Michael Maiello's picture

    Use of Force

    The spirited discussion from my last post, as well as Wolfrum's takedown of thoughtless libertarianism and Another Trope's well thought out response to his critics, got me thinking about the use of force and police power in general.  I'm unlikely to break any new ground here, but if you'll all indulge me thinking out loud...

    I take this issue very seriously, from both sides.  My grandfather was a detective with the Albuquerque Police Department and my brother in law is a former EMT and now a firefighter, so I'm pretty aware of what the "serve and protect" set has to go through on a daily basis.  The police serve a complex function as they are both civil servants and civil authorities.  I think it was Another Trope who reminded my during our previous discussion that my insistence that the police be treated like any other citizen is a little flawed as the police are decidedly not like any other citizen in our system.  While they are not above the law, they do have prerogatives that the rest of us do not.

    The state has the monopoly on the use of force because, if it didn't, the rich would have that monopoly.  We know this from our own history.  During the western expansion, frontier justice wasn't so much mob justice as it was justice orchestrated by the wealthier land and ranch owners.  Billy the Kid and his gang were in the employ of a wealthy rancher involved in a land and cattle war.  In the absence of accountable civil authorities, we would all be vulnerable to Warren Buffett hiring an army of toughs to come kick our asses.  Having civil authorities who will cuff and treat you and me and Buffett the same way is mean to prevent that.  Don't worry, we'll get into whether or not the authorities treat everyone equally in a bit.

    So far as the use of force goes, we give the police tremendous leeway.  I'm sure some police officers will disagree with me on that and could cite copious rules and regulations in support of their argument, but in practice, when the police encounter a civilian, what the officer says goes.  Say, for example, that you are subject to an illegal search.  It may well be that a court will find the results of this search can be presented as part of a prosecution.  It may well even be that the officer is disciplined.  In an extreme case, you mighty even be able to file a civil lawsuit against the officer, the police department and the city.  Some one might settle or you might even win.  But here's what you can't do... you can't physically stop the illegal search from happening in the first place.  You can't throw a punch in defense of your rights.  You can't effectively resist at all.  If you do, you could be subject to prosecution for all sorts of infractions.  If a police officer does you wrong, your only recourse is to convince a higher authority, after the fact and often at your own (considerable) expense.  If I tried to shoot pepper spray in your face and you responded by knocking the cannister from my hand and then knocking me out, there'd be no problem.  Unless I was a police officer.  You have no right to self defense against the police.

    The problem is that as America has grown larger, we have tended to cede more and more power to the police.  These decisions weren't made irrationally.  The world is dangerous.  In New York, you can be stopped and frisked for just about any reason.  Sure, there are rules but good luck if you feel unfairly singled out.  As was also pointed out in the previous discussion, politically important groups of people don't tend to get stopped and frisked.  A white dude in a business suit might have a packet of blow in his wallet, but he really doesn't have to worry about some beat cop in Battery Park City going to look for it.  No  blonde socialite shopping on Fifth Avenue is going to have her purse searched for illegal prescription pills.  We all know who gets stopped and frisked.  Every year in New York some news purveyor tells us that it's young black and Hispanic kids who get stopped way up town, in some rougher parts of Brooklyn, or for visiting the wrong (rich) neighborhoods.

    Which brings us back to the point of giving the state the monopoly on violence in the first place.  Remember, it's to protect us from a physically enforced plutocracy.  We give the state this authority because it doesn't matter who the president is if billionaire Larry Ellison decides to occupy northern California with his own private army.

    I'm not going to stray so far as to say that the police are serving the wealthy and well connected in such a fashion.  Except here in New York, where the mayor happens to be a billionaire, the police aren't getting their marching orders directly from some wealthy elite.  However,  the police (and our entire justice system) are an arm of our politics and our politics has been demonstrably corrupted by money.

    When it comes to Occupy Wall Street, police officers have far more in common with the protesters than with the political leadership.  One thing the Occupiers should articulate loudly is support for good pensions, benefits and salaries for all public workers, including the police.  Heck, you want to see effective organization of an advocacy group?  Look no further than a police and firefighters union.

