“The Institute also said it has determined how, after an officer uses lethal force, “investigators can best ‘mine’ officers’ memories and avoid interviewing mistakes that can put the officer, the investigator and the entire department in jeopardy.”
The ironic revelation of this mission statement appears lost on the staff at the Force Institute.
These are incredibly dangerous times for normal citizens to have the most banal contact with cops or even be near the scene of their actual work. Police in America are the single greatest threat to human liberty and become more lethal day by day.
The brutality is bad enough but then there are well-funded tax-gorging entities like the Force Institute in Minnesota that use junk science and violence rationalization to buttress the worst behavior of the authoritarian trade.
The Internet, blogosphere and video sites are packed full of brutality stories and visceral filmed evidence of daily misbehavior and malfeasance on the part of police.
As anyone who has ever been ensnared in the legal system knows, the defendant’s deck is stacked against them in ways that quickly outstrip their capacity to get any kind of justice. Once you are standing in that courtroom, hopefully with your privately retained attorney, government bureaucrats whose sole function is to act as the gateway for draining your financial resources through fines or seizure or the possibility of being caged for a period of time determined by a robed government employee surround you. The higher the jurisdictional level the better the chances of having all the charges piled on in a fashion in which your salvation is doubtful at best.
Most sober residents of the US can acknowledge that something rotten is going on in the legal system. With a mere five percent of the world population, the American prison complex has twenty-five percent of the planet’s prisoners behind bars. This does not count the “peripheral prisoners” living at the King’s pleasure on probation or parole. This does not account for the tens of millions of family and friends who are directly affected by this mass incarceration.
More than 72 percent of all Federal prisoners are non-violent offenders. Yet, nearly 3,281 of these unfortunates are serving life without parole for non-violent offense. The entire pretense of isolating violent offenders from society can make sense in a particularly cruel and calculating fashion but the idea of putting a shoplifter in jail for life gives even the most ardent warden groupie pause.
All of this is nasty and brutish but I needed this as a preamble to talk about one of the most disgusting humans I have yet to come across in the media and the interweb: William Lewinski, the junk science purveyor of “police psychology” who runs the Force Science Institute. He is a poster child of opportunism and an apologist for the worst instances of police brutality and oppressive behavior. Much like Lysenko in the USSR, his specialty is to put a happy face on maiming and killing by badged bureaucrats. There is little difference between the twisted unscientific idiocy of Comrade Trofim Lysenko and his modern day twin in Lewinski.
Lewinski is a keen entrepreneur in the government sphere who has managed to take a dime store PhD and gain legitimacy at a major university in Minnesota. His PhD was granted by a university whose ability to confer such degrees came under severe scrutiny:
“The Union Institute & University’s Ph.D. program came under scrutiny by the Ohio Board of Regents, culminating in a 2002 Reauthorization Report. In response to the Report, The Union has undergone major academic and structural changes, including dissolution of The Union Graduate School and restructuring of Ph.D. programs. The Ph.D. in Arts and Sciences, for example was redesigned to a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies.”
Nonetheless, he has amassed quite an empire in the field of force apologetics and as an expert witness testifying on why police brutality is not so excessive. His Force Institute is nothing more than a sophisticated excuse factory for bad cops who exceed their charter and practice barbaric behavior on the force. He is not coy about this in his own rather ironic mission statement from his site:
“Shortly after word of his work began to spread throughout the legal community, Lewinski and his staff were flooded with requests for use-of-force case analysis, guidance on argument construction, and expert witness testimony in court. With that came the founding of the consultation division. The unique time-and-motion studies conducted by the research division have produced bombshells in courtrooms worldwide. They have not only saved government entities millions of dollars in civil liability judgments but, most importantly, they have kept officers from unjustly being punished for controversial uses of force.”
Lewinski is the worst kind of human being who specializes in rationalizes the most brutal aspects of police abuses of power most likely to the delight of police unions nation-wide:
“He will reverse-engineer from his conclusion, which is that the shooting was justified, to explain away whatever physical evidence doesn’t fit that conclusion,” said John Burton, a Pasadena, Calif. civil-rights lawyer who specializes in wrongful police shootings and has twice cross-examined Lewinski.” Burton said Lewinski “has the lowest reputation as just being somebody whose opinion is for sale, and it’s always to the police side.”
Of course he does like so many of his fellow-travellers in the police and national security establishment whose entire lives are devoted to making nice cooing noises about psychopathic behavior and justifying the worst excesses of government employees. This is much like the rubber-stamping of “justifiable” law enforcer shootings mere hours or days after the police have investigated themselves.
