by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: ‘No
More Hesitation’

Police Chief
Ed Flynn of Milwaukee believes that his department is at war with
the gun-owning public. In
his February 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Flynn claimed that “in the last 20 years we’ve been in an arms
race” with private citizens who supposedly out-gun the police.

Flynn testified
in support of a proposed federal ban on so-called assault weapons.
But in the past he has made it clear that he considers a Mundane
carrying a firearm of any kind is an unlawful enemy combatant subject
to detention and forcible disarmament.

“My message
to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets
of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away, and
then decide whether you have a right to carry it,” Flynn
said a few years ago in response to a statement from Wisconsin
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen recognizing that residents of the
state have a right to carry firearms openly.

Flynn clearly
sees himself as commanding an army of occupation. In practical terms,
he is less a warlord than a crime lord who presides over an officially
sanctioned street gang.

Milwaukee resident
Brad
Krause was one of the armed citizens targeted by Flynn’s criminal
syndicate. Mr. Krause was arrested and had his gun confiscated in
August 2008 after a neighbor called to complain that Krause was
carrying it while doing work in his own yard. To provide official
cover for their crimes, Flynn’s “troops” filed a bogus
charge of disorderly conduct. Krause was eventually acquitted, but
his gun was never returned.

Like most petty
dictators of his ilk, Flynn is protected by a praetorian guard that
will retaliate against people who speak ill of their dear leader.
In November 2009, his “troops” arrested a local gadfly
named Bob Braun, who had committed the unpardonable sin of publicly
embarrassing Commissar Flynn.

Braun and a
friend picketed Milwaukee Police headquarters carrying signs describing
Chief Flynn, who
admitted to an extra-marital affair with a sycophantic reporter,
as an adulterer. Citing the relevant section of Wisconsin law,
Braun demanded that Flynn be prosecuted – a
sentiment shared by many Milwaukee residents. Instead, Braun
was arrested by Sgt. Mark Wagner and charged with disorderly conduct.
The citation falsely claimed that Braun, a devout Christian, repeatedly
told Sgt. Wagner to perform an anatomically impossible sexual act.

When the case
was heard before a jury, the only witnesses the prosecution could
produce were Wagner and two fellow police officers – whose travel
and subpoena fees were paid by Braun. The jury quite sensibly concluded
that the officers – who are, let us not forget, trained
liars – were perjuring themselves in the service of the adulterer
who commands them.

Given the abysmal
character of the chief who commands the Milwaukee PD, it shouldn’t
surprise us to learn that the department has been a haven for uniformed
sexual predators.

In July
2010, a single mother in Milwaukee (whose name has not been
publicly disclosed) was raped by Officer Ladmarald Cates. After
someone vandalized the woman’s home, she made the common mistake
of calling the police in the entirely unfounded belief that they
would be of help. Cates was the first on the scene.

Acting on
instinct and experience, the predator recognized an exploitable
opportunity. The officer ordered the boyfriend to go to a nearby
convenience store to buy some bottled water. Once he had isolated
the victim, Cates maneuvered her into the bathroom, where
he put her “on the ground” by forcibly sodomizing and
raping her.

Immediately
after the assault, the woman – barefoot and wearing tattered clothing
– ran screaming from the house. Cates stormed out of the building
and grabbed the victim by the waist, causing her feet to strike
his partner. This gave the officers an excuse to arrest the battered
and traumatized woman for “assaulting an officer.”

The victim
was taken to jail and held for 12 hours before receiving medical
aid. After the hospital visit, she was sent back to jail for four
days before being released without charges.

This was not
Cates’s first assault – but the department wasn’t willing to take
disciplinary action of any kind until DNA evidence corroborated
the rape victim’s account. Instead of prosecuting Cates, Flynn fired
him for “idling or loafing on duty.” In
January 2012, Cates was convicted of federal civil rights charges
and sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Flynn would
insist that Cates isn’t representative of his officers. This is
true, but not in the sense Flynn would have us believe. What makes
Cates an anomaly is not the fact that he was a purulent thug, but
rather that he was actually punished for his crimes: The Milwaukee
Police Department holds
down the number two spot in the national police brutality rankings.
Its distinguished contributions in the field of state-sponsored
crime include a
lengthy and growing list of suspicious deaths of people in police
custody.

