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Not Always As It Appears
Sudhama Ranganathan - 01.06.2010 17:00
In a society like ours where law and order to the extent we enjoy them help enable our standard of living, it is easy to take the quality of them for granted. When in trouble the first people we think of calling are often law enforcement and we rarely hear of instances when they do not show up or help. We think of them as heroic, strong, brave and possessing above average moral conviction. That’s the picture we really should hope to have even though we are now well aware of the dark side of our nation’s law enforcement.
We hear about this dark side in cases of police brutality most often. These cases were often confined to neighborhoods and areas of the country considered on one side of the tracks. As with much of life on that side of the tracks for a long time what happened there stayed confined there. All those on the opposite side heard were usually stereotypes and anecdotes of the worst sort. This created a false image any wrongs happening to those on that side of the tracks were of their own making and what they deserved. Among other things video recordings helped change that and bring the reality of the flipside home.
We have also heard other instances with corrupt federal agents tipping off drug kingpins of impending busts. We have heard of intelligence officers becoming embroiled in politics and using their positions to benefit a particular ideology or party in exchange for money, power or both. We have heard of classified US secrets being put in the hands of private security firms who also are employed by private industries and, in some cases, other countries simultaneously.
Yet, most people rarely hear in depth accounts that really expose an underbelly so filthy it makes one wonder, who exactly it is responsible for ensuring those things don’t happen. For the majority of Americans rarely do they experience more than a cop giving them a traffic ticket they felt unwarranted or slightly excessive. Beyond that perhaps they were there when someone they know was roughed up, illegally harassed in some way or even obviously racially profiled. Those things always sound so innocuous until you see it up close and in person to people you know were doing nothing untoward at all.
When I was a high school senior in 1989 I became interested in issues of racial inequality here in the US and South Africa when Nelson Mandela was still in prison. I became involved with two college students who planned a violent student protest and I made the unwise decision to tag along. Though I essentially did no planning and did nothing violent myself I ended up holding the bag. One of the others was shot in a drug deal I was not involved in before the police arrested me and the other despite witnesses and more went free. ( http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com/questions.html)
Both were older, appeared and acted even older than that and both planned to go on to more colleges. The remaining person actually did, as he heard about a small online write up I did years later about the incident and wrote me a letter confirming - at what must be well past the age of forty - he is still being placed at different colleges. ( http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com/letter.html)
Years after that incident I became a student at the University of Connecticut and experienced one of the strangest and most protracted instances of harassment related to that time I ever have. To be sure I had experienced it previously to varying degrees, but this one was so obvious and flagrant to become surreal. It was topped only when one of them admitted to me he was a federal agent who was watching me and had been on the campus for about eight years. If I sued the school, he told me, he and another student he pointed out could be outed along with their work.
The thing was, much of what they had been doing was not watching me, but actively participating in and coordinating the harassment. It was as though I were deemed a threat to the security of the school so how they decided to deal with me was to attempt to make me as agitated, angry and stressed as I could possibly be and have the obvious source other students. Wow, what a genius strategy for the maintenance of the health and well being of my fellow students and the campus. Luckily I am not unstable - quite the opposite to their chagrin.
The pressure on me did not stop once it was obvious I had no intentions of joining any politically affiliated groups, nor was I travelling to other countries, I wasn’t even Muslim (not that that should matter) and I exhibited no signs of threatening behavior.
From then on it seemed I was never bad enough. It was as though in order to justify their presence the people in charge of the open secret of illegal harassment were attempting to get the person who had been obviously revealed as no threat to behave in a manner made to seem threatening. Perhaps by having at least people who behaved like criminals they could justify their jobs and source of income. I do know it was definitely illegal and their having revealed themselves to me only made me realize that if they were so flagrantly illegal with me there must have been others.
Recently two investigative journalists from Philadelphia did a series of articles revealing the results of their investigations into corruption in an elite narcotics unit. The series revealed many disturbing and surreal occurrences within this group. In a radio interview the two discussed their findings.
The articles revealed among other things, “all different types of store owners alleged that the police would come in, focus on the cameras, smash them, in some cases take a sledgehammer to them, and then the people in the store would be arrested. Once they were taken to jail, when they returned to their stores, their stores were in shambles. Cigarettes were missing. All kinds of merchandise was missing: batteries, sandwiches.
Refrigerators were left open, Snicker bar wrappers on the floor, and a lot of their money was missing. So the police would record that they took $1,000, but actually, the store owners were alleging, no, I had $7,000 in my store. A lot of these store owners dealt in cash. They paid their vendors in cash. They didn't trust banks. One woman, (who) was Korean, she was an older woman, and she didn't speak any English.
She kept - she had $10,000 under a mattress in a room above the store where she slept. That's how hard these people worked. They literally had to live above their stores. And they kept money squirreled away in various locations. And so in addition to just having their stores left in shambles, they alleged that thousands of dollars were gone. And when they told their attorney about it, their attorneys were saying, well, you know, everybody says that. Everybody says that all the time. How are you going to prove it? It's your word against their word.” ( http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=126386819)
The investigations led to other crimes committed by, arrests of and firings of officers from the unit in question. Not all police, etc. are corrupt, but when they go bad there is little ordinary hardworking Americans like you and me can do about it. That doesn’t mean we should not report it, complain and file lawsuits as right now it’s often cases of civilians doing so which are the only thing keeping them in line.
It’s unfortunate, but injustices committed by law enforcement sometimes do happen and when they do they should be prosecuted harder than normal crimes and the offenders given much stiffer punishments. They were expected to protect us, not try to find ways to leverage their positions to take advantage of us for personal gain. That sort of corruption should be rooted out from bottom to top and more measures put in place to ensure it never happens again. No one should ever be above the law. What would the founding fathers say if they knew we were being taxed only to have our money discarded like toilet paper in such a manner?
To read more about my experiences with harassment at The University of Connecticut go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.
 E-Mail: uconnharassment@gmail.com  Website: http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com
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