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Sci-Fi Author Peter Watts Beaten, Charged During Border Crossing
JoeGee writes "On December 8th, Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, was crossing the US/Canadian border at Port Huron, Michigan when he was involved in an altercation with US Border Patrol agents. According to Watts, he was beaten, left half-naked in a cold cell, and finally dumped on the Canadian side of the border with no coat. A legal consultant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was successful in helping a civil rights lawyer in Michigan free Watts. Watts faces US charges of assaulting a federal officer. Based on the accounts, one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer's hand with his face. If convicted, Watts faces two years in a US Federal prison."
Exactly. Or more accurately, assaulting an officer means trying to defend yourself from aggressive police.
Defend yourself in court, not on the scene. Allowing people to "defend" themselves against the police because they think they are in the right is not one compatible with the rule of law. Should the police just give up if the guy insists (very strenuously I'm sure) that he has done nothing wrong?
I read a story about a homeless mean getting beat by cops for resisting arrest. The only charge? Resisting arrest of course.
Because there's no point in leveling loitering, vagrancy or trespass charges since they carry no jail time and you obviously can't fine the guy. Of course, they shouldn't have beat him any more than necessary to effect a (seemingly) lawful arrest.
They had no reason to harass him in the first place, other than to give him a hard time for being homeless on public property.
Which can be, under some factual circumstances, a crime in some cities and States. The MA law on loitering (MGL Chapter 161 Section 95), for instance, comes to mind.
Stability will NEVER be achieved there without killing all the civilians (remember, the "insurgents" are also civilians). The people in that part of the world are not advanced enough to have a nation; they still have a tribal mentality.
More importantly, the USA does not have the money to maintain a formidable military presence in that region for decades. Trying to do that will bring about complete economic collapse, which we're already on the brink of.
Troll? Really? I'm just saying you shouldn't initiate physical contact with someone that has a job that puts them in danger. I guess someone had a problem with the fact that I said cops are pretty friendly (I even said there are exceptions)! Sure, cops that use their powers inappropriately should be legally dealt with in an appropriate manor - but why hate them all without justification? Modding someone troll because you disagree is an abuse of the system. You're a dick.
"My baby didn't do nuffin!" or "But I wasn't doin' nuffin!" are all too common. Nobody says "Oh, yeah, I really deserved that."
"He was just asking them questions" can just as well be "He ignored thirty seven requests to get back in his car, and ten additional warnings."
Before I jumped to any conclusions... I would want to know what really happened.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Yeah, you sound like one of those wacko types that don't fit in here.
You sound like you can understand the likely outcomes from making certain decisions... around here, we just believe in entitlement. Go back to your own country, freak.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Bullshit. It's the ultimate way to confine the government to the rule of law. If the state obtains a monopoly on the use of deadly force, then all the laws you can write won't amount to anything.
So the proper measure of whether a citizen is in compliance with the law is whether he wins a contest of force with the police? How is a man that successfully shoots an officer coming to arrest him any more likely to be innocent than one that surrenders peacefully? If anything, it's got to work the other way around -- murderers probably have far less compunction over committing one more murder than the next.
The result of a contest of force is entirely uncorrelated to which party has the law on their side. Better aim is not the same as a better legal position.
The parent post has been modded "troll". How is that possibly justified? He didn't insult anyone, or make any obnoxious remarks--unless the moderator happens to be politically offended by the ideas the poster expressed. And that's the worst reason to mod "troll".
The bullies that engage in this kind of crappy, argumentative moderating need to be called out. I will bust out the insults, but I'm reserving them for someone who can't possibly be involved in the comments, here: I'm talking aobut the asshat limp-dick insecure loser who gets off on abusing power, even if it's as lame of a power as Slashdot moderating. He probably has an undiagnosed learning disability (not a retard, probably ADHD or dyslexia), and a consequent massive authority-defiance complex as a result of being humiliated in front of schoolteachers his whole life. His obviously fragile self-esteem has to-date kept him from ever having sex with a woman, though he may have gotten some the rude way, after getting drunk one night by himself and running into the wrong bull queer in a dark alley. He probably has a hard drive full of BDSM and rape porn, which is the only thing that gets him going because he's too afraid of intimate vulnerability to express his sexuality as anything but a power trip.
The sad part is, you may know him and not suspect any of this. You probably just think he's a douchebag, and while you never really want him to hang out with you, you probably aren't overtly rude to him. He's got a "loser-y" vibe, rather than a "creepy" vibe, so you might even feel a little sorry for him. (But if you ever have given in to the pity, and tried to connect with him, you've concluded that you'd rather be mean than hand out with a combination douche / buzzkill like him.)
The funny part is (and this is where I get back on-topic), he'd make an OK small-town cop, he's certainly got the instincts for bullying. But he can't, because he's unable to muster the basic social skills needed to hang out with other men in a locker room for five minutes without causing everyone around him to fantasize about stuffing his head into a toilet. And he's probably quite the physical coward, too--standard Internet Tough Guy syndrome.
Hoo-ee, that's going to cost me some karma!
(It was worth it, if Fuckup McGee the Moderating Queen actually reads it.)
I'll probably go down as "offtopic" or "redundant", possibly even "troll"--how about that, for a touch of irony?
You're assuming the guy who was "beaten" by the cops is not lying. As a writer he has far more to gain by making shit up then admitting he did not cooperate peacefully with authorities. By making headlines, even on geek news sites, he gets his name out and makes that many more people more aware of his presence on the book stand.
>>However, we no longer live in a world where the police only arrest dangerous people.
WHAT?
You are certainly NO student of history. Right now, at this very moment, we have probably the most effective LEAST dangerous police forces in this country EVER. Would you really like to argue that?
Go ahead and try. Tell me a decade when they were better than we have it right now. We have dozens of rights organizations ready to step up to the plate if an officer so muchs as farts when he's not supposed to. So, if you please, tell me when we DID only arrest dangerous people? In the 40's, people were arrested for being Japanese. In the 50's, people were arrested for being black. In the 60's, people were arrested for demonstrating. Segragation? Schools? I would bet you could go back decade by decade, all the way back to the wild west and before, and show millions of instances of arrests for anything BUT someone being dangerous.
I know that people who are young or people who don't have a good grasp of history don't get it. It's sad really. We are living in a time with free legal representation - many times you'll get pro-bono work from some of the best lawyers in the country if it's a high profile case. The ACLU, the EFF, and hundreds of others are willing to stand up against the police and fight for YOU.
On top of that, I've typed all this sounding a bit like the police are the bad guys. That isn't true either. They go through more training and take more psychology tests to weed out the dangerous power seeking ones that ever before. Because of economic times, many of the poor performers have been let go. No, they aren't perfect. But they're better right now than they've ever been before for a hundred different reasons. I get sick of people talking about how the past was always better. How on earth did they ever get deluded into believing that?