Gangsters in Blue

Heartfelt thanks and gratitude to those who have responded to my Phone bill of doom! posting and ChipIn. Y’all rock!

I’ve asked donors in the past, erratically, if they want to be named, linked, etc. Answers tend to vary quite a bit, with most tending to not want to be named or not caring either way. So, I’m adopting a new policy. When donations come in and I post them, I’m just going to list initials. If you then want to be linked or named, you can do so yourself in the comments or email me privately with your request and I’ll update the post.

• JS sent $15 (a while back)
• T sent $25
• JB sent $25
• JE sent $25
• AM sent $10
• M sent €100

I’m still about €321 short on the phone bill, and the ChipIn — which doesn’t update properly and doesn’t include some out-of-band donations — is still running, so of course your contribution is welcome!

Thanks very much to all of you!

Tags: blegging, cats, ChipIn, donations, donor, gratitude, Henry, reader contributions

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• Lost art not lost in the digital age (5)

Andrew Sullivan finds an eloquent opinion from federal appeals court judge Alex Kozinski. The plaintiff was suing under federal civil rights statutes after a police officer stopped and arrested him, apparently in retaliation for a series of obscenities the plaintiff had earlier directed at the cop. Kozinski writes:

Defendant relies heavily on the fact that Duran was making obscene gestures toward him and yelling profanities in Spanish while traveling along a rural Arizona highway. We cannot, of course, condone Duran’s conduct; it was boorish, crass and, initially at least, unjustified. Our hard-working law enforcement officers surely deserve better treatment from members of the public. But disgraceful as Duran’s behavior may have been, it was not illegal; criticism of the police is not a crime.

[T]he First Amendment protects a significant amount of verbal criticism and challenge directed at police officers…

The freedom of individuals to oppose or challenge police action verbally without thereby risking arrest is one important characteristic by which we distinguish ourselves from a police state…

Thus, while police, no less than anyone else, may resent having obscene words and gestures directed at them, they may not exercise the awesome power at their disposal to punish individuals for conduct that is not merely lawful, but protected by the First Amendment.

Inarticulate and crude as Duran’s conduct may have been, it represented an expression of disapproval toward a police officer with whom he had just had a run-in. As such, it fell squarely within the protective umbrella of the First Amendment and any action to punish or deter such speech–such as stopping or hassling the speaker–is categorically prohibited by the Constitution…

No matter how peculiar, abrasive, unruly or distasteful a person’s conduct may be, it cannot justify a police stop unless it suggests that some specific crime has been, or is about to be, committed, or that there is an imminent danger to persons or property.

Georgia police officer responds to false security alarm, shoots and kills family’s black lab in the backyard.

My crime column this week looks at the Gates arrest, and argues that we ought to put race aside and focus instead on the overly broad arrest powers afforded to the police.

Here’s an excerpt outlining a contradiction in conservative thinking that no one has ever really been able to explain to me:

Commenting on Gates’ arrest, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote that he counts himself among those who are “deferential to police,” and willing to “give cops the benefit of the doubt for a host of reasons.” That’s a common position among conservatives. At a Federalist Society luncheon a few years ago, Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson praised the Supreme Court for “putting more trust in our police officers” in recent rulings. Los Angeles Police Department officer Jack Dunphy (a pseudonym) oddly concluded at National Review Online that the lesson from the Gates/Crowley affair is that anyone who asserts his constitutional rights when confronted by a police officer risks getting shot.

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply.

The only explanation I can come up with for the contradiction is that conservatives are more sympathetic to the targets of regulators (businesses, mostly) than they are to the targets of police and prosecutors (people accused of committing crimes). But that doesn’t change the fact that police and prosecutors are subject to the same trappings of power as other government employees, and so ought to be viewed with the same amount of skepticism. Moreso, actually, given that your average bureaucrat isn’t empowered to arrest you or put a bullet in your chest.

Ilya Somin has more on the expanding reach of federal law, including a pretty scary essay by Judge Alex Kozinski and Misha Tseytlin. The fear here isn’t that we’re all going to be prosecuted, it’s that if a U.S. attorney decided he doesn’t like you, he can pretty easily find a way to ruin your life.

