Brown, Garner, et. al. post #2: We're still assuming it's not about race...

What is left unsaid in both of my critiques is the undertone of each...

The undertone of the Randian argument is fear that someone who is unbound by the law will be able to do those things which I (if I were a conservative), being bound by the law, only wish I could do.

The undertone of the quid-pro-quot argument is that I (as a liberal) recognizing that quid-pro-quo happens constantly in matters unrelated to law enforcement, fear it happens there as a protection of police who have used and will, as a result of a lack of punishment, continue to use physical abuse against various people, myself included.

Both are based in a common fear: powerlessness.  We are primordially afraid of people who have power over us because we see examples of that power being abused every time we turn on the news.

Case in point - the language of gun rights activists:
In a home invasion in Georgia, CNN tells us, a man used a crowbar to break in, and the female homeowner, hiding with her children in the attic, unloaded on him when he opened the door.  The response by gun rights activists was completely typical for what we've seen on national media many times before:

"It's a good thing she wasn't facing more attackers. Otherwise she would have been in trouble and she would have run out of ammunition," said Erich Pratt, director of communications for the Gun Owners of America.

Don't you hate it when your home is broken into by roving gangs of marauders?  Yeah, me too. 

Statistics on invasion events are hard to find, but here's some detective work we can do on it:

• There are 115,226,802 households in the U.S. (link).
• There are 3,700,000 household burglaries in the U.S. annually (link). 

Many of these households will be burglarized more than once, but even in the worst case, that means 3.2% of people would experience a break-in during a year.

• 266,560 home break-ins result in violent harm to residences of the home (link). 

That's a 0.23% chance of being the victim of such a break in each year.  That's still a significant value - 4 out of every 1,000 homes.  The fear of such an event is not without its reasoning, and people should take precautions to try to protect themselves if they can afford to.  

But the real question is - how many people are involved in those crimes?  Are marauding gangs of thugs involved?

Well... sadly, yes.  Sometimes.  We don't have statistics on that - for some reason, no one is asking that question.  To listen to, for instance, Erich Pratt's quote above, you'd think it was happening in every break-in.  It's not.  But, to what extent it is happening, we just don't know.

But gun laws are based off of the belief that it's always happening - which is why we insist on the need for guns with high rates of fire, so that if four people come into the house, the homeowner can mow them down in a hailstorm of bullets.  It's the fear of these invasions, the fear of "stranger danger," that drives some people to buy guns for protection.

(I'm not, here, getting into the argument of whether that causes more harm than good.)

In the same way, it's fear of police officers abusing their authority that leads some people to protest them.  Certainly not all, but some.  That fear seems justified in light of the statistics I previously posted about the incidence of indictments of police officers.  Here again, though, national statistics are impossible to find, and only local state statistics can help to fill in the gap a tiny bit.  In Cleveland, for instance, the Justice Department recently released a report showing that cops “too often use unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution” (link).

So fear of crime is justified.  Fear of cops is justified.  Each one of these things is an example of a power dynamic - a fear of powerlessness in the face of power.

The two types of power are markedly different, though.

Normal crime, even violent crime, is a personal power.  It is the ability for one person to overpower another through physical means - which could be strength, weapons, drugs, and so on.  In this situation, the perpetrator acts relatively alone; while he or she could have the support of criminal colleagues, the support ends there.  There is no intended institutional support for the criminal actions, and there will never be a vote of the people to grant political power to the criminals in those actions (e.g., a "right to rob someone's house").

In the case of a criminal attack, there are means to fight back.  A person can own guns and use them in self-defense.  A person can learn martial arts and use that for self defense.  A person can buy alarm systems, a very large dog, security bars, and so on.  These measures ARE supported by law.

Police brutality, on the other hand, is an institutional power.  When a police officer places a suspect in a choke hold, or shoots a suspect, or sits on a suspect, etc., the institutions in place help to protect that officer (the lack of indictment is just one example; another is the fact that the officer continues drawing pay even if on leave while the incident is investigated). 

In the case of a police attack, there are no legal means to fight back.  Anything a person does is taken as resisting arrest, and many people are quick to rush to the defense of the officer by saying that the brutality wouldn't have happened if the suspect had simply not resisted (See this NY Times article on the Garner case).  When an incident between an officer and a suspect comes into court, we as a society are inclined to believe the officer's side of the story, even though both sides have bias and their own reasons for lying to the court.

