Death row goes DEI — and the execution still goes off the rails



America has been inundated with sob stories from female murderers over the past few months. First, it was Lindsay Clancy, otherwise known as the Exercise Band Executioner of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Prosecutors say Lindsay deliberately strangled her three children; she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Now after a mistrial, her lawyer insists there is a “total and complete lack of evidence” that smiling Lindsay killed them. A judge rejected that bid Thursday.

Maybe JonBenét Ramsey’s killer, who is still on the loose, climbed in the Clancy window and did what Mom is being unfairly blamed for?

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Recently, the soap opera moved farther south to Tennessee, a state that had not executed a woman since 1819. The convicted female death-row inmate in the news is 50-year-old Christa Pike, condemned for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer.

Pike’s lethal injection was scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. CDT. Concerned about being traumatized, Christa demanded special treatment at her execution.

Christa took diversity, equity, and inclusion to new heights by requesting that women handle the execution because of her history of sexual abuse. Her attorney later said it appeared Tennessee honored the request.

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Pike also challenged Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol because of her small veins and a blood disorder. Her lawyers proposed a central line or even hanging as alternatives. It’s a shame no one thought of Lindsay Clancy; she is both a nurse and a woman. If Pike had requested that wheelchair-bound Clancy be flown in from Massachusetts to tenderly place the IV line in the femme fatale’s arm — then if that had failed, who better than Lindsay to enforce the alternative?

Poor Christa said she had been living in constant fear, unable to sleep and hoping the IV would go in cleanly. She did not want to end up like Tony Von Carruthers, the Tennessee death-row prisoner whose execution was called off in May after officials spent more than an hour trying and failing to establish the required backup IV line.

After a day of appeals, a temporary Sixth Circuit stay, and the U.S. Supreme Court clearing the way for Tennessee to proceed, Christa finally found herself eight miles from Music Row in Nashville, in a sanitized execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, about to be ushered into Nirvana by the all-female team she had requested.

The curtain opened at about 7:27 p.m. Witnesses saw Christa strapped to a gurney and prepped for lethal injection. Pike received pentobarbital and remained conscious long enough to smile, move, and complain that her arm hurt.

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The curtain closed, reopened, then closed again. Witnesses could still hear Christa breathing and snoring behind it. Tennessee administered a second dose. That one didn’t kill her either.

Her attorney demanded that officials stop the execution and provide emergency medical care. At 8:53 p.m. — 86 minutes after the curtain first opened — Christa Pike was still alive, and witnesses were ordered out.

Instead of a hearse, an ambulance eventually shuttled Pike from Riverbend to a hospital. As of Thursday afternoon, her lawyers said she remained in critical condition receiving “life-saving care”. Gov. Bill Lee (R) halted Tennessee’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent review.

No one scooped Colleen Slemmer up on that freezing winter night in Knoxville and ferried her away. Slemmer’s unrecognizable body wasn’t found until the next morning.

Christa’s journey to Riverbend started on January 12, 1995, when she was 18 years old. The night before, she told friend Kim Iloilo that she intended to kill fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day”. Pike believed Colleen was interested in her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

The next night, Pike, Shipp, Slemmer, and Shadolla Peterson left the Job Corps center together. Only three came back.

Pike later told Iloilo that Colleen had begged them to stop. Instead of mercy, Christa cut the 19-year-old woman’s throat, beat her, and cracked her skull with a piece of asphalt. Pike said a meat cleaver was used to cut Slemmer’s back and a box cutter to cut her throat. A pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s forehead and chest.

Then Pike came back with a souvenir: a piece of Colleen’s skull.

The next morning, with the skull fragment still in her pocket, Pike bragged to classmate Stephanie Wilson about the killing. Pointing to brown spots on her shoes, she said, “That ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s blood.”

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On January 13, a University of Tennessee groundskeeper found Slemmer’s brutalized body and testified that it was “so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.”

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to death in 1996. Her prison résumé did not improve. In 2001, she choked inmate Patricia Jones unconscious with a shoelace and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder.

With execution looming, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition. They said she was sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, raped by a neighbor at 11, and raped again by a stranger at 17. They also cited bipolar disorder, PTSD, suicide attempts, and other mental-health problems.

Granted, if Christa’s accounts are true, they are tragic. But even all that does not justify one woman brutally torturing and murdering another woman. And then, three decades later, she had the gall to ask for women around her execution gurney to lessen the “trauma.”

