The year was 1972, President Nixon was running for reelection; violent crime was  rampant, as poorly trained police officers were outgunned by gangs in the war on  drugs, and law enforcement was often infected and obstructed by political corruption.  The People were scared, and young Americans were openly rebelling against being  sent off to die or be maimed in Viet Nam. With bombings of federal buildings in  Washington DC, and riots in the cities, the presidential policy question was, what to  do? Nixon appointed the commissioners of a National Advisory Commission on  Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, and professional members of task forces on the  Police, Courts, Corrections, and Community Crime Prevention, with each task force  staffed by research writers recruited from leading agencies to produce individual  reports, leading to the Commission’s Report. 

The opening question was whether Congress should enact more federal criminal  laws and fund their enforcement by more federal officers, backed up by the military?  It was unanimous that criminal laws should be primarily enacted by the States, and  that laws should be enforced at the most local level possible, to best ensure that the  Constitutional rights of everyone are preserved, and that the reserved individual  Rights of Liberty are respected. 

To implement national justice policy in the second term, a priority of new federal  fundings would be granted to local and state jurisdictions to identify and replicate best  practices, and to professionalize the administration of justice at every level. Acting  through the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a  newly created Office of National Priority Programs would administer a billion-dollar  budget. National policing standards were quickly implemented by the creation of  Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commissions by the legislatures of  every state. Today, these State commissions certify the basic training and standards of all professional local and state sworn peace officers with arrest powers, and the  intermediate and advanced certifications of supervisors and commanders. The Commission adopted the following national standard for policing, which has  never been withdrawn or replaced as a matter of national criminal justice policy:1 “The police in the United States are not separate from the people. They draw  their authority from the will and consent of the people, and they recruit their  officers from them. The police are the instrument of the people to achieve  and maintain order; their efforts are founded on principles of public service  and ultimate responsibility to the public.” 

“If the overall purposes of the police service in America were narrowed to a  single objective, that objective would be to preserve the peace in a manner  consistent with the freedoms secured by the Constitution.” 

Also adopted as a national standard was the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics, to  which every professional Peace Officer in America swears an oath when basically  trained and upon receiving their weapons and badge of arrest authority, which opens: 

“My fundamental duty is to serve; to safeguard lives and property; to protect  the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation,  and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the Constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality and justice.” 

Reflecting upon the intervening 50 years of criminal justice practice and history,  one wonders if the Commissioners and their professional staffers who created these  enduring standards of national criminal justice policy, could ever have imagined the  social, political, and historical reality confronting the American People in the June  2026 elections. 

The vote of the American People this year will be an expression of our consent to  be governed by the failed and corrupt two-party system of government, and the  election will be the ultimate test of the wisdom of self-governing People, who chose  to police themselves as an expression of their reserved Rights of Liberty.

A fundamental question addressed by the Commission and its task forces was the  nature and control of the raw physical power of restraint, arrest, and the lawful  application of violent lethal force in the free society of America; whether police  authorities can control crime and riots, while allowing and protecting constitutional  dissent; can we the People peacefully coexist in our nation of laws, with enforcement  actions authorized by Law, bound by our Constitution, and guided by locally defined  policies governing discretion in all matters of personal liberty? 

Or, 

Are to become a nation of Man, where all military, justice, and policing power is  concentrated in one Man, the elected president, whose absolute discretion and  Executive Orders prevail over law and Constitution. The “unitary executive” of the  federal government and Commander in Chief is not bound by the Constitution, or his  oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it, or by the laws of Congress and the States,  or by the orders of any Court. 

With the best of foresight, could the Commissioners in the era of Nixon’s voluntary resignation,  have imagined a president admittedly constrained only by his “own morality,” a president, who when  inaugurated the second time was on bail pending sentencing for multiple felony convictions for paying  hush money to a porn star during his first campaign, a president whose indictment for inciting the  January 6, 2021 “OneSix” insurrection against Congress was imminent; a president who was  granted immunity from prosecution by a majority of the Court he appointed, while at the same time  disobeying judicial orders he is Constitutionally obligated to enforce as the nation’s chief law  enforcement officer. 

Could the anyone imagine a president who refused to accept electoral defeat following his first  term, and who hired and incited a riotous mob to attack Congress to stop the Electoral College count,  who refused to attend the inauguration of his lawfully elected successor, and whose last order as  Commander in Chief was his own 21-gun salute. 

