A proportional response out of proportion
To define ourselves as a nation of laws has been to misconstrue and misinterpret, by presidents and police chiefs, senators and security guards. It’s been the impetus, in some cases, behind unnecessary enforcement actions, brutal reactions, wrongful convictions and even the killing of unarmed civilians.
To be a nation of laws is not to be a nation of martial law, and the countries where that happens at the drop of a hat, where the slightest undercurrent of discontent brings with it batons and bullets from uniformed regimes, is halfway around the world, not in our own backyard.
What has happened this week in Ferguson, Mo., is shameful and, sadly, becoming all too familiar in America, where the proportional response is growing grossly out of proportion to the threat. In Missouri there is an obvious element of racial injustice that has been and will be debated for what seems like forever as an example of the slaughter of young black males in this country by a suspicious and paranoid police state.
That has merit, and there have been many examples of this in recent months, yet throwing a show of force at the hint of a collective resistance knows no color. We have a history with this kind of overreaction in the name of the law, from the killings at Kent State of student protesters, to overzealous responses during any number of the Occupy events of the last few years.
Most concerted police actions that occur in this country are justifiable, with local, state and federal governments attempting to respond in a reasonable way, to calm situations rather than inflame. But all it takes is several high-profile overreactions caught on camera and uploaded for the world to see to erase the perception of a measured approach. When the time between occurrences in the so-called freest society on Earth get smaller and smaller, the indications of a more widespread problem get larger and larger. That is proportional response.
How does that all go so terribly wrong? When do the forces meant to “protect and serve” somehow become the forces to “subject and subdue”? How, ultimately, do perceptions of what is egregious and what is appropriate flatten out so that every response is not an arbitrary one, but one that is somehow called for based on the situation? That doesn’t seem to be happening now.
That thorny interpretation of a “nation of laws” is the bastardization of what President John Adams explained in defining a free republic. Addressing a brigade of the Massachusetts Militia, Adams explained we are “a government of laws, not of men” as a necessity for the existence of laws themselves, but not the rule of law.
We were not meant to interpret them arbitrarily, to use them to threaten and to subjugate, but to apply them reasonably and not as a reactionary tool of a militarized society.
“Those laws,” Adams said, “which are right reason, derived from the Divinity, commanding honesty, forbidding iniquity; which are silent magistrates, where the magistrates are only speaking laws.”
To watch this gradual descent down an increasingly aggressive path gets both the liberal and libertarian blood boiling. Maybe it’s the folks traveling the middle of the road who turn the blind eye and allow all of this to take place without voicing opposition. That in itself makes sense, as the fringes of society are often the victims of the harshest responses. Again, “proportional.”
Crime, though, often exists on the fringes, and it is a fair question to ask whether those living outside the mainstream, behaving badly, are courting order from chaos by any means necessary.
Unfortunately way too many innocent people get caught up under the millstone of militarized reactions, victims of their own voices not their crimes. It’s the idea that in a nation of laws out of context, the rule of law takes hold and society lives beneath the shadow of a hammer that sees confrontations and people as nails.
“If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves ‘solving’ social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.”
That is the trenchant observation of Civil Rights attorney and The Nation columnist Chase Madar, who put it better than just about any other politico, pundit or human rights activist out there.
When kneejerk reactions bleed over from irrational individuals to institutions meant to protect us from harm, it’s a scary thing.
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Aug. 15, 2014.