In the end, it is almost as if karma circumvented compassion. After all the argument over who would touch Christa, how the IV would be placed, and how much suffering the state could lawfully impose, Tennessee gave her two hefty doses of the death drug and still failed to kill her.

Now Pike remains hospitalized in critical condition with a dire prognosis — which is considerably more medical attention than Colleen Slemmer received after Christa bludgeoned her to death.

The Anniversary Of Charlie Kirk’s Murder Should Fuel More Prosecutions

We owe it to Charlie Kirk to get retribution for his horrible murder and to ensure he didn’t die in vain.

ICE gets watched. Who’s watching the immigration lawyers?



As a deportation officer, I managed cases from beginning to end. I took the file when it opened and stayed with it through custody determinations, immigration court, appeals, travel-document requests, and, when it came to that, the flight home.

We worked those cases on the merits and nothing else. Not race. Not nationality. Not religion. Not politics. What did the file say, and what did the law allow?

A rule that exists only on paper is not much of a safeguard.

Anyone who worked differently answered for it, because immigration enforcement is watched constantly: by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Professional Responsibility, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, detention inspections, congressional oversight, federal litigation, and a press corps often eager to publish before a case is even closed.

I never objected to that scrutiny. Enforcement power is serious power, and it should be examined hard. I have said so under oath.

What I do not understand is why the examination so often seems to stop at the government's side of the table.

On the other side sits a disciplinary regime that is hardly weak on paper. Federal regulation subjects immigration practitioners to discipline for grossly excessive fees, solicitation through runners for financial gain, frivolous filings, false statements, and other misconduct. A lawyer's signature on a filing certifies that he has read it, made a reasonable inquiry, and has a basis in fact and law for putting it before the court.

In other words, the rules already recognize the problem.

And the misconduct is not hypothetical.

In Illinois, immigration attorney Robert DeKelaita was convicted by a federal jury of conspiracy to commit asylum fraud, making false statements in asylum applications, and procuring perjury during asylum interviews. Federal prosecutors said applications filed through his firm contained fabricated accounts of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping, and bombing. Some clients obtained asylum, lawful permanent residence, and eventually citizenship on the strength of those lies.

In New York, a Queens immigration attorney received five years in federal prison after submitting more than 100 asylum applications containing false persecution narratives, criminal histories, and travel histories. Prosecutors said she invented stories, forged clients’ signatures, and falsely notarized affidavits.

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In Georgia, an attorney went to federal prison after filing false documents in employment-based immigration matters, surrendering her law license, and forfeiting $100,000 in fees.

Those are the spectacular cases. The quieter misconduct may be more common and, for individual families, just as destructive.

Illinois disciplinary records describe an attorney who allowed nonlawyer office managers to practice law out of his firm, failed to diligently represent immigration clients, withdrew from others without adequately protecting them, and failed to return tens of thousands of dollars in unearned fees.

That does not make national news. But to the client who handed over his savings, it can be devastating.

An enforcement officer has two reasons to care.

First, every fabricated claim consumes real resources: an adjudicator, a docket slot, government-attorney preparation time, and often years of delay. Fraud also poisons the well for the applicant behind it who is telling the truth. When adjudicators repeatedly encounter manufactured versions of the same persecution story, the genuine claimant has a harder road.

Second, I have watched families pay lawyers for cases that were dead on arrival, then get billed again at every continuance while the years ran out. Immigration law is complicated enough without desperate clients being sold false hope.

The point is not that immigration lawyers are uniquely corrupt. Most are not. Nor is it that government officers deserve less oversight. They do not.

The point is symmetry.

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If ICE officers are properly subjected to inspectors general, professional-responsibility offices, civil-rights review, congressional oversight, litigation, and press scrutiny, then the lawyers whose conduct can determine whether a family loses its savings, whether a false asylum claim enters the system, or whether a genuine claimant waits even longer should face meaningful accountability too.

There is a straightforward way to begin measuring whether that accountability exists.

How many practitioner complaints does the Executive Office for Immigration Review receive each year? How many are substantiated? How many end in discipline, suspension, or disbarment from practice before the immigration courts? How long does the process take?

Those are not classified questions. They are basic oversight questions.

If the numbers show a functioning disciplinary system, publish them and let the public see it. If they show a large gap between complaints and consequences, Congress should ask why.

A rule that exists only on paper is not much of a safeguard.

Immigration enforcement deserves scrutiny because government power can ruin lives when abused. Immigration representation deserves scrutiny for the same reason.

