friendly household. My father was a lawyer, an assistant attorney general, and then a judge. He was the only judge in the area who would sign search warrants after hours, so we would have state and local cops in our house in the middle of the night. My dad knew them all. Cops were just part of the landscape. I write this to give you perspective on where my attitude towards law enforcement started out. 

I’ve been watching the police my entire life. I have experienced a slow evolution from support to suspicion. Over the past couple of decades I have come to the conclusion that they aren’t paying attention to their own best interests. 

It’s counterintuitive. They seem like the most self-interested profession in the country. They have powerful unions and the blue wall of silence. They pressure politicians for more funding and less oversight. It’s gotten to the point where they can outright murder people on camera and walk away free. 

Lately it has gotten bolder, if that’s possible. People of color, religious minorities, and LGBT folks have always known that they are vulnerable, but police are taking it to the privileged. Recently a riot cop in LA, knowing he was on camera, casually shot an Australian journalist in the back with a non-lethal round as she was speaking to the camera. ICE agents, without provocation, manhandled and handcuffed a New York City mayoral candidate, again, on camera. Members of Congress aren’t safe from pointless arrest. 

The problem for police concerns their sources of power. They have one tiny power and one giant power. Their tiny power is on their belt. The gun, the nightstick, the taser, the pepper spray, may seem like their big power  because their effect is immediate and dramatic. Likewise their power of arrest and legal monopoly on violence. Not so. 

Their giant power is the idea in the minds of the people that they are a source of justice and safety. That they are the good guys. That they are definitely a better option than their absence. With that power they walk among people who support them, who will obey their orders without reluctance, and who will warn them of danger and assist them. Also a population that will pay their salaries and maintain their numbers. Without that power they are just another bunch of guys with guns. In America that doesn’t make them special. 

The police have been hacking away at the base of that giant power forever, but lately with more fervor. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, confidence in the police is around 51%. It hasn’t gone over 64% in the past 30 years. Broken down by demographics, the police are only above 50% with people over 55, white adults, and Republicans. Even Republicans only go as high as 62% approval. That’s a miserable rating for an institution that is supposedly the instrument of the law and order that Republicans tout. My guess is that even conservatives don’t really trust the police as a force of justice. They just believe that the police are brutal and lawless towards the types of people they fear and hate. 

In this disapproving environment it makes no sense in terms of self interest for ICE agents to show up everywhere in face masks with their badges covered. Wearing street clothes and driving unmarked vans, for that matter. It broadcasts a message of “We are doing something illegal and shameful.” Which, or course, they are. They are openly violating federal immigration laws and the Constitution every day. There is some evidence that ICE is hiring professional bounty hunters at $1,000 per arrest and deputizing unemployed prison guards. It’s red meat for a racist voting base, but not for the majority of Americans. 

That’s bad enough, but videos are now surfacing of random groups of white men in eBay tactical gear impersonating ICE and harassing Hispanic people. Every self-interested law enforcement officer in the U.S. should be alarmed and outraged by this. It’s a direct threat to their safety. In mid-June a man dressed as a police officer murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and shot another lawmaker and his wife, critically injuring them. This was a political assassination and an act of terrorism. It was also a blow to the legitimacy of law enforcement. The Minnesota police had to tell people that they would be searching for the suspect in pairs, and not to open their doors to a single police officer. 

There is rising resistance to the unidentified gangs snatching people, ICE or not. Unarmed groups of people are facing down the masked pseudo-cops. There is an ongoing resistance to police brutality and overreach. Every week there is another video online of some out of control cop either shooting, beating, intimidating, or humiliating somebody. For every cop that does this there are ten cops knowing that it happened and at best doing nothing, at worst obstructing justice. If police keep acting like criminals and can’t be visually distinguished from criminals, then what? 

At some point a sufficient mass of people will decide to act. The question is what form that action will take. With luck this will be a reform movement. ICE will be disbanded. After all, we made it from 1776 to 2003 without it, and it has become completely lawless. Police departments will get citizen oversight with real teeth. Qualified immunity will be weakened. Federal, state, and local  law enforcement will raise recruitment standards and improve training. And so on. Police will hate this and fight it. They will cling to their obvious, yet feeble version of power. 

Without luck, well, I don’t want to think about what will happen without luck. 

Law enforcement officers of every kind need to stop and think about their relationship with the people they supposedly serve. All of the people; not just the wealthy and the white and the likeminded. It’s on them to change that relationship from adversarial to cooperative. They need to think about their tiny power and their giant power. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it’s the self-interested thing to do.

Snow Peeve

Ok, so this one is personal and limited in scope. Limited, that is, to anyone who drives in the snow belt. Southerners may now go outside and enjoy the nice weather.

A week ago I was driving on the interstate, just after our ice storm. The highway crews had done a bang up job, and I was cruising along behind a minivan at a decent distance at 65 mph. Two pieces of ice, each about a half an inch thick and over two feet square, flipped up off the roof of the van and rotated rapidly for a moment around an invisible axle about eight feet in the air. Then each piece broke into four and crashed to the pavement just in front of my bumper. I don’t think the driver even noticed. If I had been a few feet closer….well, let’s not think about that.

