But after you put down the peace pipe, a legitimate and important difference remains. It’s structural, and cultural, and (over the past four decades of relentless Drug Warring and Constitution-eroding), judicial as well. There is a strain in law enforcement, backed by various vague statutes, thousands of politicians, and everyone who tends to side with authority against an obnoxious popoff, in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable form to arrest, detain, or otherwise punish a non-threatening person for being an asshole. This includes the perceived assholery of yelling about one’s real (and sometimes imagined) trampled rights. If a person is considered undesirable by a police officer, for whatever reason, it’s far too easy to ruin his day, even if no law has remotely been broken. And as Balko has led the world in documenting, the literal militarization of domestic police forces, combined with awful Drug War-related enforcement, has caused grave injustice and the death of innocents.
The past two weeks has been a conversation about race, I guess (I tend to tune out such things pretty quickly, being a privileged white male and all). It’s always appropriate to point out, as in the Drug War in general, that disfavored minority groups (whether defined by skin color, class, lifestyle choice, politics, or whatever) will take a disproportionate brunt of abused power. But thankfully in modern America, when we peel back the general stereotype to the specific individual, most people (least I don’t think) aren’t racists and aren’t assholes. It may take two weeks to make that realization, or two decades, but after that you’re left with the underlying structural problem, one that might be even harder to dislodge. The pendulum of law enforcement in this country, as relates to the individual citizen, has for far too long swung in the same Constitution/individual-disrespecting direction.
Matt Welch, “‘When he’s not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy'”, Hit and Run, 2009-07-31
July 31, 2009
QotD: It’s the institutions, not the people
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