A Warranted Article

Crime is increasing
Trigger-happy policing
Panic is spreading
God knows where we're heading
--Inner City Blues, Marvin Gay

I can stop these cops from killin',
I can feed these hungry children,
I can stop racism,
a product of cap-it-a-lism
--We Need A Revolution, Dead Prez

I feel like I'm being stalked by a Nazi
--Mike, Dazed and Confused (1993)
___________

The two Atlanta police officers who killed Kathryn Johnson, a 92-year-old during a ''botched drug raid'' last Fall, pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges last Thursday (''Atlanta Officers Plead Guilty.'') An informant said he'd bought drugs from a dealer there, so the police burst in on armed citizen Johnson, who then opened fire on those who invaded her home. She was shot dead by the entering officers.

There are so many aspects of this story which are appalling:

• Johnson shot once through the door, injuring no officers, following which they shot at least 39 rounds, striking her five or six times, once fatally in the chest.

• After being shot, Ms. Johnson was handcuffed while her premises were searched. When no WMD's, uh, drugs, were found, ''the cover-up began in earnest.'' One of the convicted officers, J.R. Smith, admitted to planting three bags of marijuana is Johnson's apartment.
  

• A man claiming to be the informant said he had never fingered Johnson's residence, leading Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington to admit he was uncertain whether the suspected drug dealer actually existed.

Some reports place the woman at 88, so using that conservative estimate, let's take a 360 degree walk around her life.

She would have been born in 1919, which is a year the U.S. was fighting a war to make the world ''safe for democracy.'' This probably meant that democracy should be safe in America, versus making the world safe in terms of receptive for proselytizers to go traipsing about the world planting the seeds of democracy like an agenda'd Johnny Appleseed.

She also lived through WW II, which was another exercise in fighting non-democratic forces of evil loose in the world. We fought the Nazis because they did things like arrest people without warrants, use slave labor, hold secret courts and detentions, and commit torture, among other very bad things. Then Ms. Johnson lived through the Cold War, eventually making it to the current era of forced democratization (Iraq/Afghanistan) and the export of democracy.

Which brings us to Atlanta and Ms. Johnson's death at the hands of police officers executing that marvelous invention of democratic police action, the no-knock warrant.

The American people accept the ''no-knock'' as a requisite tool in the arsenal of the War on Drugs, which is a subset of the War on Democracy. I guess it is because we have a Drug Czar overseeing this effort, and this is par for the course in Russia, where they do such things.

The party line is that the no-knock visitation disallows drug criminals from flushing the evidence down the toilet. However, if they possess such a small amount that it can voided in this manner, why not let them flush it and call the raid a success? Ranger argues that raids should be focusing on major suppliers rather than low-level users/pushers.

Further, warrants are granted by ensconced judges that accept the flimsiest of ''probable cause'' statements that are usually or often based upon the statements of low-life informants. Instead, warrants should be granted on the basis of solid police work, rather than info/intelligence purchased from drug-dazed stooges.

The New York Times alleges ''broad corruption in the Atlanta Police Department'':

First, according to court papers, they pried off the burglar bars and began to ram open the door. Ms. Johnston, who lived alone, fired a single shot from a .38-caliber revolver through the front door and the officers fired back, killing her.

''She was without question an innocent civilian who was caught in the worst circumstance imaginable,” Mr. Howard, the district attorney,

Ranger contends that more American citizens are shot and killed by local, state and federal police actions than are killed by terrorists. So if the latter scares you, ...