    But, here's the thing... the police are part of our politics and our politics has been corrupted.  I think the only answer is to take action within the system to reduce and limit police power.  It's going to be tough.  No politician ever won office for being weak on crime.  I think we should accept more danger in exchange for limited police power.  No warrantless searches. Harsher civil and criminal penalties for brutality and excessive use of force.  I'm an extremist on this.  I don't think a police officer should be allowed to search you just because  German Shepherd smells pot brownies.  It's a freaking dog.  I don't think the police should be allowed to place a GPS tracker on your car without a judge's approval.  I don't think the police should be able to "stop and frisk" just anyone at any time.  I even think that if you physically resist the police and can then prove that they police shouldn't have been hassling you in the first place, that the state should not be allowed to bring resistance-type charges against you.

    But, let's face it.  The country disagrees with me strongly on all of this.  What the country has chosen is to err on the side of law enforcement in almost all cases.  The country has chosen to give broad authority to law enforcement.  When I hear about a wrongful search or wrongful arrest (or worse, a wrongful conviction and even a death sentence) I think that a great tragedy has occurred that the state should stop at nothing to make amends for.  But I am not most people.  Most people see these events as the unfortunate consequences of a necessary system.    That those afflicted tend to be either poor, minorities or both gives the great white middle some faith that these travails will never fall on them anyway.

    I'll tell you one thing for sure -- if the New York City Police Department wanted to crack down on recreational drug use, it could send its officers downtown every night in December and wait for the investment bank and financial industry holiday parties to let out and then stop and frisk every person stumbling onto the streets.  Under current law, they would have every right to do so and every joint, pill or powder they find could be cause for arrest and, depending on the amounts, misdemeanor or felony prosecution.  I'm also willing to bet that if the police actually did that, New York's "stop and frisk" laws would be taken off of the books by the end of January 2012.

    We can't take the politics out of policing.  But we either need to get control of our politics (and severely edit, curtail and shorten the criminal code so that there aren't so many damned offenses to commit in the first place) or we need to depower the police.  The current system can last, but it shouldn't.

     

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    Agree with your rough arc and trajectory here, Destor. Couple of points.

    1st, not sure we ever sat around and created the state and decided to "give" it a monopoly on violence. I'm not saying it was a pure creation of the rich and powerful either, but I think history - while always murky - pretty much shows that the rich had more of a say than we did in its creation. (At least, it's modern, European-derived variants.) And also, that the creation wasn't so much to protect us against the plutocracy. 

    This changes the picture to one where these issues have always existed, and are fought for, rather than simply being the result of a fall into corruption from an earlier, more perfect, state.

    Similarly, when you talk about what the country thinks and the country decides. What the country thinks should never be too tightly equated with what the law is. Loads of people never get a chance to affect our government and its laws by voting. Especially... those who have broken the law, funny enough. Others just aren't listened to. Others have to see their views on the law traded off for other ends. And all of this is enormously shaped by the media, the pundits and... the plutocracy. e.g. Canada just eliminated its long-gun registry. Gun-related crimes had actually gone down. But the Conservatives got in, claimed they had a mandate to fight crime, and that was that. Was there really any great change in how Canadians felt about crime? Nope. It was more a result of other political deals being made. 


    Wow, you're devastatingly correct here.  Absolutely, you're right.  The police were not invented and given powers to protect use from the rich,  They were invented and empowered by the rich, likely to keep us rabble in line.

    That said, it's a better system than the frontier (and before that, in Europe, feudal system) where they just hired armies (from among us) to attack us directly.

    That felons can't vote in most states is a freaking travesty.  What if some of those felons don't even feel like what they did were crimes?  What if some of those felons should have been left alone in the first place?  I'm a guy who is harder on Wall Street than most but who has always believed that "insider trading" is not really a crime.  I also have no beef with any nonviolent drug dealer.  Heck, I believe that very few things outside of theft and violence should be punished.  Yet people convicted under such laws lose their rights to even vote and who is going to stand up for cons?

