[Flash Walken]

Here's an important and related article from Macdonald as well:

The bitter truth, more obvious by the year, is that law enforcement in the U.S. is actually the enforcement of the class system itself.

If you are poor, you understand that. If you are wealthy, you probably understand it, too, but in another way altogether.

For a member of the American underclass, a minor brush with authorities can turn into the kind of Kafkaesque despair that most Americans associate with places like Egypt or Russia or Iran.

So the story of Kalief Browder, detailed earlier this month in the New Yorker — "Three years on Rikers without trial" — could only have been a shock to the readers of that magazine, who are generally members of America's elite, and therefore largely shielded from judicial abuse.

Long story short, Browder was arrested wrongly for robbery and assault. And for the sin of refusing to cop a plea he was imprisoned in New York's fearsome Riker's Island jail, mostly in solitary, for three years without trial, before prosecutors gave up and admitted they had no case.

Keeping him locked up didn't seem to bother anyone; Browder, a juvenile delinquent from the Bronx, belongs to the nuisance class, and that was enough.

Such treatment, it goes without saying, simply would not happen to a kid from the preppy confines of Sag Harbor or Montauk.

And Browder was by no means an exception. Half a country away, in Ferguson, Mo., some of the town's mostly white police force were wearing "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets (before Washington stepped in and told them to stop).

Others were hiding their name tags, which is illegal, as they tried to deal with the town's resentful, mostly black population.

Wilson is the policeman who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown last August, triggering what was basically a race riot that went on for weeks.

The message the bracelet-wearing, ID-tag-hiding police were sending couldn't have been clearer: We are the faceless wall of the establishment. Question our authority at your peril. For your purposes, the law is whatever we say it is.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/how-the...rica-1.2800057