Lewinski is simply a nice “academic” decoration to the pseudo-science of the Force Institute. There appears to be no other purpose for the institute but to rationalize and justify vicious police behavior in America and Canada. The East German Stasi and Russian NKVD would have been happy clients of Lewinski for him to ply his trade by justifying state violence. The aptly named Force Institute is merely that: a cheeky academic boutique to put a blush on the pig (pun intended).
His silence is all one needs to know on one question: “Lewinski however, did not respond to a request by CBC News to provide an example of a case in which he had testified against an officer.”
I suspect that this rather small and modest academic boutique is a tiny cog of the vast apparatus that seeks to put a happy face on the American police state. The sycophantic media and their love affair with all cops as heroes, the noxious and childish police procedural dramas that pollute the televisions in living rooms and movie theaters and the well-funded police unions that keep the thin black and blue line staffed and protected.
The three pillars of police unions, officer safety and qualified immunity to include the evil contributions of apologists like Lewinski keep the well-oiled tyranny machine of thug-scrums alive and kicking.
Many complain that the groves of the American academy are chockfull of communists, socialist and other government supremacists but Lewinski represents an especially lethal strain of the contagion. Not only is his work junk science and rife with the worst logical fallacies but his coin of the realm is nothing more than the justification of the state to maim and kill its citizens.
There are no good cops because they all see themselves merely as tools of the rulers to carry out the laws of the land no matter how unjust and barbaric. Their plot is not to question but merely to obey the diktats and whims of political masters that hold their ultimate loyalty.
Lewinski is merely the cheap fixer to make it all look legitimate no matter the injustice or cruelty of the behavior.
A degree in anything, much less a PhD… from ANY university or “school” lends little to the credibility of the holder of that degree in the long run. Most universities and “schools” are operated by statists and collectivists of one kind or another, and their hate of individual sovereignty is both obvious and ongoing.
This is a particularly egregious example of statist, collectivist use of a so-called science, but there are many others. Psychiatry in particular, and in all of it’s forms, is a questionable “science” to begin with, and bastardizations of it like this can only drive it to further disregard for thinking, rational people.
ML,
I agree 100% and thought this was a peculiar if lethal exapmle of this kind of sycophantic relationship with animal behavior among the statist cops. Thomas S. Szasz in the Myth of Mental Illness really turned me around on the threats of psychiatry in society esp in the hands of the state to abuse the power.
Bill
I once knew a young man who became a cop a couple years ago. Not long after his “probation” period he once gleefully told me how funny it was to taser a grown man and make him cry. I responded that a clerk working a 7-11 is more deserving of one’s respect than a cop who finds humor in bringing pain to another human being. I never heard from him again.
There.
Are.
No.
Good.
Cops.
Dan,
Makes me shiver to think about the mind-set that is settled in the brains of most cops in America. If the Kiev protests had happened here, US police would have gone to gun early and leave hundreds of maimed and killed bodies littering the site.
Bill
Bill,
The sad part of it all is that I knew this young man and considered him a friend. Before he became a cop we used to go to several local ranges and shoot together. Today, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Sadly, the badge and the gun and the accompanying power changes a man.
While I’m at is….allow me to thank you for your blog and your essays. I appreciate your thoughts that you put into words. Take care,
DAN
I’m guessing that Mr. Buppert, like me, has friends in LE. Or used to. The local cops I deal with mostly just answer the next 911 call. We talk about local crime but I think they aren’t completely open with me. In my town I have seen little of the abuse the above article documents. But there is too much video out there. I am all for officer safety, but how about using a little pepper spray on the next dog you encounter, instead of a bullet. The beating death of that disabled man in California, where the police just got acquitted, was beyond belief. I have taken part in lots of arrests were the perp was fighting. One time I did put a knee into a guys ribs. But I was alone that time and was trying to get the perp off a victim. Mostly you just lay on them till they get tired then hook them up. And you make sure they can breathe, that they are talking. But my experience just doesn’t jibe with the problems others are documenting. There is something going on. I don’t know how things got out of hand. But they are out of hand.
Rainman
RM,
Acquaintances, certainly and friends in the distant past before I arrived at the conclusion that good cops are an impossibility.
I appreciate your insights and apparent restraint but I think that is now far more the exception than the rule. The amount of dog murders is astonishing to me and really speaks to the venality and cheapness of life that most cops now seem to embrace.
The problem with documentation is that the sheer volume of non-reporting and under-reporting of what goes on in the terror-chambers of police stations and the incidents not filmed is massive.
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