Yet more on US police - the Boston Tea Party has a lot to answer for

Three in a row is probably enough, but you shouldn't miss the story about the family who got a morning visit from a SWAT team because they drink loose-leaf tea. Full story here. At least one can be confident that that wouldn't happen in the UK.

I'm not the only right-wing extremist who doesn't like that kind of thing. Mark Steyn, from whom I got this story, notes "the five-to-seven officers required to kill a 95-year old veteran for refusing to take his medication; the multiple law-enforcement agencies needed to off a confused woman with a baby on board who drove too near King Barack's palace - and who earned the cheers of Congress for so dispatching her. In recent days, a mentally ill homeless man was shot dead for "illegally camping" in the Albuquerque foothills, and at a traffic stop in South Carolina a 70-year old veteran was shot by an officer who thought the man was reaching for a gun. It was his cane."

More on paramilitary police

Following on from my post on Waco, I see that the Economist is concerned about American paramilitary police as well.

How about this one "In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant."

And the incentives are all wrong too. "Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back."

Would you like your policemen to wear T-shirts saying "We get up early to beat the crowds"?

In similar vein. the Atlantic recently had a sobering article on how prison warders are trained to deal with riots.

Waco

I have an occasional series on over-zealous US law enforcement. The worst example of this is, of course, Waco. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker doesn't do much of his Gladwell thing on us (and when he does, it's not that convincing in this piece), he just tells the story by reference to one of the believers' memoirs here.

It started when "some eighty armed agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the Mount Carmel community, in an effort to serve a search and arrest warrant on Koresh, on suspicion of violating federal firearms rules." That is to say, it started very badly, and not because of the Branch Davidians. The Feds could have served the warrant on him when we went into town, which is something he did. And what was the evidence for the firearms violations? Well, an undercover agent had infiltrated the group to look for it - and found no evidence.

This is what happened then. "“I want you all to go back to your rooms and stay calm,” Doyle recalls Koresh saying, as federal agents descended on Mount Carmel. Doyle goes on, “I could hear David’s steps going down the hall toward the front door. . . . Then all of a sudden I heard David say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! There are women and children in here!’ Then all hell broke loose—just a barrage of shots from outside coming in. It sounded like a bloodbath.”" Sounded like - and it was.

So, in a reaction to this, "Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people."

As we know, it all ended even more badly. "Koresh and seventy-three others perished, including twenty-five children." Wikipedia tells me that one of the women was pregnant. I think the guys with the tanks, the CS canisters and the demolition equipment got off more lightly than the children.

My sympathy is always for the underdog, and people on the receiving end of that kind of effort are definitely the underdogs. But they weren't bad underdogs either. Gladwell describes them as "the sort whose idea of a good evening’s fun was a six-hour Bible study wrestling with a tricky passage of Revelation", which might be accurate. It's a little sneery, but makes it clear that they weren't necessarily the sort of people who should be on the receiving end of an army assault. They weren't your classic cult weirdos: "The Branch Davidians ... engaged freely and happily with the world around them. Doyle went to California periodically to work for an audiotape-dubbing company and make money. Other Davidians started small businesses around Waco. Wayne Martin, a prominent member of the community, was a Harvard Law School graduate with a legal practice in town."

Moreover, when they found out about the agent who infiltrated them, they were nice to him. The FBI, in the 'negotiations' before the final assault, tried to goad the Branch Davidians with the infiltrator. This was the response from the deputy to Koresh "I realize that. . . . [But], still, we love people so much, you give them the opportunity. . . . Even if it’s one out of a million, even if it’s that, whatever it might be, he’s still a person that was made, created by an authority above himself and we loved the guy. I mean . . . we spent enough time with him where we really do appreciate the man’s character and personality."

Zadie Smith on why the French are to blame for climate change

This is, I assure you, not a wholly misleading headline, but it is not all the French, just Jacques Derrida and his acolytes. See below for details.

Holi

Holi. Perhaps the most photogenic religious festival?

The Battle of Salamis: "a gay neoconservative snowglobe"

This is, of course, the defining sea battle of ancient Greece as seen in 300: Rise of an Empire and reviewed by Alex von Tunzelmann.

The best magazine in the world (at least north of the river)

This is an article in the Guardian about the London Review of Books. It is, as one would expect, full of praise for the unashamedly loss-making venture, worrying mostly only about the lack of women contributors.

What I most liked was the tension between the parochial and the global. The headline is "Is the LRB the best magazine in the world?". The subheading starts "The London Review of Books has become the most successful – and controversial – literary publication in Europe". So the message is that the LTB is big - and yet...

"Wilmers [the editor] is an established part of the liberal-leaning Primrose Hill intelligentsia: she was married to the film director Stephen Frears (the couple divorced in the 70s and have two sons, Sam and Will) and used to live next door to the biographer Claire Tomalin and her husband, the writer Michael Frayn. The playwright Jonathan Miller was down the road. Her best friend from Oxford (where she read modern languages) is Alan Bennett.

When I put this to her, Wilmers blinks. "Does everybody live in north London?" she asks herself, before going through a mental checklist of contributors and staff. "John Lanchester doesn't," she announces triumphantly. Spice [the publisher] says that most of their readers come from N and NW postcodes. Anywhere else?

"Clapham," he replies briskly."

I'm pretty sure that means that John Lanchester is the Clapham reader as well as being the Clapham contributor. But I can help out with another example - James Wood lives in Massachusetts, where he "teaches the practice of literary criticism at Harvard". Although I think Harvard is spiritually north of the river in LRB-land.

Teasing aside, I got the link from an American blog, an Anglophile, but a Daniel Hannan-reading Anglophile. So the LRB's writ does run a little outside the N and NW postcodes.