Excerpt #1 from Escape From Chaos

Jim Hipkins, the oldest member of the gang, was a 75 year old retired Air Force Colonel. Uncle Jim, as Max called him, had flown 25 missions in the Vietnam war. Jim despised the government who, he rightly believed, had refused to recognize the contribution he and his fellow combatants had made during the Vietnam debacle. Jim had been badly injured when his plane was shot down on his 25th and last mission over Nam 45 years before. Sam, who was in his Urology residency at the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Center at the time, helped patch him up. The two had been best friends ever since and Jim had followed Sam when he and his young family had returned to California in the early 1970's. Jim opened a private security agency in Walnut Creek and had done quite well providing his services to Nordstrom's Department Store and several other high end retailers in the area. All had gone well until the east bay shoplifters decided to shift their focus from the impoverished cities of Oakland and Richmond to the more prosperous retail outlets in Walnut Creek. This, of course, was good for the private security guard business, at least initially. All went reasonably well until Jim and his employees busted three inner city blacks who were caught red handed while leaving Nordstrom's with several shopping bags full of expensive merchandise, including a $5,000 ladies hand bag, they had not paid for. The arrest was routine but what followed was not. The defendants pleaded no contest to grand theft and were sentenced to two years probation. The prosecutor for Contra Costa County had agreed to the defendants proposed plea bargain because there was no room to house the petty thieves in the Martinez County jail. The local jails in California were bursting at the seams because Governor moonbeam decided to return all prisoners, who were deemed to be nonviolent, to the local lockups in the cities and towns where they had committed their crimes. So far so good, Nordstrom's got their expensive merchandise back and the shoplifters got a slap on the wrist, business as usual in twenty-first century America. Jim's rent-a-cops got a high five for stopping another heist and, with the good publicity the episode generated in the local press, Jim picked up two more clients. Then things took an unexpected twist to the left, the hard left. It was a quite Sunday afternoon and, as was their usual custom on Sundays during the spring of each year, Sam and Uncle Jim were sitting on the deck overlooking the serine valley below the house while consuming a couple of adult beverages. Sam knew something was afoot when his dog Dukie, who was always by his side, gave a low growl deep in his throat. This was Dukie's way of telling Sam that someone was coming down the road towards the house. The next thing they knew federal agents were at the front door with a warrant for Jim's arrest. The warrant stated that Jim and his private police force had violated the inner city black's civil rights when they arrested them for shoplifting. The rest is history, the trial was held in the Federal Court House in San Francisco before Federal Judge Susan Puling. Trials by one's peers, in none homicide cases, had been abandoned several years before because of the cost involved in running traditional jury trials. The federal prosecutor produced court records showing that over the past 5 years Jim's private police force had made 562 arrests for shoplifting related offences. Prosecutor Gonzales went on to demonstrate that the vast majority of those arrested, 96% to be exact, were residents from the minority communities of Oakland, Richmond and Bay Point. Prosecutor Gonzales argued that the large number of people of color being arrested was evidence per se that the defendant and his colleagues were relying on racial profiling to make their illegal arrests. Jim's high priced lawyer, Samuel Kline, tried to object, contending that there was no evidence, what so ever, that any innocent person, irrespective of race, had ever been arrested by Jim or any member of his team of security guards. Without a second thought, Judge Puling ruled that Kline was out of order and fined him $500 for, what she said, was his trivial attempt to disrupt the proceedings. The trial was short, if not so sweet, lasting less than an hour. Judge Puling ultimately ruled that, irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the shoplifters Jim and his staff had arrested, they had been illegally detained because he had used racial profiling to select them from a crowd of other prospective shoplifters. Defense lawyer Kline made one last feeble attempt to defend his client by pointing out that the level of shoplifting by the white residents who lived in Walnut Creek and its surrounding suburbs was too low to be statistically significant. Thus, Kline argued, with respect to the crime of shoplifting, the whole concept of racial profiling was meaningless. After all, how could his client be expected to arrest locals who lived in these communities if they weren't inclined to break this particular aspect of the law? By this time Judge Puling had had enough, she found Kline in contempt of court and sentenced him to 5 days in the county jail. As they handcuffed lawyer Kline and led him to the bus that would take him to the Martinez Jail, the good Judge fined Jim $100,000 and sentenced him to 600 hours of community service. With that, she slammed down her gavel bringing the proceeding to an end and called for the next case on her calendar. The verdict in the case, which was ultimately upheld by the Ninth District Circus Court of Appeals in San Francisco as well as the United States Supreme Court, changed the law forever. Before the Puling ruling, it was unlawful to use racial profiling to apprehend suspected law breakers. After the Puling ruling it became illegal to arrest individuals of a minority group for a crime if the overall percentage arrested for the offence exceeded their rank in the population as a whole. This was interpreted to mean that, in California, where minorities make up 50% of the population, it was evidence per se of racial profiling if more than 50% of those arrested for a specific crime were from the minority community. The states of Washington and Oregon adapted similar anti-discriminatory racial profiling legislation shortly thereafter as did most of the Northeastern states. Once again California had lead the way, taking judicial lunacy to an entirely new level, and a large segment of the clueless nation, had followed. Six months later Judge Puling disappeared after she left her home on Russian Hill one foggy Monday morning to drive to the San Francisco Federal Courthouse. No trace of her or her shinny new black Mercedes SUV was ever found, it was like she and her vehicle had disappeared from the face of the earth. Jim swore that he had no idea what had happened to the judge, but couldn't vouch for the innocence of several of his former employees who had been extremely pissed off when Jim was forced closed his security guard business and they lost their jobs. Sam later came to the conclusion that it was, more likely than not, Judge Puling had become the first casualty of the Second American Revolution. Well, she might have been the first, but she certainly was not be the last. Uncle Jim paid the 100 grand fine but never served an hour of community service. Once the feds got their hands on his money, they seemed to lose interest in him. Within a week he had closed the doors of his thriving private security business and discharged his entire work force of 22 employees. Nordstrom's also stopped doing business in Walnut Creek two months later, after several more robberies convinced management that they could not continue to operate a successful high end retail outlet in the Walnut Creek area. The department store's closure added an additional 225 people to the unemployment lines in Contra Costa county. Tiffanies followed suit shortly thereafter as did Davidson and Licht, a high-end jewelry store that had been a fixture in Walnut Creek since 1916. If you wanted to buy a Christmas present for your wife or girlfriend in Walnut Creek that year it wasn't going to be anything very fancy, more than likely it was going to be of the dime store variety. 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