🚀 go-pugleaf

klaatu  writes:
> Maximillian Natzet wrote:
> 
> Ahem, if you thought they were not respected _before_, you expect that
> local cops would have anything like respect if they became
> _collaborators_? With an occupying power?
> 
> What of those officers (a very high percentage) who are also Reservists
> or National Guardsmen? They would, unless ordered by their President to
> surrender their arms and accept the new regime (I think that anyone
> giving such orders is practically-by-default on the basis of such action
> no longer President and can be ignored), be traitors at least and could
> be expected to be reviled.
> 
> The concept of local police collaborating with an occupation force is so
> inherently repugnant to any American I have to ask you what culture you
> come from, that you could even make such a suggestion.

Yes, I would expect that most of the police would resist the
invaders, but they would cease to be police at that point.  I'm
speaking about legal niceties here, but once a civil
administration admits to being occupied (ie surrenders) it is
expected to cooperate - that is the point of surrendering.

When we occupied Japan, for instance, we left the majority of
the Japanese civil authorities in place, we just supervised
their operations.  Would you expect American soldiers to
suddenly be responsible for the day to day affairs of running a
community?  This includes more that simply law enforcement, but
trash collection, postal delivery, operating sewage treatment
plants, etc.  The police fall into the same category as other
local civil servants.

What seems odd about my proposition is that it is framed in
the context of a foreign occupation of US soil, a repugnant and
unprecedented event in the modern world, not that it isn't the
expected legal behavior.
-- 
Maximillian F Natzet, Combat Botanist
	North American Combat Botany Institute
	University of Virginia    Charlottesville, VA
http://watt.seas.Virginia.EDU/~mfn8j/