A president whose first act in his second term was to pardon more than 300 convicted felons who  had swarmed the Capitol at his instruction, irrespective of the seriousness of their crimes, including  deadly attacks on police officers. A president who appointed his own personal defense attorney as his  loyal constitutional Attorney General controlling the Justice Department, secured the dismissal of his  own impending indictment, and obtained immunity from prosecution for all acts as president; a  president who has ordered the prosecution of his political and personal enemies, focusing his expressed hatred on “all Democrats;” a president who denies disaster aid to Blue States, and deploys uninvited  and untrained paramilitary gangs into their cities to round up immigrant visiting workers, while there  are far greater numbers of undocumented immigrants in large Red State cities. 

Could the Commissioners in 1972 imagine that a president would refuse to surrender control of  his branded family business enterprises while in office, including issuing his own presidential crypto  memecoins, netting millions–with a reciprocal loss to investors; that a president would continue to  gamble in the stock market with the buying and selling of securities and bonds, profiting from inside  knowledge of his own Executive Orders; or that a president would openly solicit and accept lavish  gifts, including objects of gold from all seekers of favors, directly or through the inflated purchase price  of his commercial products. 

A president whose image appears not only on his memecoins and soon to be on a commemorative  dollar, but displayed on massive banners hung on federal buildings around the District of Columbia,  with some locations already renamed with his brand; a president who demolished one historic wing of  the White House to build a grand ballroom paid for by his wealthy supporters, and who ordered the  simple residence built by the People for their president, and his oval office to be gilded with the gold  leaf of royalty. 

A fantasy president who acted as the unitary executive, with today’s vast powers of Commander  in Chief of the combined military, homeland security, justice, and intelligence resources; who in their  wildest dreams 50 years ago could have imagined such a president renouncing defense alliances that  are the constitutional Supreme Law of the Land, reversing a military philosophy of united defense to  become an aggressive, ultra masculine Department of War, who appointed a former soldier journalist,  television influencer, tattooed nationalist as his loyalist Secretary; fired the inspector generals and  general counsels of the War Department and other vital departments, fired all women and officers of  color in command positions; a president who staged a military parade for his birthday; a president  who acts without any application for a declaration, or even notice to Congress, before bombing the  nuclear generating facilities of a nation that we are not at war with, and who does not pose a present  threat to the American People; a president who militarily blockaded and violently invaded the capital  of another country, killing dozens to kidnap its leader and his wife, all expressly to secure the  country’s oil resources; a president who does all this, committing crimes in violation of internation law,  and then extorts the Nobel Peace Prize from its legitimate recipient, as that nation’s lawfully elected  resistance leader, while making side deals with the successors of the old regime.

Acting entirely without Congressional acts or approval, imagine a president who has threatened,  imposed, and withdrawn import tariffs at whim, which are acts of economic warfare, on all nations  including allies and adversaries. The economic cost of which have been imposed as an unlegislated tax  on the People by the president, rather than Congress, while ending the People’s health care subsidy to  reduce taxes on the corporations and wealthy CEOs, including himself. 

A president who as the chief law enforcement officer deployed thousands of untrained and  unrestrained paramilitary agents to brutally enforce immigration deportation laws, treating all  immigrants as though they are all violent felons, and all constitutional protestors as urban terrorists,  and who has unlawfully deployed military units within the States in defiant violation of the Posse  Comitatus Act. 

Back then, could we believe that a president, who spent years selling millions in development  properties to Russian oligarchs, cleaning their money into the U.S. banking system, would risk  conducting personal private talks with the president of that adversary nation during his first term in  Helsinki and more recently in Anchorage, and frequently on the telephone, without American  translators or note takers; one would wonder why only that nation would be spared tariffs, and which  continues to invade and occupy another nation, despite the Budapest agreement of the United States  and Russia in 1994 to protect and defend Ukraine if it surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia. 

Who could have believed that a president in his second term would sue his own Department of  Internal Revenue and Treasury Department demanding $10 billion in damages because of leaks  made during his first term when they were under his supervision, that truthfully revealed the president  only paid $750 in taxes in 2016, and no taxes in ten of the previous 15 years. 