This seems pretty creepy, although the story is so poorly written it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on.

Five freedoms you’ll lose under the Dems’ health care plan.

Cheney, Yoo, Addington wanted to do away with Posse Comitatus, send federal troops into Buffalo back in 2002.

Jack Dunphy, NRO’s pseudonymous cop in residence, says the lesson from the Gates/Crowley incident is that if a cop confronts you, don’t even think about exercising your constitutional rights, or he just might shoot you.

The world’s saddest zoos.

It’s interesting how so many defenders of the Cambridge Police Department are arguing that there’s nothing wrong with the officer’s conduct because he would have arrested Gates even if he hadn’t been black.

I think we’re entitled to doubt whether he really would have been as ready to arrest a non-black Gates – but OK, let’s stipulate that that’s so. What the hell kind of defense is that? “He’s not a racist, because he treats whites like crap too!”

Whatever his motivations, Officer Crowley (any relation to Aleister, incidentally?) should have dropped the case and departed as soon as he determined that the “intruder” was in his own home. (Note that Crowley himself has said, “I really didn’t want to have to take such a drastic action because I knew it was going to bring a certain amount of attention, unwanted attention, on me,” which shows that he knew the man he was arresting was not a burglar.)

Assume that Gates behaved in a “confrontational” manner; assume, if you like, that he did so in a way that went beyond what the situation warranted (though this seems far from obvious even according to the officer’s version of the story). So what? There’s no evidence that Gates aggressed against Crowley; his only “crime” was failing to kowtow to the superior authorita conveyed by Crowley’s blue costume. (And if Gates weren’t a famous person, I doubt the charges would have been dropped.) But while the American public is willing – though, alas, just barely – to be dragged into a conversation about the possibility that cops might be systematically abusive toward particular races, the idea that they might be systematically abusive, period, is still outside the bounds of polite discourse.

Quick Addendum:

Another argument I’ve heard is that Crowley’s conduct couldn’t have been racially motivated because he leads anti-racial-profiling seminars and once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete. This “but some of my best friends are …” argument misses the point. People with consciously antiracist convictions can still be guilty of relying on racist assumptions in their conduct; that’s how prejudice works. (And of course the same applies to sexism, statism, homophobia, and so on.)

Addendum #2:

See also Charles’ post.

One of the advantages of not being even remotely connected with electoral politics is the fact that, unlike, say, Barack Obama, I have no votes that I need to collect from timid white moderates, and also no sniffy self-important special interests or political respectability rackets that I need to appease. I don’t need to care what professional blowhards or doughfaces think of me, or whether or not a white police sergeant in Massachusetts, and all his buddies in the Brotherhood, are disappointed in me. So while Obama may feel compelled to re-calibrate, I have no reason to back off out of concern for sensitivities of conventional-delusional political thinking. So if he won’t stand by his own perfectly reasonable comments, I at least am free to say, without qualification or calibration, that when Sergeant James Crowley cuffed, arrested, and imprisoned Henry Louis Gates on his front porch, for daring to holler at a cop inside his own house, Sergeant James Crowley was damn well acting stupidly. As a matter of fact, he was being stupid, belligerent, and violent towards an innocent man who he had absolutely no right to arrest.

Of course he was. He putatively showed up to investigate a possible burglary (in the middle of the day?) when a neighbor called in a report that two black men were forcing open the door to the house. (Gates had just gotten back from a long trip to China and found that the door was jammed, so he asked the man who drove him home — who was also black — to help him shoulder it open.) The cop showed up, demanded that Gates step outside, entered the house without a warrant and without permission when Gates refused to step outside, demanded identification while refusing to give his badge number, and when it was conclusively demonstrated to him that Gates lived there and was, in fact, breaking in to his own damn house, he and his gang brothers ambushed Gates on his front porch and arrested him for being loud and tumultuous in his own house where he had a right to be. Quite in spite of the fact that, even if you grant for the sake of argument every single detail of the cop’s own version of events, once it was clear that Gates lived in the house he had supposedly been burglarizing, Sergeant James Crowley had absolutely no moral or legal basis whatsoever for remaining one second longer, or for arresting and imprisoning Henry Louis Gates, since raising your voice to a police officer is not a crime, and neither is calling him names (whether those names are fair or unfair), and neither is hollering loudly and tumultuously inside your own home. Shoving your way into a man’s house to hassle him, and then arresting him for these non-crimes when he gets upset, is a stupid way to handle a situation when you’re not sure what’s going on; the cuffing, arrest, and jailing were also an act of physical force carried out against an innocent man by an entitled bully who had no right to be there but who has no problem with using intimidation and violence to get his way.

