“They showed up like the Gestapo.” So says Eric Meyer, son of Joan Meyer, co-owner of the Marion County Record. The Marion, Kansas police executed systematic raids on Friday, August 11, targeting the Record’s offices, the home of its two co-owners, Joan and Eric Meyer, and the home of a reporter. These raids, conducted with the authorization of local judge Laura Viar, violate federal law. The narrowly-tailored harassment, designed to silence the newspaper, left the Meyers in a state of shock — particularly Joan, who worked on the Record for more than 50 years. Joan, 98, died on Saturday afternoon. According to her son, she was unable to eat or sleep as a result of the hours-long raid, and was killed by the shock.
In a transparent attempt to shutter the press, investigators seized critical machinery needed to run the newspaper: the press file server, computers, phones, their internet router, personal cell phones, and their backup drives. Eric Meyer told reporters that “We are going to publish somehow,” but “it’s the nitty gritty stuff nobody can help us with. Like where is the ad log? Where is our nameplate?” The message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
What’s the business? Police are acting on behalf of local restauranteur, Kari Newell, owner of the local business Parlour 1886 in the Elgin Hotel. The Record staff had been kicked out of a public forum with U.S. Representative Jake LaTurner by Newell the week before. She attacked the paper online as well. In response, a confidential source leaked information to the Record that Newell had been convicted of driving under the influence but continued to illegally use her car without a driver’s license. In Kansas, a criminal record like this can jeopardize a business’ attempts to get a liquor license, and Newell was seeking one for her catering business.
The editors at the Record suspected the information was coming from Newell’s husband, who was filing for divorce, and decided not to run a story using it. Meyer alerted the police instead. “We thought we were being set up,” he said. Police notified Newell. She made public statements at a city council meeting claiming the Record had gotten and distributed sensitive documents illegally, which wasn’t true. The Record published a response laying out the facts on Thursday.
Before 11 a.m. on Friday, the police launched their raid. The warrant alleged that the paper was participating in the “identity theft of Kari Newell.”
The police in Marion are merely a miniature model of the police throughout the U.S. Empire. Police often act directly as the agents of the propertied classes. Newell, whose property was threatened, went to the police in Marion and asked them to take action to protect her money and her company. Just like they do when they arrest the unhoused for daring to pitch tents on public property so they may live, just like they do when they arrest the starving for taking the necessities of life from huge corporations, the police moved immediately to protect Newell.
Police have two overarching missions in the U.S. Empire. The first is unique to the settler-colonial history of the country — they act as a domestic garrison to put down Black and Indigenous uprisings. The second is something they share in common with police everywhere: the protection of private property. We often consider this “corruption” in the common parlance, but in fact it’s what police do all over the country. Big and small, police departments act at the beck and call of moneyed interests. From the FBI down to the tiniest local police station, they are the right hand of property owners. You can think of them as the blue-jacketed Gestapo of the local Chamber of Commerce and the fascistic petty business tyrants. The bigger the police, the bigger the paymaster.
The police of Marion Kansas are the face of police throughout the U.S. Empire.