Shiloh Hendrix took the bait — prosecutors took it too far



I don’t love Shiloh Hendrix as a First Amendment martyr. Then again, most First Amendment martyrs aren’t especially lovable.

Maybe Hendrix is a great gal in person. I don’t know her. But on April 28, 2025, she was at Roy Sutherland Playground in Rochester, Minnesota, with her toddler when an 8-year-old black boy allegedly took an applesauce pouch from her diaper bag. Hendrix chased him, retrieved the pouch, and, according to witnesses, repeatedly called him the Very Worst Word in American English™.

A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

The row got the attention of Sharmake Omar, a Somali immigrant who began recording her on his phone. Hendrix told him it was “none of [his] f**king business” and walked away. Omar challenged her to say the word again.

Hendrix obliged.

“F**k you, n*****. N*****, n*****, n*****.”

Omar posted the video online, sans asterisks. Fifteen months later, an Olmsted County jury acquitted Hendrix of disorderly conduct toward the child — and convicted her of disorderly conduct toward Omar.

Say what?

For good or ill, Hendrix has now joined some august company: Eugene V. Debs, Charles Schenck, H.L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, Henry Miller, Clarence Brandenburg.

The First Amendment has always had lousy taste in clients. Still, Hendrix hardly belongs in that group. Schenck went to prison for distributing anti-draft leaflets with the Bill of Rights printed on one side. Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment aloud. Brandenburg, a Klansman, gave us one of the great protections for political advocacy.

Hendrix doesn’t even rise to the level of “F**k the Draft.” She got angry in a park, took the bait, and said an ugly word over and over.

Should she have exercised more self-control? Probably. But since when did criminal law punish bad manners?

Which brings me to Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.

The 1942 Supreme Court case gave us “fighting words”: face-to-face insults punishable when likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace and forming “no essential part of any exposition of ideas.”

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Libertarians mostly hate Chaplinsky. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression calls the doctrine “quaint” and notes that the Supreme Court has not upheld a fighting-words conviction in 80 years.

True enough. Give government power to punish offensive speech, and it will abuse it. That’s why I’m against hate-speech laws. But that does not require pretending every noise made by a human mouth is an “argument” worthy of First Amendment protection.

Hadley Arkes, the constitutional scholar who has influenced my thinking for decades, suggests an admirably simple test:

The soundness of the test can be confirmed again instantly whenever we give a panel of people this set of words and ask if they can identify the terms clearly established as terms of insult, as opposed to words that may be on the borderline of insult, or perhaps even terms of approval and commendation: 1) kike, 2) wop, 3) n*****, 4) urologist, 5) meter maid, 6) saint. People will not show the slightest puzzlement here in fixing on the words used as insulting or "fighting words."

Exactly. Nobody wonders whether “urologist” is the slur. A blind man could see the difference.

“F**k you, n*****” directed at a black man advances no proposition about race. It is an epithet. Threats, extortion, perjury, provocation — all are words, and all can be actionable.

I made a related argument 16 years ago in Snyder v. Phelps. Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had every right to preach that America was damned. I argued that they did not have the right to commandeer a dead Marine’s funeral. Mencken called the boundary “the last limits of the endurable.”

So two cheers for Chaplinsky.

But that’s a long way from concluding that Hendrix committed a punishable offense.

She was carrying her child and walking away. Omar was recording and baiting her. He practically announced the consequence: The internet was going to see this. It did. Hendrix was identified, doxxed, and condemned by millions.

Omar had counter speech. He had a camera. He had the internet. He won.

Why did the state need to pile on?

Nothing about the encounter suggested an “imminent breach of the peace.” Yet the jury convicted Hendrix for insulting Omar while acquitting her over the nastier conduct alleged toward the 8-year-old.

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Hendrix’s attorney, Brian Karalus, says the judge excluded exculpatory evidence and mishandled witness disclosures. He called the proceeding a “fraud” and a “circus” and has filed an appeal. Maybe the appellate court says he is wrong, but I hope he wins.

Chaplinsky does not give prosecutors a permission slip. The state still must prove that these words, in this context, were likely to provoke a fight in the moment.

That’s what angers me about this case. It was needless.

Hendrix behaved badly. She said something vicious to a little kid and allowed herself to be provoked when she should have kept walking.

At the same time: So what? A free country doesn’t need to convert every ugly human encounter into a criminal proceeding.

