A Guy in New York » Blog Archive » Police State, Part 4

Police State, Part 4 – Keystone Kops and Big Brother

Contemporary police are increasingly an armed gang enforcing the many rules of the omniscient regulatory state, i.e., Big Brother. Easy to do in the time of Three Felonies a Day.

The so-called war on drugs was the casus belli for the militarization of the local police forces in the U.S., although it took time to effect the evolution far and wide. Near the end of the campaign in Iraq, the favorite think tank of the left, the RAND Corporation, published a report in 2009 entitled Does The United States Need A New Police Force For Stability Operations?

Not to be outdone or left behind, the military establishment has weighed in with papers advocating the use of U.S. troops for a similar mission on American soil. One example, causing me forever to lose any respect for Small Wars Journal, was entitled Full Spectrum Operations In The Homeland: A Vision Of The Future, and SWJ followed this up later with Political Violence Prevention: Profiling Domestic Terrorists. The former paper advocated the use of U.S. military troops for stability operations in America, while the later paper advocated the use of human terrain systems for profiling “domestic terrorists”.

Social science with a gun: community involvement, town meetings, law enforcement knowledge of everyone all of the time, biometrics to track people (and especially men of military age), door kicking and killing as punitive measures, all sanctioned by the authorities and fully approved. A new mission. No longer will we merely perform constabulary duties. We must rebuild our cities, bring stability, and ensure that the centralized planners work with the military leaders to guide us all. The example has been set, and we’ve watched it unfold before our eyes for ten years. It has been paraded across our television screens for years, and now we know how to do it. (emphasis added)

(Not just a US problem:)

Police involving the community sounds warm and acceptable to the uninitiated, but it has a dark underbelly. The carrot and stick approach requires that they perform as COIN troops, as forces of occupation, to enforce their will. War is, after all is said and done, the use of violence to enforce your will.

While SWAT teams have adopted the tactics of the military, they aren’t trained like the military.
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Even if SWAT teams were trained like the military, their actions violate the fourth amendment of the U.S. constitution.
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The application of force isn’t discriminatory. The Pittsburgh SWAT dragged a ten year old out of the bathtub and made him stand naked next to his four year old sister at gunpoint. The Detroit police were all in a tizzy over an art gallery.

Counterinsurgency Cops

We’ve heard a lot of talk lately about mass incarceration, the stop-and-frisk policies in New York, reforming the drug laws, and mandatory minimum sentencing. There’s also been discussion about over-criminalization — that we have too many laws, too broadly enforced — from groups as ideologically diverse as the Heritage Foundation, the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

But here’s a related statistic that’s pretty mind blowing in and of itself: According to the FBI, in 2011 there were 3991.1 arrests for every 100,000 people living in America. That means over the course of a single year, one in 25 Americans was arrested.

The FBI also reports that the arrest rate for violent crime was just 172 per 100,000, and for property crimes, it was 531. That means that in 2011, one in 33 Americans were arrested for crimes that didn’t involve violence against another person, or theft of or damage to property. More people were arrested for drug crimes than any other class of crimes — about one in every 207 of us. One in every 258 of us was arrested for drunk driving. The FBI doesn’t keep track, but presumably the remaining arrests were for crimes like prostitution, vandalism, public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and other consensual crimes and relatively minor offenses.

One In 25 Americans Was Arrested In 2011