Why Are People Surprised Cops Injured A Peaceful 75-Year-Old Protestor?

The recent video of a Buffalo senior citizen being shoved to the ground by cops went viral and was one more example of the ways in which police departments around the country have turned into small armies. 

Back in the Obama administration, official Washington was having second thoughts about the giant giveaway of military grade equipment to local police forces. But it was already too late to reverse a decade of bad policy and bad thinking because too many American cops were thinking of citizens as “The Enemy.”

And it wasn’t just Black citizens–though they’ve been assaulted and killed in disproportionately high numbers. It was and is all citizens.

A sea change was taking place that was invisible to most Americans. Across the country, in big cities and small towns, police forces gradually turned into armies. It took the events in Ferguson to blow things wide open. Senators like Claire McKaskill started to speak out, too late, about the results of a misguided policy: “The whole country and every representative and senator have seen the visuals, and at some level, it made all of us uncomfortable.” Note her shocking understatement and the typical D.C. focus on “optics.”

Those optics have only gotten more horrifying.

The technical term for the change  is “militarization.” Well before 9/11, the Pentagon was lavishing cops in every state with military equipment, but that’s escalated since 2006 as the Pentagon has unloaded surplus assault rifles; armored vehicles; planes and helicopters. The total dollar amount has now reached into the billions since that terror attack has made everyone think they’re the next target, no matter how improbable it might seem.

Even tiny towns want armored personnel carriers. And they use them. For things like serving warrants and drug raids. That’s right. For ordinary police work that used to done without military hardware.

Assault with a Deadly Lie: A Nick Hoffman Novel of Suspense (Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 8) by [Lev Raphael]
50,000 SWAT team raids take place in this country every year. The U.S. is now a war zone and our police have morphed into soldiers. They raid at night for maximum shock and awe, break down doors, use flash bang grenades, shoot people’s dogs, wreck homes, and commit violence on innocent citizens. They often raid the wrong house because their information is out of date. Sometimes they even kill unarmed citizens. And they haven’t really been accountable to anyone, despite the string of news stories that have been appearing on local TV stations and in local and national newspapers for years.

I started reading about these epidemic SWAT raids a decade ago and was shocked to learn that police forces were recruiting ex-military and radically shifting their consciousness and their perceived mission. Forget serving the public. The public is the enemy, at least potentially, and the enemy has to be crushed. As more ex-soldiers have entered the police force and more cops have been trained by the military, the danger has increased to the general public everywhere.  

And you know this is a searing problem when organizations as different as the ACLU and The Heritage Foundation agree that America’s police are out of control.

That’s one reason I wrote Assault With a Deadly Lie, a novel of suspense that explores the crushing effects of police brutality on innocent people. Because nowadays, none of us are really innocent when cops are on the scene. We’re all criminals, no matter who we are or where we live. As the defense lawyer in my book says, after 9/11, “You think you have rights and freedoms, but everything is contingent now.”

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-six books in a dozen different genres, from memoir to mystery.

Was Sue Monk Kidd’s Editor AWOL?

When I reviewed for the Detroit Free Press I discovered that best-selling authors could publish badly written books and hardly anyone seemed to notice.   Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel The Secret Life of Bees spent one hundred weeks on the New York Times best seller list, which might explain why the editing seems spotty in The Book of Longings.

It’s a serious book about female empowerment told in the voice of Ana, the fictional wife of Jesus, but the first paragraph is filled with grotesque laugh lines and incongruities.  Here’s how it starts:

I am Ana.  I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.  I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder. 

“Little Thunder” sounds like some hokey name from a Grade B Hollywood Western in the 1950s, the kind where white people in dark makeup played Native Americans.  It sets the completely wrong tone.

Ana goes on: He said he heard rumblings inside me while I slept, a sound like thunder from far over the Nahal Zippori valley or even farther beyond the Jordan.

It’s hard not to think of someone with serious stomach trouble after a line like that.

I don’t doubt he heard something. All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night.

If you’re writing a book set in the early years of the first century CE, it’s not a great idea to use a term that for many people might evoke music of the nineteenth century and Chopin.   Piano nocturnes are melodic–they don’t “wail.”

Perhaps Ana is referring to prayer nocturnes (also spelled “nocturns”), but there was no Christian church in the years 16-17 when Ana is speaking, so prayers like that didn’t exist.  They evolved much later, however you spell the word.  So much for the “meticulous” research the publisher says the author did. 

The comic factor increases at the end of the paragraph with these lines: That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him.  What he heard was my life begging to be born.

Why is Jesus bending his heart and not his head to listen to his wife?  And if Ana’s heart is making all that noise, she sounds seriously ill and needs to find a healer–though she could just as well ask Jesus for help.  It was part of his skill set, after all.

I read a bit further out of morbid curiosity and met her aunt Yaltha, a character apparently inspired by Yalta, the wife of a rabbi who lived several hundred years later.  The aunt is first called “educated,” but Kidd immediately contradicts that with a ridiculous image: “Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”

Feral and educated are opposites, and how does a country spill its own borders?  Was it a seismic event?  A volcano turning rock into lava?  Or was the aunt’s mind filled with feral pigs and that’s what was spilling across the border line?  Could the image be a super-subtle reference to the miracle of the Gadarene swine that appears in the three Synoptic Gospels? 

Probably not, and I was laughing too hard to read much further (though I also found significant errors in her portrayal of Jewish life in that period).  Bad writing and bad research in the opening of a novel are not good omens.  What else did the editor (and copy editor) miss?

Lev Raphael has reviewed for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post and other publications.  He had his own book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Erica Jong and may other authors.  Raphael is also the prize-winning author of twenty-seven books in many genres. The Library at Michigan State University collects his literary papers.