[hga]

Your fist mistake is expecting anyone in America to care about your suffering.

There you are wrong, starting with e.g. reporter Radley Blako and his readers, and extending to large swaths of the white or thereabouts population who buy books like Arrest-Proof Yourself (http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Dale-C-Carson/dp...) This was reified for me in ~2008 when a local cop played a game of chicken with his car and my body.

Some of it is that the author lives in Santa Clara County, California as mentioned in another comment. Citizens in Bay Area counties are allowed to own (some types of) guns, but by and large not to carry them, and that appears to help the Badge Gang feel they can treat nearly the entire populace as their playthings.

Take that too far in my part of the country, a combo of Greater Appalachia and the cultural South, and the calculus changes rather a lot. And in my county, when I last renewed my concealed carry permit, 5% of the age eligible population had one, and gun ownership is not quite ubiquitous, but extremely common and steadily increasing. And many of the cops are on our side; can you imagine a Santa Clara County law enforcement public affairs type confirming that a woman had an "absolute right" to use lethal force against some home invaders?

[joesmo]

I too had a cop play chicken with me in his SUV while I was peacefully standing on the sidewalk. I'm not surprised to find out it's happened to someone else. There were actually at least a dozen people there. Anyone else would have been charged with attempted murder. For the cop, it was just another day at the office.

Radley Balko is one brave writer, that's for sure. But even he's just going to write about the atrocities here after the fact. Maybe what I should have written is not that no one cares, but that very few people do, and they cannot change anything. Even Balko does not realize the full extent of the problem of living in a police state like this, probably because he doesn't recognize it as a police state. And while his assessments of what exactly is wrong with our police in "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces", for example, are spot on, his solutions are lame. He understands the hate that communities in the US have for police, yet suggests that more foot patrols will help. We are way, way beyond that. Without strict liability laws and restrictions on police, there is no fixing this. While cops can get away with murder, there will be no fixing this. If having justice, which includes not murdering innocent people, is not enough of an issue for Americans to change this system of horrific, Holocaust-scale imprisonment, it really does seem like almost nobody cares.