The video below comes from Nottingham, England, with the associated story recounted at the Daily Mail. One officer twice uses a Taser on the victim, bawling, "Taser, Taser, Taser!" as the man writhes on the ground, behavior the police feign to interpret as resistance. After the second application of the Taser, while fellow policemen are holding the suspect down and stretching him from his fetal position, one of the officers savagely slugs the man three times in the face.



Only after the incident and the appearance of the video did police field a story about an officer being hospitalized because of actions by the victim before the video was shot, and only after the video hit YouTube, CNN, and other media outlets did the police refer the incident to official inquiry.

This kind of violence will end only when bleeding-heart conservatives and criminal-coddling judges start dealing effectively with violent thugs acting individually and in gangs under color of law. Only when supposedly civilized nations fully apply the rule of law to their law enforcement personnel will fear of extreme violence at the hands of police be replaced with volitional respect for the law and those who enforce it.

A generation ago, Right-wing and conservative forces screamed for minimum sentencing guidelines, harsh sentences, and restrictions on the rights of accused. They got their way, and now, one in every 31 citizens in the United States is either imprisoned or otherwise at some level of oversight or confinement in the federal or a state penal system. The welfare queens of state and municipal governments beg endlessly for more money to be thrown at their "law enforcement" needs, and towns across America vie like starved wolves for one prison after another to be built in their area to create jobs their elected leaders and business people cannot create on their own using entrepreneurial skill and local encouragement.

It is time for society to take the same rightful, harsh, retributive means of dealing with crime and apply it to the thugs who hide behind badges, and no amount of bleeding-heart excuses from the conservatives should be tolerated.

Lock them up and throw away the key. That's what we did a generation ago over the cries of liberals and Leftists, and that's what we should do now over the bleating of conservative and Right-wing apologists simpering about "circumstances" and "up-bringing" and "how hard it is" to be a law enforcement officer despite being armed to the teeth. Use a search engine and type in "Taser"; you'll find incident after incident of over-the-top violence by police using these weapons to degrade and injure people.

Just like a generation ago when society finally understood that weakness in punishment encouraged more crime by the dregs of society, we must now turn our attention to the weakness with which we deal with men and women who use their official status to pursue their brutish, violent ways.

No more. The three pillars of an effective system of punitive justice are certainty, severity, and celerity (swiftness). In other words, the criminal is definitely going to get punished, the punishment is going to hurt terribly, and it's going to happen right away. More bluntly, you're going to get it, it's going to hurt like Hell, and it's coming now.

And the punishment must extend to the bleeding heart coddlers, too. A State Supreme Court judge in New York let three killers go Scot free: they were police officers who butchered an innocent man and badly wounded his two companions in a hail of hysterical gunfire. After the judge rendered his verdict, police surrounded his house and even had a helicopter overhead to ensure that he remained safe.

In the Bay Area, a transit policeman acting in concert with other transit officers shot a man straight through the back as he lay face down on the ground. The bullet went through him, ricocheted off the pavement, and went back up through his chest. He died slowly from drowning in his own blood that soaked his lungs. Without video taken by by-standers who uploaded their captures to the Web, nothing would have been done. As it is, the former officer firing the shot is the subject of a weak-kneed prosecution (with the alleged killer claiming he intended to use his Taser), but only one other transit police person there at the time has been subject to anything remotely approaching serious backlash, despite separate video showing that other officer minutes before punching or slapping (depending upon who is interpreting the scene) the same victim and thereby escalating the spiraling ugliness of the police before the shooting, and despite the statement of the young woman who shot the video of the killing on her cell phone that yet another officer at the scene tried to confiscate her phone with the incriminating evidence.

In England, where the incident in the video presented at the outset of this article took place, special law enforcement officers slaughtered an innocent Brazilian man on the pretext that he might have been a "terrorist" (the guy had brown skin, so that makes him an Arab, which makes him a terrorist suspect); then came the lies about how the homicide took place. In the end, it turned out the victim was shot repeatedly in the back. That's right: in the back.

Did the killers go to prison to rot and get sexually brutalized the way our ugly citizens and entertainment shows like to sneer about? Of course not.

Anecdotes of state-sponsored violence aside, to my Leftist and liberal friends in the reading audience I offer this: the age of mercy is over. It never really got started, but any nascent shards of an understanding society that sought accommodation, help, and tolerance have long passed, and it is now time to get with the program. Chanting, "Hey ho! Fascists must go!" and holding hands to sing Kumbaya will not stop the freight train of authoritarianism and the shadow of the iron fist now darkening the landscape of nations.

The Age of the Authoritarians is here to stay.

Use it.

The fist will come down on you, so make the fist work for you. Demand equal justice not merely for everyone, but also against everyone, including those who work under the color of law enforcement authority. They are no better than you.

They just happen to be better armed.

The Dark Wraith trusts that readers take this post seriously (and note the category under which it is posted).