Finally, could the Commissioners have foreseen a president who began to expressly govern as a  dictator from “day one,” one who is unwilling to surrender the Constitutional powers of office a second  time, and who has threatened to suspend elections, if he perceives an insurrection against his personal  power? A president who is the most powerful person on Earth, who not only has nuclear weapons  under his personal launch command, but also the regular military commanded through his  Department of War, 70,000 special forces directed by his National Security Council, plus his new  personal paramilitary ICE army. All of this raw power is controlled by the physical brain and body  of an angry, raging, glaring, forgetful, vengeful, threatening old man, however, inside there’s a lazy,  spoiled boy, uncaring, unable to read, sly, fearful, afraid of his rich bullying father, who gave him  almost billion dollars to invest, who became a serial failure and bankrupt until being bailed out as a  reality television star, who marketed his own brand. Throughout he succeeded by bullying and threatening with his lawyers to get what he wanted, and what he couldn’t earn on his own merit.  Now, what he demands is the oil of Venezuela, the mineral resources of Greenland, a nation  protected by NATO, and the destruction of Iran at the instruction of Israel, whose intelligence  apparatus knows all the president’ Epstein and Russian secrets. Irrespective of the pathology, his  threats and application of military violence were declared to be war crimes following World War II,  based on the lessons learned from appeasing the threats and insatiable demands of dictators. 

The wisdom of the Commission’s recommendations 50 years ago, and their  adoption by the Nixon (and Ford) administrations, and every successor presidency  until now, can be found all across the United States in every county, town, city, and  

state, where uniform POST standards funded by a slight penalty assessment (p.a.) on  all court fines have trained generations of professional peace officers to act according  to the Constitution, Law, and national and state professional standards, and to be  guided in their discretion by locally formulated policy and systems of accountability. 

In addition to the police service, standards have been established throughout the  justice systems in the Courts, Corrections, and Community Crime Prevention. With  self-funding through penalty assessments, and by serving as professional standards for  federal and private grants and funding, the vision of local policing, judgement, and  corrections by the People themselves has substantially reduced violent crime by half  and property crimes by one third in America in the past 50 years. 

Widely emulated by other nations, standard-based professional policing has  allowed the American People to safely travel across its States and around the world in  a rules-based international order of justice, using our mobile phones to get us where  we are going, with the means to pay our way, and to feel safe in seeking police  protection if threatened.

Are these violent acts of ICE agents lawful?

Brutal violent takedown  arrests by gangs of masked, unidentified ICE agents; forced, warrantless entrances  into residences; the casual use of dangerous riot control agents including CS gas,  Tasers, bean bag firearms, threats with military assault weapons and unholstered  sidearms by unsupervised ICE agents and military personnel, acting under orders of  Homeland Security and the War Department primarily against misdemeanor-level  immigration deportations and constitutional protestors.

Agents have been involved in more than 30 shootings in the last year, becoming  increasingly deadly with two shooting deaths in one week of American citizen  protestors in Minneapolis during the “Operation Metro Surge” by ICE and other  federal agents. Both January shootings are clearly out of police policy standards and  are probably criminal homicide in one degree or another; the widespread applications  of riot control violent methods are not preceded by the mandatory declarations of  unlawful assembly, or according to other basic justice and constitutional standards,  before the application of violence against peaceful constitutional protestors. 

The answer to the title question is clearly no, as these practices do not even come  close to the standard of justice Americans have come to expect as a constitutional  right, but the invasion and brutality offend our reserved Rights of Liberty to be left  alone by our own government. We originally organized ourselves together as patriots  to revolt against the king and our colonies’ corporate owners, and we fought in World  War II against corporate fascism and dictatorial rule to keep government of every  form out of our lives, homes, and communities to the greatest extent possible. 

Freed from the threats and coercion of federal paramilitary agencies such as ICE,  we the People can best take care of most policing matters on the local level, including  the threat posed by our law abiding, tax paying, undocumented visitor workers, and we  can elect our own representatives to represent us in governing our democratic  republic, which is empowered by our consent, according to our policies. 

The federal agents and soldiers employing violence toward immigrants, targeting  citizens of color and protestors, are acting under the command of constitutional  officers who are personally accountable and individually loyal to the president, instead  of the Constitution. The ICE agents are acting under the authority of Executive  Orders, instead of Congressional law and the Constitution. The agent’s use of force  and discretion is guided by the president’s racist policies as expressed on social media  describing lawful immigrants and citizens as “garbage,” the undocumented as  “animals” and “monsters,” and constitutional protesters as domestic terrorists,  accompanied by hints of immunity and pardons for the unlawful acts of his loyalists. 

Acting without authorization as the unitary executive in defiance of Congress, the  executive orders of Trump resulted in a swarm of intentional violations of existing  laws that overwhelmed the judicial system, as planned by Project 2025. The legal conclusion is compelling that there is no legal justification for any ICE arrest actions, and that  the violence imposed by federal agents is clearly in violation of the Constitution they are sworn to  protect and defend. 

