Skip to content

Hating us for our freedom

Hating us for our freedom

by digby

The Nation takes on this notion that because of protests, the crime rate is rising in some cities. It’s called ‘The Ferguson Effect” which says that because police have had their hands tied they can’t stop citizens from killing each other any more and that many of them are holding back out of fear of being held accountable for over-zealous tactics. It’s a thorough piece but I thought this got to the heart of the problem:

What those who declare a “Ferguson effect” want us to believe is that police need a “free hand” to control crime. Any attempts to end abusive, racist, or illegal police activity is problematic because it interferes with unfettered police power. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of effective policing. Decades of research shows that policing works best when communities support the police, feel respected by them, and accept their actions as legitimate.

Second, it throws the Constitution under the bus. Practices like shooting fleeing suspects and stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion have been found unconstitutional. To defend these practices as not only necessary but appropriate flies in the face of our legal system and should call into question the loyalties of those who mimic them. Finally, the social costs of racist overpolicing are too high, regardless of effectiveness or legality. No society should be asked to accept the levels of arrest and incarceration being meted out against young people of color in the United States. It tears at the basic social fabric, and is one of the main drivers of increasing social and economic inequality.

Whether there is an uptick in homicides or not, we should all be concerned about the concentrations of extreme violence in very poor communities of color in the US. In order to reduce this violence, we must embrace non-punitive solutions that maximize the well-being of as many people as possible—that is the definition of justice.

There is a lively debate among liberals as to whether or not we should be hitting the panic button over this slight spike in murder in some cities (others are not experiencing one) and start agitating for some kind of dramatic intervention lest we derail the tentative consensus that’s forming around criminal justice reform. Others say that his is not such a dramatic uptick and getting panicked over it is playing into the Donald Trump worldview which says the country is under siege from people of color and we need to bring the hammer down, thus short-circuiting that same tentative consensus. I tend toward the latter view simply because I know the wingnuts are looking for any excuse and playing into it has never accrued to the benefit of people of color. Ever.

We’ll see whether this spike in murder rates in a few of cities is spreading and growing soon enough. In the meantime, I can’t help but be reminded of the arguments the CIA makes over holding them accountable for torture when I read that rationale laid out above. “If you criticize us or hold us accountable for illegal acts we’ll be too afraid to protect you and then where will you be?”

That is blackmail and it should not be tolerated in a free society. But it is. Which means we don not have a free society. If we allow law enforcement and national security agencies to basically say, “nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happens to it” we are already so far down the road to authoritarianism it’s hard to see how we turn back.

.

Published inUncategorized