It’d be nuts to think every terrorist incident was an
“inside job” -- but killers from Oswald, McVeigh, and Chris Dorner to Navy Yard
shooter Aaron Alexis have often had military and/or police ties, which is
hardly surprising. Violent personalities
will probably tend to be drawn to jobs that allow them to use force against
people (and when they go berserk, politicians -- even while arming groups with
terror ties -- will respond with calls for increasing
the power of police or the military and disarming the rest of the population, renewing calls for bans on specific
disfavored weapons even when they were only falsely reported to have been used
in the rampages).
I didn’t worry too much about police and military abuse of
power when I was a child watching the TV show S.W.A.T. (with its
classic, undeniably funky theme song, from an opening sequence that was surely
a big influence on the Beastie Boys’ epic “Sabotage” video over a
decade later), nor for that matter while absorbing the less violent but still quasi-martial
virtues in some of my other early favorites, like Star Trek or reruns of Thunderbirds
(which, nearly fifty years after its
debut, still has the best
opening sequence in TV history). I certainly
did not realize when I was a child what novelties S.W.A.T. teams were.
The police were not always so militarized, as is explained
in a book I actually chose to buy in a store despite going to a lot of Reason
events lately: Rise
of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by
Reason’s Radley Balko (who I hear was Breaking
Bad’s Walter White for Halloween, though paradoxically he also looks a bit
like DEA agent Hank). Less than two
centuries ago, we didn’t even have continually-staffed, official government
police departments, as hard as that must be for non-anarchists to imagine. It is roughly during my lifetime, especially
under the influence of ardent drug-warriors Nixon and Reagan, that no-knock
raids and paramilitary tactics came to be seen as necessary -- and a way to
generate cool publicity for law enforcement and the politicians backing them.
At least in the 70s and 80s, militarized police were still
seen (despite increasingly-frequent, sometimes tragically botched raids) as
something to be deployed on special occasions.
In the Bush/Obama era, even as drug-war fervor ever so slightly
diminishes, the vague, omnipresent threat of terrorism is seen as sufficient
reason for every dinky rural police department in America to be outfitted with
body armor, tanks, stun grenades, and other Department of Homeland
Security-subsidized toys that now get used even for checking on routine
regulatory violations.
If there’s a terrorist on the loose, the whole town might
just be put under martial law, as in Watertown, MA -- though the hippies of
1980s rural California could’ve told you that the mere possibility of
pot-growing was by then seen as enough to justify helicopter raids and the
temporary penning-in of the entire local populace.
In the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, Attorney
General Eric Holder said we must reject “stand your ground” laws that permit
arguments of self-defense without
obligation to retreat to be made by defendants (disproportionately black
ones, actually, despite the impression you’d get from the hubbub surrounding
that case -- an ambiguous one in which an all-female jury reluctantly acquitted
a Hispanic neighborhood watch member who’d been in a losing fight with a black
teen, leading somehow to new denunciations of a white-male-dominated justice
system). You’d think from comments like
Holder’s -- and the rhetoric of anti-gun activists -- that vigilantes or
believers in the basic right to self-defense are the biggest danger in America
and that we’d be in safe hands if the
police and military were the only ones who were armed. That’s even harder to believe after reading
about some of the cases in Balko’s book.
(It’s also the “minarchist” libertarian or “law and order”
conservative version of the mistake the left routinely makes: assuming that if
government sticks to the functions you consider legitimate or important, it
will at least do those things
well. No, it will do everything badly. With government, every mission is creepy.)
Balko recounts cases (1) where one stumble by a cop
led
others to think they were being shot at and open fire with fatal results for
one hippie, (2) where a war against the Black Panthers led to one being shot by
cops at point-blank range as he slept, where (3) valuable property was seized
by cops not even because its owner was convicted of acquiring the property through
drug dealing but simply because the property was roughly estimated to be equivalent
in value to property the owner was suspected
of acquiring by drug-dealing, and many, many more.
If our civil liberties and legal procedures dissolved that
quickly under the mere threat of drugs, one can only imagine what sort of
horrors and flimsy pretexts lie ahead in an era when potential terrorists and
workplace shooters are imagined to be so omnipresent that we should all be
prepared for phonetaps and lockdowns at all times. With his brave reporting on this topic, Balko
has become like a one-man “thin line” between us and police overreach.
Meanwhile:
•The vast and growing array of YouTube videos of cops
behaving badly makes it increasingly difficult to take the Giuliani-like view
that cop misbehavior is rare and not indicative of a broader culture of gung-ho
recklessness and ass-covering (though I think I have at least one acquaintance
at the Manhattan Institute who doesn’t want to hear about it).
•Fellow anarchist Gary Chartier (mentioned briefly in United
States of Paranoia as having a dad who was intrigued by conspiracy
theories) linked to this
piece by Reason’s Brian Doherty about paranoid cops in New Hampshire seeing
local libertarians as justification for a Homeland Security-funded armored
vehicle.
•And even the most reasonable-seeming police activities
sometimes turn out not to make so much sense under closer examination, as this detailed video argument
against low speed limits suggests (h/t R. Brent Mattis).
•The left, to its credit, has long been wary of everyday
police and military abuses -- and on rare occasions spawned writers who were
nonetheless still fond of guns, like Hunter S. Thompson and the
man Verso books honors at powerHouse in DUMBO this Thursday night the 19th,
the late Alexander Cockburn. I plan to
attend.
•And if all this sounds scary, take some comfort in knowing
this Saturday the 21st is the International Day of Peace.
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