    It's early in the discussion but I'd say you fairly blitzed my post.  But I still think it's worth further reading and discussion.

    Thanks, by the way, for the incisive (and deflty cutting) reply.


    Jefferson wrote that every citizen has the right to:

    Life, liberty and the pursuit of property.

    Franklin edited the line a bit as to not underline the real merchantile approach to liberty so that the line ended with the phrase:

    ...pursuit of happiness.

    Ironically, the Fifth Amendment goes back to Jefferson's original phrase:

    No person shall be ...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

    The police were originally street gangs hired by local business leaders to protect their properties and these gangs ended up as our police force!

    As far as the Pauls are concerned (along with all repubs really) the only purpose of the police departments and our state guards and our national guard and even our military is to protect the propertied classes. PERIOD

    So the lower castes should not be roaming around richer neighborhoods. These people are 'out of place'.  And folks must be kept in their place so that peace might be had.

    It is kind of funny but I am watching this Walking Dead series on AMC and switching to one of the greatest films ever made: Ghandi.

    Now besides the fact that I have seen Ghandi at least twenty times I am spending most of the afternoon watching this Walking Dead episode.

    The zombie cartoon is popular because if the rich in this country has one fear, it is that the masses; the lower classes will will overthrow them in one felled swoop.

    The barbarians shall sweep across this country destroying the property of the rich and the middle class because of their shear numbers and the fact that the barbarians have nothing to lose.

    The Founding Fathers had no time for the barbarians. Witness the Whiskey Rebellion or a thousand other rebellions over the centuries.

    In the 19th century the English had only a hundred thousand soldiers keeping the peace--(protecting its merchants)--in a land of hundreds of millions of people with their own distinct culture and caste system.

    Ghandi, following his twenty year sojourn into another British Protectorate (South Africa) figured out that if the Indians just sit down and do nothing their shear numbers will drive out the British barbarians.

    Ron Paul is at least honest in his evilness. and he always always always makes me laugh:

    Property rights trump everything, they trump racism and segregation, they trump the common good, they trump Christian sentiments....

    This country was established for the purpose of protecting property rights and to protect the upper castes who actually had property.

    The real joke is that there are thirty or forty million people in this country who think they have property or one day will have property.

    These idiots are known as the Teabaggers!

     


    I am interested in the informative discussion of how it all came about but it is apparent where it has gotten to.

     

     


    Great post, Double D.  Funny how people without property couldn't even vote at first, and how little influence they till have.


    I do believe that Madison had something to say about this.

    Mr. MADISON, observed that the more he reflected on the use of force, the more he doubted the practicability, the justice and the efficacy of it when applied to people collectively and not individually. -A union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force agst. a State, would look more like a declaration of war, than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound. He hoped that such a system would be framed as might render this recourse [FN12] unnecessary, and moved that the clause be postponed.

    IE when the police begin to look more like an army, the situation begins to look like a war and then all bets are off.


    Right. Then the police are no longer "policing."


    Yet Mr. Madison, the way it turned out is that sometimes they ended up staying in the Union anyhow:

    [Litte Rock, Arkansas] Seventeen African American students were selected to attend the all white Central High School in 1957 but by opening day the number had dwindled to nine....The day before school opened, Governor Orval Faubus called the National Guard to surround Central High, declaring "blood would run in the streets" if blacks students attempted to enter.

