Know where you can now find lockdowns and para-military police squads that go around shooting and killing people at night? In the “Live Not So Free” state of New Hampshire.
On Sunday, according to the Union Leader, the police shot not one, but two people under questionable circumstances. A 22-year old Windsor man was shot in Concord during a confrontation in White Park after a burglary at the skate house (“Pursuant to protocol, the name(s) of the officer(s) involved in the incident is being withheld pending the conclusion of the formal interview. No additional information is expected to be released until the conclusion of the formal interview(s), and in Manchester, the police shot a man on Lake Shore Road, possibly related to an arson at another address. [UPDATE: SHOT AND KILLED]. [UPDATE 04/07/20: AUTOPSY, DEATH RULED HOMICIDE.]
But who knows? Few details are available for either incident because when law enforcement shoots someone, you better not want to know what really happened, because, unlike any other investigation in which one human being is shot by another human being, these “officer-involved shootings” are “special,” with special kid-glove rules designed to protect the officer when an investigation is started by the Attorney General’s office.
The pristine, trustworthy New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, the same AG’s office that is actively fighting to keep a list of about 260 dirty cops secret from you even though a judge ordered last April (a year ago) that the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule or Laurie’s List is NOT confidential, is NOT subject to any exception of the Right-to-Know law, and should be made public. Instead of doing the right thing, the AG appealed this decision, meaning they’re now seeking a New Hampshire Supreme Court judge just shady enough to rule that keeping a list of rotten cops secret from the people they purport to work for is A-OK. Does this sound like open and transparent and accountable government to you?
That same Attorney General’s office that has never once ruled that an “officer-involved shooting” is unjustified, even when a fleeing man was shot in the back and killed, or when TWENTY FIVE PERCENT (25%) of all firearm deaths in 2017 were people shot and killed by New Hampshire law enforcement (the national average is 6%), or when LEOs tear-gassed two twenty-something drugs users to death in a hotel room last year, and even now, a full year later, not a peep… THAT Attorney-General’s office is going to bring us independent, trustworthy investigative reports about what is going down while Granite Staters are “ordered” by “decree” to “stay-at-home.” Umm, m’kay…
Let me make it simple for you to understand. Here’s exactly how this will go:
- The officers involved will have at least a week to get their stories straight before meeting with an “investigator,” who will be someone they know and who definitely works for the same boss. No conflict of interest here, right?
- Somewhere along the line, someone will say they thought they saw a gun. Whether there was an actual gun or not at the scene of the crime does not matter. Your active imagination, if you are a law enforcement officer, is all you need to get out of jail free! (Think I am exaggerating? When I was arrested back in 2010 in Weare, NH for filming police officers from behind a white picket-fence, more than 30 feet away, and after telling them I was audio and video recording, when they arrested me and chained me to a pole for several hours with a handcuff that they painfully tightened when I complained about how I was being treated, the officers paraded through the holding area and several told me ‘we’re going to say we thought the camera was a gun!’ They even wrote it into the police report, saying my camera’s red light looked like a laser on a gun… except, we proved there weren’t any lights on the camera at all. Huh, go figure.)
- The officers may or may not be put on administrative leave, but my guess is the officers involved (see? we don’t even know their names, how accountable!) won’t be put on administrative leave. I am, however, 100% confident that they will still get paid their full $80,000-100,000+ salaries, they will still accrue vacation time and all their really, really enviable bennies, and if they are placed on administrative leave, that time will still count towards their lifetime pensions. When you wonder what’s happening in America, remember, you will probably never be able to retire because you will have to continue to work in order to pay the pension of someone who will have stopped working when they were fifty-years old. Sure sounds like “we’re all in this together,” eh?
- In about a year, after everyone has forgotten, a report will quietly be issued by the AG’s office that will exonerate the officers involved. If any action is taken, it will be something lateral, like transferring the officer off the streets and placing them in a government-run school instead, like Officer Joshua English who shot and killed someone in 2010 and who last year attacked a 15 year-old from behind and threw him on his head on a school floor at Keene High School. The officer was not reprimanded, but the child who was thrown to the ground and the student who took the video of the incident were suspended. Sounds about right!?!
While you are ordered by the “State of New Hampshire” to sit at home, while you lose your business or job or salary (but don’t worry–local government employees are getting raises and it was announced last week your property taxes will be going up!), maybe now is a good time for a crash course in what the government agents who literally have a license to kill you have been up to the past decade. I hate to break it to you, but it ain’t pretty. Go ahead, Google “police brutality” on YouTube, or actually, just go read the NH Attorney General’s own reports online, and let me know what you think.