The police were already there as the rest of the clubs arrived that morning. “They're circling like buzzards on a dead deer,” one biker told me. “I look at the people I was riding with, and I said, ‘This don't look right.’ ” Afterward, said the Cossacks' John Wilson, “a Waco spokesman was touting the quick 40-second response time of the police, when that was obviously false. They were here.”

The bikers believe this provides a clue to the Waco P.D.'s ongoing silence: The cops know their response was overzealous, possibly unlawful, and now they're covering it up. Some bikers believe there's an even more sinister explanation: that a firefight of some kind was supposed to happen—that it was all part of a plan by the Waco P.D. to provoke bitter rivals into a public brawl that could be violently crushed and then used as a basis for sweeping RICO indictments.

It’s worth noting that although locating and detaining three young men suspected of property crimes was beyond the competence of the Arena PD, the department was a model of efficiency in tracking down and arresting a harmless fellow who had posted an offensive note on their Facebook page. In that contrast we see a splendid example of the institutional vanity of government law enforcement – and a good and sufficient illustration of why we would be much better off without it.

This should hardly be seen as profound. In the past, self-defense was viewed as a human right. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the citizenry of the United States, it recognizes natural rights. One of those rights — a veritable law of Nature — is the right to resist.

What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorney files a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.

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