The excessive physical violence and use of force imposed by these poorly trained  and unsupervised ICE agents is far disproportional to the threat, and the arrests fail to  meet the most basic national professional standards of constitutional law  enforcement, much less the performance of highly trained police SWAT units. Such  violent military tactics are not only substandard and unlawful, but they are also null  and void, ab initio, as lacking any valid authority. They are probably violations of State  laws, and individual agents and their commanders may be subject to state prosecution,  and convictions cannot be pardoned by the president. 

Recruited with minimal background investigations and paid tens of thousands of  dollars in upfront signing and arrest bonuses, provided training far short of basic  POST standards, ICE agents are so poorly trained that they cannot control an  unarmed arrestee on their own, even with a partner, without violently attacking  individuals and spraying chemical agents in their faces. 

POST trained police officers know that you cannot transform a vehicle into a  weapon by stepping in front of it, nor can you kill a car by shooting at it, but every  trained officer knows that a car with a dead driver can strike other cars and children.  Professionals also know that once a person is disarmed and no longer a threat, they  cannot be shot nine times. Trained officers expect that following every use of deadly  force, there will be an objective, lessons-learned, after-action evaluation that identifies  mistakes made so they are not repeated. Professional officers have learned from  professional experience that errors can never be covered up for very long, as they  always come back to haunt you, until corrected. 

Particularly troublesome in the exercise of the paramilitary arrest violence by ICE,  other federal agents, and military personnel is the absence of clear rules of  engagement for applying military grade lethal force, and command accountability.  Even worse are the implied immunity and pardon that are being suggested by  commanders and constitutional officers, who quickly go on social media to absolve  the shooters and to criminally charge their victims, before any investigation.  Deploying military doctrine to bring the maximum force and to kill, rather than the police doctrine to use the minimum amount of force required to secure detention, the  ICE rules of engagement appear to be the same as occupied Iraq, “shoot and scoot.” There is little difference in the deployment of poorly trained and commanded,  brown combat clad, masked, paramilitary ICE agents being deployed against the  People of America, including their peaceful, hardworking, tax paying, undocumented  immigrant visitors, and the Nazi Brownshirt SA being used to intimidate and round  up hardworking Jews, both being scapegoats to the accumulation, corruption, and  abuse of power.

Can this abomination of American Justice and the constitutional  betrayal of the American People be reversed before it becomes  entrenched and hereditary? Success will require every liberty-loving American,  whether Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Green, ANTIFA, or  MAGA to put aside our political differences and to agree that we do not consent to  be governed by deceit and corruption, and that irrespective of the candidates presently  offered or elected, the existing two-party system of government no longer represents  the interests of the People, instead of the corporations and wealthy elite who have  corrupted it. 

We the People, acting together, have the power to generate the collective  “wisdom of the crowd;” thinking and working together, we will always be smarter and  better than any one individual, no matter how rich, famous, influential, or charismatic  they may be. If we are intelligent enough to pay taxes and to die in wars, we are smart  enough to make our own policy choices every four years before the presidential  election in a national policy referendum, when we all vote on the 12 most critical  issues facing the new administration. Then, we will cast our informed votes for the  representatives who promise to implement our policy choices. 

The Voter’s Bill of Rights addresses the most important issues about voting,  expands our constitutional rights, resulting in more effective self-governance and  respect for our reserved Rights of Liberty. 

Before the primary elections in June and the general election in November, it is  essential that every candidate for every public office in the United States be  respectfully and repeatedly asked, “Do you support the Voter’s Bill of Rights of the  American People? 

As the Rights of Liberty of all American People are surely threatened by the  current corporate-AI puppeteer takeover of our government under the guise of  MAGA, playing one party against the other, and by the insatiable greed of its gilded  unitary executive and his creditors and sycophants, never forget, one of the great  powers retained by the American People is our right of liberty to quietly suspend our  personal consent to be governed by deceit and corruption, irrespective of party or  personage. A government in which representatives are loyal to the People and their  laws and Constitution, rather to political party, powerful corporations, and wealthy contributors, one in which we retain and defend our liberty to create our own policies  and to police ourselves. 

A new Congress next January could impeach and convict not only the President,  but all the constitutional officer who are aiding and abetting his many crimes, without  having to wait two more years of his immunized crime spree and his pardoning of  coconspirators to see what he and his vice president are going to do.