Again, two cheers for Chaplinsky and the “fighting words” doctrine. It’s good law. We should keep it and use it — sparingly. But thank God for every last constitutional protection Shiloh Hendrix has coming to her.

Every long arrest video exposes the same failure



What do Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and a viral body-camera video from the University of Central Florida have in common? More than most people might think.

Last weekend, I attended an instructor-certification program at Gracie University in Torrance, California. It was my third time completing the training since I began studying Gracie Jiu-Jitsu six years ago. Rener and Ryron Gracie have developed a remarkable system that adapts essential techniques for real-world confrontations while prioritizing everyone’s safety.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

They also helped develop SafeWrap, a restraint system created after medical professionals asked for a safer way to control violent patients. Hospitals sometimes needed five or six nurses to restrain one belligerent person, exposing staff and patients to serious injury.

That problem came to mind while I watched the UCF video. The encounter has become another argument about pronouns, mental health, and whether the officer used the right words. Those questions may deserve discussion. But the video also reveals a more practical failure: It took officers far too long to place one resisting person in handcuffs.

The officer began with verbal commands. When those failed, he warned that he would use pepper spray. Backup arrived. The student continued resisting. Officers threatened a Taser and eventually deployed it, yet the struggle continued before they finally secured the handcuffs.

Whatever one thinks about the politics surrounding the incident, a prolonged physical struggle endangers everyone involved.

Every additional second increases the chance of serious injury. Officers suffer damaged shoulders, backs, and hands. Suspects can strike their heads, break bones, or experience medical emergencies. Bystanders can become involved. A routine arrest can turn into a tragedy when officers lack a reliable method for establishing control without escalating through increasingly severe force.

This is where Gracie training deserves serious attention.

I am a professor, not a police officer or medical professional. But I have trained in Gracie Combatives and SafeWrap, and the underlying principle is straightforward: Use position, leverage, and technique to control a dangerous person quickly while minimizing injury.

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Police departments should study Gracie Survival Tactics. The program adapts the same philosophy behind SafeWrap for law enforcement, teaching officers to establish positional control, restrain resisting subjects, and transition safely to handcuffing.

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu teaches a smaller or weaker person to overcome a larger opponent through skill rather than brute force. Applied properly, those techniques help officers manage dangerous encounters involving suspects, bystanders, and fellow officers.

The goal is not to win a fight. It is to end the fight safely and move the suspect into the justice system.

Good control tactics can reduce the need for repeated strikes, prolonged wrestling, and repeated use of intermediate weapons. They also make officers less likely to escalate out of fear or frustration because they have techniques that work under pressure.

Pain compliance often fails when a person is intoxicated, mentally ill, or in extreme emotional distress. Pepper spray does not affect everyone equally. Tasers do not always produce immediate compliance. The UCF student was tased and still resisted.

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When those tools fail, officers need a dependable way to control the person. Simply forcing a suspect prone and placing a knee on the back is neither reliable nor always medically safe. A subject can still posture onto his hands and knees, and prolonged pressure can create additional risks.

Safe restraint training offers a better option. Departments around the country have trained with Rener Gracie, and law enforcement professionals have provided favorable testimonials. The Los Angeles Police Department has also discussed the program’s effectiveness here.

America spends enormous sums on police technology while devoting comparatively little time to ensuring that every officer has competent grappling and restraint skills. We would never expect firefighters to rely on better hoses while neglecting rescue training. Policing deserves the same practical standard.

The objective of every arrest should be simple: The officer goes home safely, the suspect enters custody alive and without unnecessary injury, and bystanders remain safe.

Viral arrest videos will always invite political arguments. But anyone who wants fewer injuries, lawsuits, and controversial uses of force should support one practical reform: Train officers to control resisting suspects safely, efficiently, and humanely before the encounter spirals into something worse.

I train at Gracie Glendale in Phoenix and value every trip to Gracie University in Torrance. Medical and law enforcement professionals should consider SafeWrap and Gracie Survival Tactics. Citizens who want policing to be both effective and humane should ask their local departments whether officers receive this kind of training.

America’s newest jail has no walls



Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

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A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

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During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

'Just say the right pronoun!' How one cop-cam video exemplifies the absurdity of 'hands-off' policing



Cop-cam videos are one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Seeing the badly behaved and the thuggish get what’s coming to them is a rare treat in an America that has abandoned personal responsibility and consequences for bad behavior.