    On September 24, Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann sent a special request for federal assistance to President Dwight Eisenhower. The following day nine African American students entered Central under the protection of members of the 101st Airborne Division of the U. S. Army, shown here. The Little Rock Nine, as they have become known, finished the school year in 1958. One of the students, Ernest Green graduated that year with the help of federal protection. In September 1958, Governor Faubus closed all high schools in Little Rock. They reopened in August 1959 with the protection of local police. Only four of the nine students returned.

    and

    On September 10, 1962, the Supreme Court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, a twenty-eight year old Air Force Veteran, after a sixteen month legal battle. Governor Ross Barnett disavowed the decree and had Meredith physically barred from enrolling. President Kennedy responded by federalizing the National Guard and sending Army troops to protect Meredith. After days of violence and rioting by whites, Meredith, escorted by federal marshals, enrolled on October 1, 1962. Two men were killed in the turmoil and more than 300 injured. Because he had earned credits in the military and at Jackson State College, Meredith graduated the following August without incident.

    from

    Brown vs. Board at Fifty/The Aftermath, Library of Congress exhibition

     


    Who has the power

     


    What do you think the significance of these secret societies and gatherings is?

    The presentation is suggestive with lots of atmospherics, but it doesn't deliver much substance. Presumably Alex Jones has things he could relay, but the clip doesn't have him doing that.


    I think it shows who controls the government and it is they who get the protection. 

    Even if it means a secret to be kept;  by those in power.

    Can those who swear an oath, serve two masters?

    Do those who serve a secret society, can they really serve and open one; without deception?


    You make good points, but I'm not sure the dots have been connected.

    Does membership in S&B really mean that John Kerry is serving two masters?

    Or did he join a fraternity-like organization when he was young? These organizations are part of the good old boy network, so there is that--and friends do help friends.

    These organizations are part of our class structure, but I'm not sure that amounts to a perversion of our democracy.

    I'm not sure we could reasonably rid our society of these kinds of "societies."

    The problem, or the accusation, of serving two masters is with us all over the place. Do you give hiring preference to a Marine or a Georgetown graduate because you were one? Are Roman Catholics more loyal to the Pope than to secular authorities? Are Jews more loyal to their group than to America? Why aren't there more blacks in OWS? And what about the Boy Scouts?


    These organizations are part of our class structure, but I'm not sure that amounts to a perversion of our democracy.

    Democracy, freedom, liberty, laws, all nice sounding words until there is perversion of justice.

    Protect your own

    Penn State? 


    Just something that popped up in my mind after reading your blog - The Dukes of Hazzard.  Here is in a nutshell the issue being dealt with.  We have a corrupted government through the wealthy elite in the form of Boss Hogg, and the police force, led by Roscoe, who do his bidding.  The Dukes are forgiven for their law-breaking ways because of this corruption of the law.  Of course, there are the police officers like Deputy Enos, who are good-hearted by nature, but because of their position still end up enforcing Boss Hogg's corrupt system.  The question is whether we just accept the adversarial roles, overthrow those currently in power, or look at ways that reform the system in order to eventually de-power those like Boss Hogg and decouple their control over the law enforcement through other means (like having the Department of Justice investigate the going ons in Hazzard County).


    Trope, in the space of two days you went from Camus and Foucault to The Dukes of Hazzard.

    I may not always agree with ya, but damn do I like ya.


    Destor, how do you feel about congressional insider trading?

     

    http://moneymorning.com/2011/11/17/while-the-middle-class-suffers-congre...


    Badly.  But from almost the opposite perspective.  It's not the market manipulation that irks me about this, it's the manipulation of law and policy.  So, you know, if the federal government sells land to a real estate developer and Congress authorizes the sale, I want it to go through because the Feds got the best deal possible, not because the sales was designed in such a way as to enrich some Senator who owns nearby investment properties.


    But that's the point: Legislators are in a position to make things happen that can make people very rich, including themselves.

    This goes beyond insider information because the congressman can actually DO something that will, pretty directly, put money in his pocket.

    You want them making decisions based the public merits, not on their profit potential.


    Not only are legislators in a position.

    In some subdivisions in Arizona, it was becoming common place, for many a Mormon Church to be located in some of the best locations, for exposure purposes.

    The church has many members, who also worked or has a business interest in Civil engineering firms who are the first, to see the proposed projects in order to bid the jobs. 

    Imagine you’re a large Company representing a large plat of land; of course when it comes to utilization of the open spaces and churches for worship. “You want that development to proceed without a hitch don't you”? 

