[P]aramilitary creep has also spread well beyond the drug war. In recent years, SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, including one at an American Legion Hall in Dallas. In 2006, Virginia optometrist Sal Culosi was killed when the Fairfax County Police Department sent a SWAT team to arrest him for gambling on football games. SWAT teams are also now used to arrest people suspected of downloading child pornography. Last year, an Austin, Texas, SWAT team broke down a man's door because he was suspected of stealing koi fish from a botanical garden.
The amount of force the government uses to uphold a given law is no longer determined only by the threat to public safety posed by the suspect. Now, it appears to give an indication of how serious the government is about the law being enforced. The DEA sends SWAT teams barreling into the offices of doctors accused of over-prescribing painkillers not because the doctors pose any real threat of violence, but because prescription drug abuse is a hot issue right now. The feds sent SWAT teams into marijuana dispensaries not because medicinal pot merchants are inherently dangerous people, but because officials believe the dispensaries are openly defying federal law. It is, to put it bluntly, a terror tactic. Sending a couple cops with a clipboard to hand out fines and shut down a dispensary doesn't convey a strong message. Sending a bunch of cops dressed like soldiers to point guns at dispensary owners and their customers certainly does.
There's also little evidence that people who consume child pornography pose much of a violent threat to police officers, yet the federal government now routinely sends SWAT teams to apprehend them. The amount of force, again, isn't dictated by the threat posed by the suspect, but by the disgust the government wants to register at the alleged crime.
If he is right about this, this is a very dangerous trend indeed.
If the police are using such tactics in order to intimidate and terrify the suspect, mainly because they hate the alleged offense, then these tactics are in effect part of the suspect's punishment. That is, what we have here is a case of summary punishment by the police, without due process of law. In some societies, the police apprehent people for (possible) punishment by others, in others, your encounter with the cops is actually part of your punishment. Surely, this one of the sharpest differences between a free society and a police state.
It violates or threatens at least two basic principles of a free society:
1. Procedural rights. In a free society, citizens have a right against the state, not merely that they not be punished more than they deserve, but that the question of their desert be decided in the right way. This generally involves a careful weighing of the evidence, a right to defend oneself, and a heavy burden of proof for the acusers. Obviously, if the police have probable cause to look for marijuana in your house, this standard has not been met.
2. The rule of law. This complex idea means a number of different things. It means that the law does not merely constrain the citizens of the state, it constrains the officers of the state as well. It means that when the state inflicts punishment, it is based on legal considerations and not on political ones. If Radley is right, the police are choosing to use these terror tactics on the basis of political considerations like the fact that the populace hates your alleged crime (eg., downloading child pornography) or that your activities threaten the power of politicians to keep their jobs (eg., the OWS demonstrators).
This would be a very big step in a very bad direction.
4 comments:
Good points. Another reason is simply that they have military equipment, and using brute force gives a lot of people an adrenalin rush (one DEA agent told me quite unabashedly that this is why he loved his job).
Neera, By an interesting coincidence, I was just now reading about "adrenalin rushes" in the context of emotional responses to movies. The author, Noel Carroll,was saying that people like thrillers and horror movies because the adrenalin experience is actually pleasant - if experienced without any of the costs that come with it in real life (mainly mainly because it is brought about by perceiving something that actually might hurt you). Maybe a similar principle is at work here. If you are in full body armor and face shield, and you just shot the guys dog to be completely safe, he is not much more of a real threat to you than the green slime in the movie.
O say, does that Star-Spangled Banner, yet wave,
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
By an odd coincidence, the armed forces will be conducting arrests of civilians if Sen. Bill 1867 is signed. The founding fathers recognised that they would be the prime targets of any invasion or insurrection & (in their wisdom) granted themselves permission to suspend habeas corpus.
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