But the pleasure turns to frustration too often. In most of these videos, the police waste minutes to an hour repeating their orders to a struggling suspect who has no intention of obeying.

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Take the latest viral example: a blue-haired college kid of indeterminate gender demanding that the cop “use my pronouns” before “consenting” to being arrested (yes, they do think they have a choice).

What should have been a simple arrest turns into an eight-minute installment of absurdist theater. It is truly something to behold.

Missed manners

Before we get to that, consider the general cultural context of such videos. Anyone in their 40s or older knows that standards of public behavior in America ain’t what they used to be. Manners are a thing of the past. People walk their carts up the middle of aisles, oblivious to anyone needing to get by. They sail through doors you hold without acknowledgment.

And that's just on foot. Rules of the road? Forget it. Everyone at a four-way stop is either trying to jump the right-of-way line or they’ve forgotten the rule altogether. Or they don’t care.

The other day I ran across an honest-to-God telephone booth preserved as part of a nostalgia display at an amusement park. These were built for a world with manners. People were motivated to build booths for phones because they assumed the caller wanted privacy and that the caller didn’t want to inflict his conversation on passersby. Quaint, no?

Broken windows

We're living through a nationwide experiment in abandoning broken-windows policing. It's just plain old common sense: When authorities let the "little" things slide — graffiti, vandalism, public disorder, petty lawbreaking — they teach people that the rules don't matter. Bigger offenses inevitably follow. New York City learned that lesson the hard way before Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton restored order in the 1990s by cracking down on so-called "quality of life" crimes.

It’s obviously true. But Democrats, leftists, and communists don’t like law and order. What they like is pretending that having rules for civil society is oppression. What they like even more is getting cities to defund their police departments so that criminals have a rules-free playground at everyone else’s expense. They do this by whining that mean, bad, Republican “fascists” like Giuliani were hurting “people of color” and “unhoused people” with these awful rules and laws.

You can see it in this essay on the blog Common Justice. Author “Cade T.,” who styles himself a “community organizer,” says cracking down on law and order is targeting those oppressed brown people again.

“Ultimately, the fear is that crime will become contagious and endemic in the urban environment,” he writes. “Under Giuliani, the NYPD identified neighborhoods in which to crack down on minor crimes. Not only did broken windows policing fail to reduce crime, but it also provided cover for a deliberate targeting of Black and brown communities.”

No respect

This is simply not true. Giuliani's policy resulted in a dramatic decrease in violent crime. It stands to reason. When people see police take a hands-off approach — especially toward groups the political class considers "protected" — they naturally become bolder. We see it every time hundreds of black teens riot through city streets while news anchors timidly describe the violence as nothing more than a “teen takeover.”

A large number of Americans — especially younger ones — neither fear nor respect the police. Why would they? As Forbes reported in 2020, at least 13 major American cities cut police funding or staffing in response to the BLM movement, while many smaller jurisdictions created such a hostile political climate that officers no longer felt confident their own departments would support them for simply doing their jobs. Small cities like Montpelier, Vermont, now struggle to recruit and retain enough officers.

The video below shows what hands-off policing looks like in the 2020s. Even when cops are willing to try to do their job, they’re strangely timid about effecting an arrest in a way I don’t remember police acting when I was a young man.

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Gender special

Our protagonist is a young man I’ll call a “gender special.” He’s obese, his hair is dyed blue, and he simpers as he gesticulates, using a falsely high voice. It’s eight minutes long. If you’re pressed for time, just watch the first two minutes, and then the last two minutes. The whole thing is worth watching, though: The young man screams “JUST SAY SHE” repeatedly at the cops, jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin when his true name was spoken.

The encounter takes place on a Florida college campus. The cops were there to deal with a car theft. The blue-haired person begins screaming at the cops; it’s not clear why. The cops tell the shrieking man to lower his voice and stop freaking out or he’s going to be cuffed and taken for a psychiatric hold. So far, so good.

And then all hell breaks loose, and the cops waste almost seven minutes shouting repeated orders at the increasingly aggressive blue-hair. The trouble is, they don’t make good on those threats immediately. The tantrum-thrower escalates; he claims to be “scared”; he screams at the cops to stop harassing him (they’re not); and he pitches a fit at being referred to as “sir.”

He even threatens the cop with “f**king try it” when the cop warns him he’ll be handcuffed.

Tantrum terrorist

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists. You give them one warning, and if they keep fussing, you bodily control them and remove them from the scene. Otherwise, the tantrum gets worse.