    You understand it could take years to get through the litigation process. You're the owner/developer; ”You say you'd like to put your church where? I think we could accommodate that. You draw it up"   "Make it work, I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” 

    I once had an opportunity to do some remodeling work in a civil engineers office. Had I wanted to be unscrupulous, I might have peered into some drafting’s on the tables and received some information that may have been enriching.

    Knowing how some major land parcels, were about to be designed, prior to the necessary presentations, in order to seek preapproval, before the city council.

     It’s the same thing with studies for transportation corridors or airport expansions environmental impact investigations.

    The land commissioner gives the approval and the city council accepts the recommendations.

    It's more than insider trading; it's directing a course to take.

    My Grandfather used to say, the best job in government was the land Commissioner. He could pick which Farm would be the one purchased for the airport. He and his friends would know in advance which adjacent farms to buy on the cheap for future Commercial development.  


    Everyone is going for an "unfair advantage," except maybe the everyday schmuck who would go for an unfair advantage if he didn't worry about being put in jail.

    That's why the conservative assumption--for it is one--that all we need is a level playing field to create "equal opportunity" is so risible.

    The LAST thing a profit-seeker in ANY position wants is a level playing field. He wants the table tipped just enough to start the marbles rolling toward his open hand.

    Businesspeople are risk reducers, not risk takers. They thrill at the opportunity to gain, yes. But they try to reduce or eliminate as many risks as possible. The unknown future is the biggest risk of all.

    Similarly, they aren't job creators; they are job eliminators. If expansion and growth require hiring more people--and they often do--then they're happy to. But they're even happier if they can get all that expansion and growth without hiring new people.


    A short anecdote about my recent, (and thankfully only), brush up against the law. A few months ago, I was pulled over for an expired registration, it was VERY expired, the result of a droll argument with my ex, that as he got all the assets and I got all the liabilities, the least he could do was pay the property taxes on my car. He disagreed. (No surprise, though it was still my fault for being stubborn, overwhelmed, and broke.)

    The state trooper that pulled me over was visibly annoyed by the utterly ridiculous length of time it had been expired, (the $350 or so I asked my ex to pay had turned into about $975 by this time. Ack!) The fact that I had lost the registration documents when I left my ex, and, perhaps the pouring rain going on at the time didn't help, but for whatever reason, he decided to scream at me and accuse me of lifting the plates from some other car. I insisted it wasn't true, but that seemed to make him even angrier. I did produce my insurance card and he accused me of forging that, as well.

    It's a felony to use stolen plates. He told me I was lucky he didn't arrest me right then and there. In the officers defense. I'm quite sure I looked like hell. I was taking antibiotics for bronchitis, on my way home from work, and wearing some ill fitting hand-me-ups of my daughters, (a lifestyle adjustment when the economy crashed), so I'm fairly sure I must of come off as a less than savory character. Normally, I'm a pretty unremarkable common stoutish brown-eyed chicken. Couldn't scare a squirrel off my front porch.

    I had to go to court, of course, so I scraped together the money and paid off the town taxes, and registered the bug. When I got there, I stood in a line in the corridor with a bunch of fairly ordinary looking people, none of them seemed to have a file folder of papers like I did. We were herded in groups of 3 into a small room where a District Attorney stood in front of you and offered you a plea, in my case it was a $50 fine, and they'd erase the record after I attended some kind of class. He was talking rather quickly and loudly, and so didn't hear me when I said, "but, I'm not guilty." Then, when he did hear me, he got even louder and more intimidating, telling me I'd have to hire a lawyer, and set a court date, and I said, "but, I have the paperwork right here." By this time the other two citizens had left and the other two DAs were watching what was going on with, it seemed, some interest. So I proved that the plates were indeed the only plates the buggie ever had, and he said "case dismissed."

    I had the impression that didn't happen too often. It was a sobering experience. I thought of reporting the trooper for his excessive rudeness, but I er, chickened out. 

     


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