A newly elected New Hampshire State Representative named Tom Alciere is making quite a buzz from coast to coast. According to the Associated Press, Alciere "enraged his constituents, party leaders and police by saying he favors killing police officers when they cross the line."
Law-and-order types are not pleased. The state GOP establishment (Alciere was elected as a Republican) wants the fellow to resign from the legislature, and the local press and Granite State pundits are taking turns regretting that Alciere can't be forcibly ejected from office.
Can you blame them? Pretty inflammatory stuff!
Well ... yes and no.
First of all Rep. Alciere seems to have a certain talent for vitriol. Soon after election, he apparently referred to his own constituents as "lamebrains" while suggesting that they finally got it right after years of electing losers to office. Those are the sort of loose lips that tends to shorten a politician's shelf life.
Also, Alciere ran as a Republican in this election for a reason — the other parties didn't want him, even though he's run in the past as a Democrat and a Libertarian. According to the Manchester Union Leader:
It wasn't just freshman legislator Tom Alciere's writings supporting the killing of police officers that first alarmed the Nashua community in the early 1990s and got him ousted from the Libertarian Party. It also was his chilling espousal of violence against women written in letters to
the editor of a local newspaper, according to police and a party leader.
Yow! If true that doesn't just step over the line, it loses sight of the thing over the horizon. What possible excuse can there be for advocating violence against women? We'll have to take the Union Leader's word on the matter for the moment, since the misogynist missives haven't been quoted, while Alciere's anti-police writings are everywhere.
Speaking of those writings, how bad are they?
Well, Alciere invites interested parties to search Usenet for his postings, so here's a quote from a discussion he started on January 16, 2000, "About the racist Nashua Police":
The recent racial harassment complaint against the Nashua Police Department brings to mind the manner in which a gentleman in Winchester, Virginia resolved such a problem on the night of 29 October 1999. The gentleman was minding his own business when a local cop decided to march up and start something. Supposedly, the gentleman "fit the description" f somebody else wanted on a probation violation. In other words, he's black, so the cop harassed him. The gentleman resolved the confrontation by fighting like a man and defending himself. The Bill of Rights never got through that cop's head, but a .38 caliber bullet certainly did.
That's only one quote, of course. Some of the others show a
bit more temper — the sort of flaming you see in every discussion group everywhere. Electronic conversations seem
to bring out the charming side in us all (yes, yours truly, too).
Alciere's posts are a tad ... umm ... heated, for sure.
But there's one thing that every one of his posts that I've
seen favoring "killing police officers" has in common: they're all conditional. That is, he advocates, if in tropical terms, self-defense against police engaging in abusive activity, such as racist harassment or the use of excessive force. It's possible that I've missed something, but then, so has the rest of the press coverage of the latter. Every story I've seen says he advocates violence against police only "when they cross the line."
Leaving Alciere's flamethrower online personality aside for the moment, is that really as horrendous as critics claim?
If so, New Hampshire's own state constitution must be a bit nasty itself. Article 10 of the state Bill of Rights, entitled "Right of Revolution," says in part:
The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
That's not necessarily an explicit suggestion that you shoot a cop who's using your best friend as a punching bag, but it does suggest that New Hampshire's constitutional framers weren't entirely in thrall to anybody with a uniform hanging in his closet.
Want something a bit more specific? Try this on for size:
(c) The use of force to resist an arrest or search is justified:
(1) if, before the actor offers any resistance, the peace officer (or person acting at his direction) uses or attempts to use greater force than necessary to make the arrest or search; and
(2) when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the peace officer's (or other person's) use or attempted use of greater force than necessary.
I actually had to wander a bit far from New England to find that. That excerpt is from the laws of the great state of Texas. The rules for using deadly force against attacking police are the same as the rules for using deadly force against any assailant — cops don't get a special pass in the Lone Star state.
I don't know about you, but when I read that bit of legal verbiage, I can almost visualize an old-time western legislator with a swollen knot on his head muttering furiously, "that is the last goddamned time ..."
New Hampshire law doesn't have any specific provision for resisting abusive police officers, but it does have a good, strong provision for self-defense against "unlawful" force — and there's no exception saying that Granite Staters are obliged to submit to Rodney King-style beatings. Coupled with a constitutional provision suggesting that nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind," it's hard to see how the law, as it stands now, could possibly frown on the use of defensive force by private citizens against abusive police.
Just as an afterthought, since it's an old decision, I'll throw in a few interesting words from the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of John Bad Elk v. U.S.:
Where the officer is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction, when the officer had the right to make the arrest, from what it does if the officer had no such right.
What might be murder in the first case might be nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no offense had been committed.
That's a century old and may have been superseded since, but it cuts pretty close to home, eh?
In other words, if you turn the heat down to simmer on Rep.
Tom Alciere's Usenet posts, he doesn't seem to be advocating anything too terribly alien to existing statutes. The law already allows for the use of defensive force against police using unreasonable force, and for the use of defensive deadly force against police using unreasonable deadly force.
And frankly, I have a hard time finding fault with that. Even if such self-defense was illegal, it would strike me as common sense and an inherent right. In the era of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and the LAPD scandal, does anybody really want to assert that giving a man a badge gives him the right to run amok without risking the consequences?
So is Tom Alciere is a stand-up guy or a jerk?
Well, it's hard to tell. The reaction from police and their
butt-buddies to the fiery state legislator has itself been so overheated that it's impossible to find the real guy in the news coverage. After a couple of references to him as a "a hate-mongering lunatic" (says Newmarket, New Hampshire, police Chief Rodney Collins) and "despicable" (Peter Burling, the New Hampshire House Democratic leader), you give up on a dispassionate appraisal of the man himself.
From his writings, though, Alciere has, at least, a pretty hot temper and a mouth (or keypad) that bypasses his brain on its way to the world beyond.
Then there are those alleged misogynist writings. If those are for real, they should be the issue. Police officers, as wielders of official force, are legitimate targets for even the most poisonous pen. If they don't like it, they can quit and get jobs that don't involve the use or threat of violence against the general population. For good or ill, they're bullyboys and need tough skins.
But advocating unprovoked violent assaults on women — or
anybody, for that matter? That's shocking. If Alciere, an
elected official, has written such letters, they should be
making headlines, not his smoking hot and not-so-off-base
critiques of armed enforcers who are perfectly capable of
defending themselves.