The inherent power we grant to police officers is far greater than that of criminals.  This is by design, so that police can fight crime - but, currently, the result of that power is the abuse of said power.  Rather than going easier on police as we currently do, we should be harder on them than we are on criminals, to hold them to a higher standard, to expect more out of them based on the power we grant to them.  If punishment fits the crime, then every crime of the police that has a non-police antecedent/corollary should also include "abuse of power" as part of its bill.

It's why we send teachers to jail when they sleep with their students, even the students who are of legal age - because the chance for an abuse of power is too great, that the teacher could expect sexual payout for good grades, etc.

And note that even our arguments of fear of criminality assume violent criminality; in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, there was no violence on their parts.  Selling untaxed cigarettes ranks even further down the "dangerous list" than jaywalking, and stealing cigars by pocketing them and walking out, rather than using a gun or making any threats, etc., is akin to shoplifting.  Yes, it's bad, but there's a reason we don't allow security guards at Wal-Mart to shoot people who've shoplifted - because it's not the equivalent of a human life.

So even if this whole thing is not about race, we still have a very real reason to stand in support of Brown and Garner, of Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and the seemingly inexhaustible list of other black men and women killed by police - because we do not tolerate bullies, and when police abuse their power, that's exactly what they are.

(All that said, it is still about race... but if I write that part, it will be part 3...)

Brown, Garner, et. al. post #1: Let's assume it isn't about race...

I'm going to assume, for a moment, that the Right is honest in its protestations that recent police killings are not about race.  Let me propose a couple of theories as to what could be going on...

#1.

Republicans as a general rule hold three literary sources to be holy and sacrosanct: the Bible, the Constitution, and the collected works of Ayn Rand.  Randian ideology holds up the individual as exemplary.  Truth is knowable, and deeply internal.  A person who seeks Truth will find it, and can use it to become mighty.  Truth can be recognized in the individual by those individuals who shuck off the bonds of society and grab for themselves everything they want, because not only is Truth the divine right of the individual, but so is everything else.  The mightiest person is the one who climbs on top of the heap of others, becoming the most politically and economically powerful, too.  Many people can achieve success and be Randian, but certainly not most, and only the king of them all is the true winner of the philosophy.

One problem occurs when we realize that the heroes of Rand's books are not beholden to the law, and in fact actively work to subvert the law when the law seems to prevent them from attaining all the power they believe is their right.  The law cannot stand up to the Truth of a Randian hero. 

And once again, this is what I was actually taught in my own religious upbringing - that when Truth and law disagree, it is the responsibility of people to stand up to the law in favor of Truth.

We all believe this, of course.  We praise Rosa Parks for fighting for Truth.  We praise Martin Luther King Jr. for fighting for Truth.  We praise Nelson Mandela for fighting for Truth.  Abraham Lincoln.  George Washington.  etc.

But we tend to forget that those they fought against also thought THEY were on the side of Truth.  The slave owners had convinced themselves that slaves were actually better off under their control.  In the American Revolution, many people born and raised on this continent gave their lives in service to King George. 

Truth, as with other things, may be decided by the victors.

But while we're in the midst of a fight, Truth is still decided by the individual - each individual fights for his/her own unique definition of Truth.

And, as I've noted before, on the Republican side of the aisle, we have a supposed arbiter of Truth that cannot be argued against.  That is, that when someone believes his/her Truth comes directly from God, there can be no discussion about it, no bending, no giving in to the demands of the other side...

no diplomacy.

The other side always already belongs to Satan, because if God is Truth, and Truth is absolute, then those who agree with Truth are with God, and those who disagree are with Satan.  It's exceedingly and necessarily dichotomous. 

And it is this Truth that narrowly limits the Randian heroes from everybody else.  For, when a person walks into a store and takes everything at gun point, they are not living within the Truth.  When a person uses legal means to take everything from someone else, however, they are right in doing so, for they are the ideal Randian hero.  When a social group, like the government, uses legal means to take a portion of things from someone else, they are right if those things are to be distributed to other Randian heroes, and wrong if those things are to be distributed to others. 

Sadly, the inner Randian is often at odds with the Truth.  For a true Randian would not give one whit about someone ELSE's definition of Truth, even if that someone else is a religious figure of global impact.  Ayn Rand herself was, after all, an atheist.  If a Randian wants to take someone else's property, at gunpoint or no, then he will take it - or will long to, and believe it is his/her divine right to do so, but may stay his/her hand to avoid going to jail. 