And, as it happens, in this case, his stupidity, intimidation and violence took the specific form of stupid, belligerent, violent racism. As they so often do when government police (especially, but not only, white government police) interact with black men and women, even black scholars in their late 50s who rent their houses from Harvard University and walk with a cane.

And the opinions of the usual bellowing blowhard brigade to one side, it actually doesn’t matter one bit whether or not Henry Louis Gates could or should have been more calm or cool or collected under the circumstances; whether or not he actually should have been grateful for being hassled in his own house by a sworn officer of the law in the name of Service and Protection; whether or not the names that he called this stupid, belligerent, violent cop were in fact fair or unfair given the situation; or whether he ought to have changed his behavior or his attitude in the least. Henry Louis Gates’s behavior and attitude aren’t in question; whether or not he was acting as he ought, Sergeant James Crowley had no reason to be there and no justification and no excuse for arresting him or hauling him off to jail. Nothing that Gates could possibly have said, under the circumstances, would have made the arrest and imprisonment justifiable or even excusable; and when legally-privileged agents of the state go around attacking innocent men, I’m a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am about policing the conduct of the victims of their aggression and coercion.

All this should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with government police, or knows much of anything about the world around them. Of course, that rules out politicians, media commentators, and other professional blowhards, who rarely talk to anyone but each other and have very little experience of being on the business end of government policing, or much of anything other than their own self-important power games. But the rest of us know perfectly well that cops often act with tremendous arrogance and entitlement, especially when they feel uncertain or threatened by the situation that they are in (that they have, in fact, been trained very explicitly to stay in control of the situation by any means necessary); that they also tend to view men and women of color, regardless of class, and poor white men and women, too, as more disruptive or more threatening than affluent white men and women; and that either conscious or subconscious racial profiling is the order of the day in virtually all street-level urban policing. It is also both obvious and widely known that cops routinely use incredibly vague chickenshit charges like disorderly conduct, even when it is absolutely obvious that none of even those incredibly vague criteria actually apply, in order to shove people around, intimidate them into complying with arbitrary orders, or to humiliate and punish those who do not comply. Even when the charges are sure to be dismissed, you can beat the rap but you can’t beat the ride, and all that. Anyone whose understanding of policework is not basically mythological in nature, or is not constrained by non-rational political imperatives, knows these things, and should be outraged, but not even remotely surprised, that all this went down.

And the fact that a bunch of cops get indignant about the offense to their honor by being called out, for once in their professional lives, on their stupid, belligerent, violent behavior doesn’t change the fact one bit. What happened is typical, damned typical; the only thing atypical is the political and media connections of the victim. And Sergeant James Crowley, as a sworn police officer, was just living up to the standards of stupidity, belligerence, violence and racism that his gang brothers have set. You might be tempted call stupidity, belligerence, violence, and racism the occupational disease of government police in America. If not for the fact that it is their occupation.

