Death of a princess: Aiyana Jones, victim of the Homeland Security State |
In physics, the term "observer effect" describes how examining a phenomenon can change it, because of the influence of the instruments used to make the observation. Something similar happens to human interactions when cameras are present. The irresistible impulse to play to the lens makes human behavior mannered and self-aware. Every statement becomes a performance, every gesture a pose.
Conflict and danger, whether genuine or contrived, make for high-impact television; de-escalation and sober, careful police work do not. Thus embedding camera crews with the police -- only officially vetted personnel from State-aligned media are suitable; Mundanes with cameras are subject to summary arrest -- creates a perverse incentive for "peace" officers to choose an approach more likely to result in avoidable death, injury, and property destruction.
Despite warnings from neighbors that there were children present in the home -- a fact attested by the toys scattered in the front yard -- the SRT paramilitaries chose a Fallujah-style "dynamic entry," hurling a flash-bang grenade through a closed window and storming through the front door with guns drawn.
This means, apparently, that the inanimate object simply discharged sua sponte, independent of intentional or negligent action on the part of its owner, a fully credentialed member of the exalted "Only Ones" -- as in "law enforcement and the military are the Only Ones who should be permitted to own and carry firearms."
Firearms in the hands of the hoi polloi, we are told, have a way of spontaneously firing and killing innocent children. Oddly enough, that's what supposedly happened to a beautiful 7-year-old girl named Aiyana Jones.
In other words, the decision-making process in this investigation was being distorted by the "COPS Effect." The department insists that this was a high-risk warrant enforcement operation, but it wasn't too dangerous to bring a camera crew along. Had the intent been simply to capture a murder suspect, the police could have sent a team of street officers and homicide detectives, rather than the paramilitary goon squad and their archivists.
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Just another day in the Reich: A child uses the bathroom under the benevolent gaze of a stormtrooper during a paramilitary drug raid.
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Of course, this is precisely the point: Paramilitary outfits of this kind are designed to advertise the might of the State. That's why the cameras were along to capture the early morning raid that claimed the life of Aiyana Jones, and it's why the SRT -- rather than a less dangerous and less telegenic police unit -- was assigned that task in the first place.
The life of Aiyana Jones -- may she rest in God's peace -- ended violently in an act of homeland security agitprop. She wasn't the first to die that way, and won't be the last.
UPDATE
Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who is representing the family of Aiyana Jones, claims that "video footage shows police fired into the home at least once after lobbying a flash grenade through the window."
This apparently contradicts the official account in which Jones was killed by a round fired in an accidental discharge during a "tussle" between one of the raiders and Aiyana's 46-year-old grandmother.
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