That’s the mistake the cops made. I watched the video and counted the number of verbal warnings and commands the cops gave before finally making good on the threat to take him down in cuffs: 14.

The blue-hair’s resistance didn’t stop there. Even after he was in custody, cops had to tase him twice before he finally stopped kicking and fighting.

Back the blue

Policing needs to go back to the way it used to be. Before recent years, we never saw cops who were afraid to arrest a disorderly suspect. Why do they keep giving orders repeatedly while their subject escalates? Don’t they see that failing to follow through on promised consequences teaches the suspect and onlookers that people can, in fact, break the law and the cops won’t do anything about it?

Yes. It does teach that lesson. And that’s part of why we now see behavior every day on the street that only used to happen in mental hospitals.

But the police are not the problem. The governments, municipalities, and mayors' offices are the problem. Cops are working in hostile territory. They know their civilian superiors not only do not support them, but are often working to target their own police force for false complaints of racism and brutality that can cost a cop his career.

If we want the boys in blue to have our backs, we have to make sure someone has theirs.

Citizen Vigilante Aims Wildly Popular Punisher Genre At Politically Incorrect Migrant Invaders

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Mark Fuhrman is dead, but his question still hangs over America



Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman, who died last week at 74, played a central role in the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. But even now, more than 30 years on, that needs clarification. Simpson, the former NFL star and actor, stood trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In the courtroom, however, the real defendant often seemed to be Fuhrman.

Fuhrman collected key physical evidence, including the bloody glove. So Simpson’s defense team made the detective, not the accused killer, the trial’s main target. Fuhrman had denied using the “N-word,” but the defense proved otherwise and, from that point, argued that he could have planted evidence. On the other side, prosecutor Marcia Clark looked overmatched, and Christopher Darden did little better.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was right all along.

As a stringer for the Washington Times, I was at the courthouse for the verdict. An airplane circled above towing a banner that read, “If it does not fit you must acquit — bulls**t.” I believed Simpson was guilty, but when the acquittal came down, I felt some relief. This was Los Angeles, where many people believe police do nothing but harass, beat, and kill black people. When that narrative takes hold, the default response is to burn down the city. The gangs were ready. For plenty of others, the verdict was a joke.

Jay Leno joked about Simpson’s new show, “My So-Called Knife,” while others volunteered to help O.J. “find the real killer.” As Fox News later noted, Fuhrman was convicted of perjury, making him the only person connected to the case who was convicted of a crime related to the trial. Yet many of his colleagues still regarded him as a strong detective, and later events helped explain why.

In 1998, Fuhrman published “Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?” The victim, a 15-year-old girl, was beaten to death with a golf club in 1975. Fuhrman showed how Greenwich police had effectively acted as a private security force for the wealthy Skakel family. They were also badly out of their depth on a murder case and botched the investigation, especially the crime scene.

The murder weapon, a 6-iron, came from a set owned by the Skakels. The evidence pointed strongly to someone in the family. Michael Skakel, then 15, had a reputation for violent behavior, giving Martha reason to fear him. In 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life for her murder.

But the Skakels are related to the Kennedys, and in 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a lengthy article for the Atlantic arguing that Michael was innocent and his conviction and imprisonment were “a miscarriage of justice.”

RELATED: Former LAPD detective: Political correctness and justice are not compatible

KEN LUBAS/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

In 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court overturned Skakel’s conviction, ruling that his attorney had failed to present alibi evidence effectively. In 2020, a state prosecutor announced that Skakel would not be retried, and the murder charge was dropped.

Skakel then sued the prosecution, and in 2026 he is still denouncing “bold-faced lies.” The Moxley family have never wavered in their belief that Michael Skakel killed Martha, much as the Goldman family never wavered about O.J. Simpson.

In 1997, a jury found Simpson liable in a civil wrongful-death case. In 2007, a federal judge awarded the Goldman family rights to “If I Did It” to help satisfy the $38 million judgment against Simpson. Simpson died in 2024 at 76.

The Moxley case led Fuhrman to ask whether America has “two systems of justice in this country, one for the rich and another for the rest of us.” The same question hovered over the Simpson case.

Mark Fuhrman can rest in peace knowing he was more right than wrong.

The Gray-Haired ‘Free DC’ Crowd Wants To Free The Capital From Law And Order

While Navy Yard sees street brawls and property damage, Capitol Hill activists are protesting the National Guard from the comfort of their seven-figure homes.