I like the police. Since I moved to Spokane in 1992, I’ve lobbied City Hall for nothing more fervently than to bring speed and crosswalk enforcement to my walking neighborhood. I like a safe, orderly city with civil, courteous and lawful behavior.

I am a grizzled old granddad. But I share with Spokane’s young, self-described anarchists a dislike for police intimidation and, of course, police brutality. Let me tell you why.

Twenty years ago, I lived in Budapest as a dance student. Communist Hungary was still governed by the hated regime of János Kádár who was installed in the wake of the failed 1956 revolution against Soviet domination. The regime’s police watched over the population rather discreetly, but intimidation and brutality remained at the ready.

A fellow dancer in my ensemble expressed an interest in the Voice of America radio broadcasts and asked me to pick up a printed schedule next time I was in the American Embassy. The embassy maintained a reading room that was freely accessible to the public back then. I said, “Why don’t you just visit the reading room yourself?” My friend answered that he couldn’t go into the embassy because the Hungarian policeman, concealed in a guard box out front, would take the picture of anyone who entered the building.

No such subtleties for Spokane’s police. When I participated in Spokane’s biggest peace demonstration before the Iraq war, the police required all 1,800 of us to walk more or less single file on our march through downtown Spokane. As we returned to Riverfront Park, we were each videotaped front-on, filing past two policemen leaning up against a police cruiser.

I conveyed later to a friend on the Spokane police force that I found it very strange, intimidating and utterly without justification that we were all captured on video at the conclusion of a scrupulously obedient peace march. He said, well, it was necessary for the police to document who was there. This response missed the real questions: Why was it necessary? To whom was it necessary?

When citizens of Spokane turned out to protest the visit of Vice President Dick Cheney, the police sought to intimidate them. They paraded back and forth with thick bales of plastic tie-strips as an implied threat. In my hour or two in downtown Spokane, only one policeman showed us some human – not necessarily political – solidarity. The other policemen had either been trained to be belligerent and antagonistic as a technique of crowd control or they were simply not very admirable human beings. Is this how you and I want Spokane to greet the peaceful exercise of free speech?

Now it’s come so far that Spokane’s police confronted and arrested 17 young people who – quite reasonably and with the best of causes – had been protesting police brutality and American military imperialism on the day when we celebrate our freedoms. Spokane’s police, so reports would have it, made a sustained show of intimidation and provocation. When that grew tiresome, they applied brute force. These policemen behaved shamefully on the Fourth of July.

The actions of Spokane’s police are terrifying in both local and national context. First, it is clear to Spokane’s citizens that protests against police intimidation and brutality are likely to be dealt with brutally. Second, when we demonstrate against the military and financial imperialism of America’s criminal power structure, it is inevitable that Spokane’s police will function as the national regime’s frontline fist – by domestic surveillance, by menace and provocation, and by brutality and arrest.

Indeed, Spokane – however far from the centers of power – has already achieved fair notoriety with its own allegedly world-class torture consultancy and laboratory downtown at 108 N. Washington. Hungary is trying to overcome its totalitarian past, and the infamous secret police facility in Budapest at 60 Andrássy út has been turned into a museum called the House of Terror. Spokane, as far as I can tell, is only just now really getting into the business.

I am alarmed to find in our national culture and in our political institutions so many traits of fascism, perhaps the inevitable consequence of our commitment to imperialism. If one is to resist totalitarianism and maintain a civil, liberal and humane society, one must not fail to strive at the local level while confronting the threat of totalitarianism at the national level. In this regard, the oversight of local police is an essential measure … and the trimming back of their predilection for the brutal devices of intimidation and suppression is an essential step.