The other day, after a moderate snowfall, I was driving up a secondary highway and saw a car-sized block of snow approach me in the opposite lane. It had wheels like a car and a small porthole cut in the snow in the left front, through which an idiot was peering intently. There was no other break in the snow through which an intelligent human being could see the road, signs, pedestrians, obstacles, or vehicles.

It reminded me of a number of incidents in the past where my car was suddenly engulfed in a momentary blinding whiteout caused by a cubic yard of snow leaving the roof of the vehicle in front of me. Did you know that a car going 65 mph would travel the length of a football field in the few seconds that it would take to get through a snow dump like that and clear the windshield? Anything closer than the opposing 1 yard line would be invisible.

You are undoubtedly way ahead of me on the moral to these stories. Clean off your damned car. The whole car. All the glass. Yes, the roof and the trunk lid too. I know, you’re late. So am I. I am late every time I walk towards my car – it’s congenital. I still take 3 ½ minutes to get my car into a state where it is neither a threat to me nor to others. We drive through this world with a one in 10,000 chance of dying in our vehicles. No need to shorten the odds.

Peeve vented. Thank you.

Heat

It’s been too hot to blog. The high temperatures and humidity make your Minor Heretic’s brain whimper and try to shrink back into its reptilian bottom third. We just had a top-5 heat wave here in Vermont, five days in the 90s, setting records. Ok, nothing to you folks in Arizona, but a lot of us haven’t invested in air conditioning.

This June, according to NASA, was the hottest since modern record keeping began in 1880. It followed the hottest January to June in recorded history, despite the sun being at the bottom of its cycle. 2009 was essentially tied with 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 as the second hottest year in recorded history. 2005 took the gold, if one can call it that, contributing to the first decade of this century being the warmest on record. According to the NOAA, this June caps 304 consecutive months that are as above the 20^th century average as the kids of Lake Wobegon. Oh, and the Arctic sea ice is at its lowest area for June (42%) since anybody has been keeping track.

I was thinking about ice the other day, and not just because it was disappearing from my drink so quickly. I went down to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and attended the opening of the new Hazlitt Small Boat Exhibit. The museum has built a place to display their collection of historic small water craft. At the center of the building is a fully rigged ice boat. It’s basically a big timber with a couple of outriggers on skates, with a mast and sail. Ice boats can easily exceed 60 mph with a stiff wind and smooth ice. If there is ice. While visiting the exhibit I listened to some people talking about their iceboating experiences. They used to sail out on the broad lake almost every winter. Now they mostly sail in the shallower bays. The broad lake doesn’t “close” with the consistency it used to. I looked up the National Weather Service records of Lake Champlain freezing over. It only missed two years in the 19^th century. It failed to ice over four times in the first half of the 20^th century and twenty-five times in the second half. Seventeen of those ice free winters occurred in the last 25 years.

As I noted a couple of years ago, the mythical Northwest Passage, pursued for centuries by unfortunate explorers, is no longer a myth. You can now take a summer boat ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of Canada.

I’ve been thinking about global warming of late, wondering how many record setting heat waves we’ll be enduring over the next decade. I’ve also been thinking about resistance to the concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I suppose some people are just born skeptical, but it seems to be more than that.

Of course, employees of coal, oil, natural gas, power, and car companies have a vested interest in disbelief. As Sinclair Lewis once wrote, “It’s hard to convince a man of something if his salary depends on not being convinced of that thing.” Beyond sheer economic self-interest or profit motivated mendacity, there is a political divide. Global warming is “liberal.” I’d contend that geophysics is beyond politics, even though individual scientists have political beliefs. The whole structure of science is bent on correcting factual error and refining our understanding of the natural world. Nevertheless, it’s those lefty environmentalists who are yammering about it, so it must be wrong.

Some observers have noted that climate change has another political facet – the negation of conservative theories about the balance of the individual and the community. Dealing with climate change requires cooperative action and strong government intervention. The corporate fossil-fuel promoters won’t give up revenue voluntarily.

It’s frightening, too. It promises extreme weather, crop failures, submerged coastlines…cue the four horsemen.

There’s a deeper resistance, though, and it involves guilt and responsibility. If I accept the concept that human activity is causing a dangerous change in the climate, then I bear guilt. Every time I put the key in the ignition or hit the thermostat I am committing a little crime. Every day I do my bit part in the grand terracide of modern fossil-fueled life. When I get on an airplane, hell, it’s a gun to some island kid’s head. Who wants to think of themselves that way? Sure, in a way we are bounded by our infrastructure and the expectations of society. But still, we have some options. This is the responsibility part, because with knowledge comes responsibility. If you know you are culpable then basic ethics requires you to act. In this case, acting means going against the current of our society, dealing with change and inconvenience, and creating a new lifestyle. Dissonance and inconvenience are not hot tickets in our culture. Personal change, although celebrated in a thousand books, is more popular in print than in fact.

The biggest obstacle to people dealing with AGW is their desire to feel good about themselves and just get on with life. Especially as getting on with life has become more difficult of late. I get the feeling that a lot of people realize that the oil companies are bullshitting us about it, for obvious reasons. There’s still that emotional hurdle, though.

As always with humans, it’s a marketing problem. Make the economic opportunity pitch? Make it a sport? People love the human drama of athletic competition*, so why not carbon competition? There are a thousand ideas, but downplaying the guilt and the looming disaster is a start. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s us.

*Name that TV show