Progressives Were Waaaaaay Ahead Of Them, Paul

Paul Harris (US correspondent for the Guardian) has his panties in a bunch over the comedy-gold televised ‘Sheriff Joe and Steve Seagal’ show:

In a post-Jersey Shore world surely nothing could emerge from reality TV that could actually shock?

If the answer was ‘No’, you wouldn’t be writing this, would you?

This week, a bizarre incident unfolded in Phoenix, Arizona, involving 115 roosters, an out-of-control sheriff, several tanks, a Swat team, a suspected cockfighter, a bomb robot and – like a muscular, suntanned cherry on top of the whole pile – faded action star Steven Seagal.

Oooh! Do tell.

Police suspected local man Jesus Sanchez Llovera, 43, of running an illegal cockfighting ring (the huge flock of roosters on his property no doubt being the clinching clue). So they decided to arrest him. While he was at home. Alone. Unarmed. With no police record of owning any weapons.

In other words, they brought in overwhelming force, just in case their original info was wrong.

Why do you find that surprising?

So, instead of pulling up outside Llovera's house and knocking on his door, Arpaio assembled a mini-army of police deputies, two armoured vehicles, a fully-armed Swat team and the bomb robot. They descended on Llovera's house and smashed his windows, knocked down his gate with one of the tanks and arrested him. Seagal, dressed in combat fatigues and sunglasses and sporting a gun on his hip, was riding in one of the police tanks. Seagal's film crew taped the whole thing. No doubt, after heavy editing, it will make for a few dramatic moments of television.

Hey, if you don’t like it, don’t watch it.

The reasons to be stunned and shocked at this barely need describing and should appal anyone of any political background…

Translation: ‘It appals me, so it should appal everyone else, too, or they just aren’t human!’.

First off is the cost: across America, cities are slashing policing to the bone to cope with severe budget cuts. Yet, in Arizona, the needs of an ageing action star's reality show resulted in a raid that some lawyers estimate would have cost thousands of dollars.

The Yanks directly elect their lawfolks. If the good people of Arizona think this is a waste of their tax dollars, they’ll be able to do something about it.

If they don’t, well, who are you to complain? You don’t, after all, live there.

Second, it has emerged that Seagal has a contract with the sheriff's department that allows him free reign to go along on any arrests the sheriff makes. In a country notoriously – and often admirably – obsessed with individual freedoms and constitutional rights, why has so much privilege in the realm of law and order been granted to a reality TV star?

Because he’s more than just a tv star – he graduated from a police academy in California and he's a reserve deputy sheriff in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, as one of the commenters points out.

Don’t you do any of that, ummm, research stuff?

Finally, there is the horrific blending of policing and entertainment that this incident represents. The two should be kept utterly apart.

There goes most of Channel Five’s programming then…

Arpaio, for his part, denies staging the whole thing for Seagal and his show. What about Seagal's thoughts? In his low, grumbling monotone, he explained to one local TV reporter the reasoning for his presence on the raid. "Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves," he said.

That's nice. But keeping idiotic reality TV shows away from the operation of a police force and the administration of justice is one of mine.

Frankly, I fail to see how Seagal and the sheriff could possibly bring law and order and the justice system into any further disrepute, following the last several decades of progressive theories...

And hey, anytime the states get tired of Sheriff Joe (unlikely, which is what really annoys you, eh?), there's a lot of people who'd be just delighted to see him take over here!