Civil Liberties Making a Comeback in Springfield

Hey, any time civil liberties move forward with out the ACLU poking someone with a stick, it's a good day. Don't get me wrong...I am literally a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and proud to make that claim. A belief in civil liberties and the desire to protect them for all Americans was the underlying factor in my husbands decision to make the USAF his career. Any political party or political philosophy that claims to represent the entire military is attempting to perpetrate a fraud upon the American people. Not every soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is a registered Republican and an Evangelical Southern Baptist, eager to fight another Christian Crusade in the middle east. Believe it or not, many in the officer corps are constitutional zealots, and if they were to crusade for anything, it would be the Bill of Rights. I know. I married one, a registered Democrat who can quote the Bill of Rights chapter and verse, and it is not merely rote. Unfortunately, these guys are calling their careers a decade too soon because they have lost faith that they are serving to the ideals they originally ascribed. I know that story by heart as well, and my husband is not alone, many of his peers, NCO's and Officers alike have taken the 20-and-out route.

But I digress. I am applauding civil liberties and the victory they experienced in a Missouri courtroom this week. In Springfield; where the police have something of a reputation for knocking heads, and such reputations are usually earned honestly; one man apparently fought back, both physically and legally. Let me make it perfectly clear that I am not concerning myself with the man who found himself in the position to have the police thump on him, or with the fact that most of the people who get thumped on did something wrong to precipitate said thumping. I am applauding the fact that the courts found for the constitution, not necessarily for the defendant in a criminal case.

Can I make that any clearer? I am not defending criminals. I'm a liberal, so a lot of people want to paint me with the "soft on crime" brush. Let me allay that fear right now. I want criminals punished. (Redefining what constitutes a criminal, however, is another discussion.) But at all costs, I want the Constitution upheld, and the rights of the citizenry protected from the tyranny of power. When the police thump on people, I want them punished, too. Assault and Battery is Assault and Battery, it doesn't matter who is doing the assaulting and who is doing the battering, wrong is wrong, and beating another human being is wrong. When the one doing the beating is violating a public trust by doing so, it crosses the line from not merely wrong, but it becomes heinous.

Every time a policeman strikes a handcuffed suspect, he or she is taking a swing at every last one of us, because they are abusing the power that we as a society have granted them, and allow them to make a living from. They serve at our pleasure, and to protect us from the nefarious in our midst. We demand a lot of them, and one of our demands is that they be above such behavior. If we condone police brutality, we need to consider that we are all just one traffic stop and a paperwork mix-up away from finding out how the justice system really works, not just how it works on "Law & Order" and "Judge Joe Brown."

A Missouri Appeals Court has upheld that all of the internal affairs reports and incident reports filed pertaining to the three officers involved in a case where a man is charged with assaulting the officers; and he is claiming self defense in the criminal case and has filed a civil case alledging that the officers were committing police brutality. As I said, I am not too concerned with the uderlying criminal case, I am just glad that civil liberties are still breathing in Missouri. The officers involved are accused of very specific misconduct, and incident reports pertaining to the same behavior in other instances are relevant, and should be revealed under the states "Sunshine Laws." In this case, the appeals court agrees with me. (Preserving my stature as one of Missouri's great legal scholars by the way.)

Concealing reports that support such a charge, or that reveal a pattern of misbehavior on the part of any member of the law enforcement community constitutes a violation of the public trust, and deserves to be revealed, not concealed. Fellow officers who are sworn to protect the public violate that public and violate our basic trust in them when they do nothing to stop an officer they know to be violent and abusive.

Let me go on record here: I live in a city where the police department was found to be so corrupt back in the days of Pendergast that the state took over the Kansas City Missouri police department. Still to this day, many decades later, the KCMO-PD consistently fails to convince the state that it is capable of self-policing, capable of punishing graft and corruption. Capable of punishing bad cops. And so the KCMO-PD remains under control of the state legislature.

Living in an area that knows crime, and knowing a few cops personally (comes with the territory when you work on a trauma team) I have to say I think this is good. Any civil liberties victory in a red state that cinches the buckle of the bible belt a little tighter, in the age of the Patriot Act and the supremacy of civil and military service, is a huge victory. Of course, we can't start taking our civil liberties for granted just because one Missouri appeals court made the right call, but we can relish the victory for a minute before moving on to the next issue threatening our fundamental American freedoms.