See also:

• Brian Palmer, Slate (2009-07-22): Do Police Officers Have To Identify Themselves? And other Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest questions, answered by the Explainer.
• Lawrence Bobo, The Root (2009-07-21): What Do You Call a Black Man with a Ph.D.? The Skip Gates arrest shows how little some features of the national racial landscape have changed over time.
• Leonard Pitts, Jr. Seattle Times (2009-07-24): The Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident: Sometimes, they just don’t see you
• Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-07-21): think they can put themselves in the shoes of black people
• Randall McElroy, The Distributed Republic (2009-07-21): Henry Louis Gates, Jr. vs. the Cambridge PD
• Lila Ravija, The Mind-Body Politic (2009-07-21): Police Arrest Harvard Scholar In House
• Sheldon Richman, Free Association (2009-07-24): For Gates and Against the Police
• Gary Chartier, LiberaLaw (2009-07-24): Show Some Respect

Since the election of President Barack Obama, there have been hundreds or thousands of cases of police abuse of brown-skinned Americans -- cases that the Obama Administration has not chosen to raise to the level of national cause celêbres. Many Blacks and even a white woman have been administered 50,000 volt shocks, some dying after being Electrocuted While Black.

The victims were nameless Black and Latino unknowns, the abuse of whom is normal in America. Obama has commented on them for the most part. Politically, he has to visibly focus on the issues that affect the majority of (white) Americans if he is to maintain his approval ratings, pass his domestic programs through the US Congress and be re-elected in 2012. Focusing on police abuse of Blacks is a double negative for Obama who angers many white voters while failing to win their favor by focusing on meeting their needs.

However, the arrest of Harvard University's Professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. touches Obama almost as if a member of his family were needlessly arrested as retaliation for requesting a police officer's badge number and name. Obama graduated from Harvard University's law school. One of his mentors, Charles Ogletree, a nationally known lawyer on Harvard University Law School's faculty, is the lawyer for professor Gates, and was forced into the unfamiliar role of retrieving one of his friends and colleagues from the Cambridge, MA police department.

The above graphic comes from a report about Professor Gates' role in starting The Root online magazine for the Washingon Post, whose writers have been reliable friends of the Obama's aspirations during the presidential campaign and continues to support him now.

So, like it or not, President Obama has been compelled by these circumstances to wade into the same national problem that led to the founding of the Panther Party, which is police brutality and the police's utter contempt for and persistent harrassment of Black people, in the belief that Blacks have no rights that police officers, regardless of their skin color, are bound to respect. In all areas of de jure law, the US Supreme Court's pre-Civil War Dred Scott v. Sanford decision has been overturned, but Dred Scott survives heartily in the ethos of police departments nationwide, regardless of the skin color of the officers involved, when it comes to the treatment of Black people. Blacks have no rights that police feel compelled to respect.

In 1998, toward the end of the second term of the Bill Clinton's presidency, Clinton announced his desire for a "national conversation about race". For all intents and purposes, the discussion never occurred for the same reason that courts do not decide issues unless their is a specific "case or controversy" before them, and the parties are there to litigate the matter. Without a specific case to discuss, conversations have no focus and there can be no debate about how our values apply to a specific set of facts, a "case or controversy" about which facts andn statistics can be gathered and decisions made.

Skin color issues, like law, are not usefully resolved in the abstract. Concepts, beliefs and opinions have to be applied to specific facts for such conversations to have any focus and value. Often the specific circumstances that provide such opportunities for concrete analysis are not chosen by presidents but forced upon them by happenstance.

Because one of America's most important and substantial Black professors has been abused as Blacks generally are daily, President Barack Obama has been confronted with a very specific "case or controversy" about color arousal issues. The question is, if the most influential Blacks in the country can be treated with utter disregard for their humanity, than what chance do average Blacks have of living unmolested by police color-aroused brutality and injustice?

Guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s site, Conor Freidersdorf generously links to several pieces of my reporting in arguing that our attention shouldn’t be focused on the Gates arrest, but on more common and destructive police abuses.

Maryland man gets an $80 ticket for driving 58 in a 65. He says it was actually 58 in a 55.

The Economist has a nice piece applying the lessons of Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency to the Obama administration.

While I’m plugging my friends’ books, the excerpt of Ryan Grim’s book This Is Your Country on Drugs that we ran in Reason is now available online.

Married Tennessee state senator who pushed ban on adoption by gay parents caught in sex scandal with smokin’ hot young intern. I blame gay….well, you know the drill. Taken together, comments three, four, and five are pretty funny.

The Oklahoma state trooper caught on video choking a paramedic has been given an unpaid five-day suspension. He should have been fired and prosecuted.