And this sensation lies under the surface of the subconscious, always waiting for a chance to act.  The greatest Randians I've known haven't held themselves back very far.

Now consider what someone might do who holds that philosophy and encounters someone who does not pay attention to the law, someone who takes what s/he wants or does what s/he wants.   The existing feeling of entitlement would find itself jealous, and would seek to eliminate the competition.

It could do so through passing laws for longer prison time, through allowing Randians to commit murder of those they deem a threat to their order, and through economic and social manipulation to ensure that those on the other side who have not yet gone to prison or been murdered by the Randians would have to stay as far away as possible, in their own worlds. 

Now, thus far I've been theorycrafting, but we see this every day. 

In the case of Michael Brown, those on the Right claim he is a thief, as if it's OK to gun down a thief in the street.  Well, in the model I just described above, it is!  A thief takes what s/he wants, and a Randian who follows the law cannot abide that, so the Randian will accept the thief's murder as a just punishment for the crime.

I'm making no claim here whether Brown did or did not steal anything - rather, I'm making only a claim about the justification for the use of lethal force.

Based on all of that, we could, perhaps, make a claim that it isn't about race, but rather purely about the extremes to which Randian beliefs have taken over the Right. 

Then we got another case similar to Michael Brown's.  Like Brown's, Eric Garner was a black man killed by police for suspected illegal activity.  Unlike Brown's, his criminal action wasn't quite on the same scale.  He was suspected of selling individual cigarettes, which would help people avoid paying tax on them.  As Ben Shapiro notes on Right-wing blog site Breitbart.com, "Garner had been arrested some eight times for selling 'loosies.'  That said, even Shapiro says, "by virtually any logic, it is the height of irresponsibility and depravity for a man to end up dead for selling loose cigarettes" (link).

I would, of course, claim the same is true for simple theft of cigars, but there may be a link to my Randian argument yet - remember that in Brown's case, he was supposedly stealing directly from a store, pitting a non-Truth Randian (Brown) against a Truth Randian (a store owner); however, in Garner's case, he was supposedly a non-Truth Randian stealing from the government of New York, a government that is, itself, inherently non-Randian.  Ergo, no crime was committed against Randianism.

And yet, Garner still died.  And not only did he die, but police were cleared of charges, even though by all accounts they used an inappropriate subdual method.


#2

Grand Juries almost always indict.  Ben Casselman, on ESPN's news site "fivethirtyeight.com" (I know... ESPN and news in the same phrase...), reveals the numbers:

... U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.

That's  0.006%.  That's 1 out of ever 14,727 cases.  You have a better chance of winning an Academy Award than avoiding an indictment.  You have a better chance of injuring yourself with a chainsaw.  Or with a toilet.  You have a better chance of dying in a horrible bicycle accident. 

Casselman goes on to explain,

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment.

Yikes.  In Dallas, at least, you have only a 1 in 81 chance of being indicted if you're a cop.  For comparison, you have a 14545 times greater chance of not being indicted if you're a cop, at least in Dallas, than of not being indicted if you're *anybody else*. 

The obvious answer to that, of course, is that the prosecutor likely intentionally threw the case.  That's easy to imagine, given that the prosecutors in Grand Jury cases are the same prosecutors as in every other criminal case, and thus they have to rely on and work with the police department every day.  At the least, there's reason to suspect they would throw the cases just to stay on the good sides of law enforcement, a kind of "I've got your back, you've got mine" mentality.  At worst, it's a reflection of outright fraternity between prosecutors and police. 

This, of course, presents a problem from the standpoint that both police and prosecutors are supposed to be working not for each other, but for the people of their districts.  If the people need to be protected, even from the police, then it is the job of the prosecutors to go after the police and keep the people safe. 

What's weird, though, is that even with this knowledge, we see the Right saying that a lack of indictment in the Brown case was the right thing to do.  For reference, an indictment is not a conviction - rather, it's saying that there's reason to further try the case, much like impeachment is not removal from office.  It would have given people a more thorough and more open trial, to see all the evidence and make a decision for themselves, rather than allowing police to hide behind the protections of a Grand Jury to prevent that evidence from becoming a matter of public record. 

It's weird, I say, only if this case was purely about attorneys protecting police - because anyone can acknowledge that it's wrong for them to use their position to protect an officer from being further tried in a court of law. 

But it's not about that... it's about power.  And I'll get there in my next post on this topic.