Even in cases where officers do not outright commit perjury to help their case, they
are professional witnesses, and their word in court is pretty much set in stone.
Add to that the esprit de corps, which is nearly nowhere (not even in the military) as rigid as in the police, and you get a mix nearly impossible to stand up against in trial as an individual. The only thing that can help you in these cases is media attention, but good luck mustering that; in the U.S., police enjoy a comparatively large amount of "good-will" from the media.
Going toe-to-toe with law enforcement in court is almost never a good idea.
give you your maranda rights without parent or guardian being present.
It's a Miranda
warning. You have no "rights". They're just gracious enough to warn you.
(P.S.: I'm not trying to incite hatred towards the police; they have their place and do their job. But, criticism of misconduct and system-inherent problems ought to be fair game, and even high-ranking police officers are questioning the status quo.)
Firearms will not help you against a corrupt (or tyrannic) government. That made sense in the age of muskets; in this day and age, it does no longer. The only hope (purely hypothetically speaking) if you wished to
violently resist tyranny would be to enlist a sizable part of your very own army's officer corps as a putschist force. Or get rich enough to buy out Blackwater & Co., by which time you'll no longer want to putsch against your administration, because you can simply buy your own laws as you please.
The only remotely sensible plan (although still wildly utopian) as I see it, would be to pool large amounts of donated money, and use this fund to hire professional lobbyists and buy citizen-friendly laws. To the tune of $200mil. you should be able to get the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT (love the U.S. for these abbreviations) repealed.
Now, as far as national security versus personal liberty is concerned:
I'm neither a libertarian nor a liberal in the US-American sense (i.e., leftist), but I do identify as an Old Liberal: I adhere staunchly to the Rousseau-Pestalozzianist school of political theory; and so I think that defense against a vague "terrorist" threat ought to stand back behind the civil liberties of the individual, behind the citizen's right to privacy and to go about their life unmolested by unwarranted show of force from the authorities' side.
Applies double when it's just a placebo measure being introduced (contemporary airport "security", CCTV surveillance, ...), and even moreso when said measure sets a precedent for totalitarianism (censorship, ...).
As far as freedom of speech -vs- discrimination goes, a line ought to be drawn where violence is being incited. Short of that, liberty always trumps animosities.