Cates was not
the only uniformed sexual predator in Milwaukee who earned headlines
in 2012.

Last
September, four of Flynn’s “troops” who had followed
his orders with exceptional zeal were charged
with felonies for assaulting and strip-searching citizens both
in the street and in district stations. In one case, three officers
restrained a victim – one of them putting him into a choke hold,
while another held a gun to his head – while a third jammed a hand
into his rectum.

The ringleader
of this rape gang, Officer Michael Vagnini, was charged with 25
counts of sexual assault and related crimes.

In a press
conference after charges
were filed, Flynn professed to be “disgusted” by the conduct
of his minions.

“Crime
cannot be fought with criminality,” warbled the costumed functionary
who had publicly abetted criminal violence against innocent citizens
– and who has actually protected an undisguised street gang within
his department.

This hyper-violent
clique adopted the logo of a nihilistic comic book character called
the “Punisher,” and they brazenly displayed the insignia
on their police vehicles and their uniforms as they prowled the
street in search of helpless people whom they could “put on
the ground.” Among the formidable figures targeted by the Punishers
was a male dancer named Frank Jude, who was nearly beaten to death
in October 2004 because he was suspected of stealing a badge.

After putting
the terrified male dancer “on the ground,” the Punishers
severely beat, kicked, and choked him – then put a knife to his
throat and jammed a pen into one of his ears. The victim survived
the assault, but was left with permanent brain damage. The officers
later claimed that this amount of violence was necessary to “subdue”
Jude – who was never charged in connection with the incident. The
jury in the criminal trial accepted that claim and acquitted the
officers – who were later found guilty of criminal civil rights
violations.

Former Milwaukee
Police Officer Jon Bartlett, the ringleader of the gang beating,
was eventually convicted
– along with six others – on federal civil rights charges. An internal
affairs investigation conducted by MPD
Commander James A Galezewski produced a detailed description
of the Punishers in official reports filed on two separate investigations
– one in
2005, the other in 2007. He also described his findings at length
in
a sworn deposition in November 2010.

One training
supervisor and at least one active-duty police officer were identified
as current members of the gang. Nonetheless, as late as January
2011, Flynn insisted
that the existence of the gang was merely a matter of “rumor.”
A reasonable surmise would be that Flynn wasn’t engaging in conscious
deception; after all, the moral gradient leading from his normal
“troops” to the berserkers who belong to the “Punishers”
gang isn’t very steep.

Every city
police department is an armed gang organized to implement the will
of the municipal corporation that employs them. Under the rule of
Ed Flynn the Milwaukee PD has become one of the most malodorous
outfits of its kind in the Midwestern United States. He and his
“troops” appear to be determined to validate every syllable
of Albert Jay Nock’s famous capsule description of the State:

“Everyone knows
that the State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime … and
that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can…. It punishes private
theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants,
whether the property of citizen or of alien…. Of all the crimes
that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we
have not seen it commit – murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud,
criminal collusion and connivance.”

If Ed Flynn
presided over a police agency in Latin America or Africa, his deeds
would be chronicled in the annual human rights reports issued by
the State Department, which diligently catalogs the offenses of
every regime but the one ruling us.

Flynn’s
misbegotten reign in Milwaukee reminds me of a comment made by Isaac
Lappia of Amnesty International in Sierra Leone at the 2001 UN Small
Arms Conference at the world body’s headquarters.

The UN’s proposed
international firearms treaty – which, in updated form, will likely
be signed later this year by Barack Obama – was intended to disarm
civilians. However, as Lappia pointed out, his organization’s studies
proved “incontrovertibly that small arms are … used in many
more countries to facilitate serious crimes by law enforcement personnel
– including police, prison authorities, paramilitaries, and the
army – where they commit persistent human rights violations, including
rape, torture, `disappearances,’ and arbitrary killings.”

This reads
like a profile of the department Ed Flynn commands – and it’s on
the basis of a record of this kind that Flynn was invited to testify
on behalf of the Obama regime’s citizen disarmament initiatives.
Res
ipsa loquitur.

March
1, 2013

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2013 William Norman Grigg

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