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...)