Is The U.S. A Police State? Posted December 27, 2013 By Chase Madar هل أمريكا دولة بوليسية؟
Counter Punch
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.
By now, the militarization of
the police has advanced to the point where "the War on Crime" and
"the War on Drugs" are no longer metaphors but bland understatements.
There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns;
the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids
to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family
dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs
once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war. (All of
this is ably reported on journalist Radley Balko's blog and in his book, The
Rise of the Warrior Cop.) But American over-policing involves far more than the
widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It's also the way police
power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of
American life into a police matter.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline
It starts in our schools,
where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police personnel. What not long
ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior—doodling on a desk,
farting in class, a kindergartener's tantrum—can leave a kid in handcuffs,
removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such "criminals"
can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed
and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate.
(Turned out he didn't do it.)
Though it's a national
phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into
a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on
schoolchildren for "crimes" like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing
the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for
several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of "zero-tolerance"
discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally
imported into schools.
Despite a long-term drop in
youth crime, the carceral style of education remains in style. Metal
detectors—a horrible way for any child to start the day—are installed in ever
more schools, even those with sterling disciplinary records, despite the
demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no guarantee against shootings and
stabbings.
Every school shooting,
whether in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, or Littleton, Colorado, only leads to more
police in schools and more arms as well. It's the one thing the National Rifle
Association and Democratic senators can agree on. There are plenty of
successful ways to run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom,
but politicians and much of the media don't seem to want to know about them.
The "school-to-prison pipeline," a jargon term coined by activists,
is entering the vernacular.
Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go
Even as simple a matter as
getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement
matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting
for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving
without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a
state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think
you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest
hospital may be in the offing—you will be sent the bill later.
Air travel entails
increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as
nothing more than "security theater." As for staying at home, it
carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a
Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away—a case
that is hardly unique.
Overcriminalization at Work
Office and retail work might
seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors, but criminal
law has found its way into the white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia
Thompson, a Wisconsin state employee targeted by a federal prosecutor for the
"crime" of incorrectly processing a travel agency's bid for state
business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a
federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson, hauled away in handcuffs by an undercover cop
for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or
George Norris, sentenced to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the
proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.
Increasingly, basic economic
transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas,
for instance, Human Rights Watch reports that a new law funnels delinquent (or
allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal courts, where
failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and incarceration, even though
debtor's prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth
century.
And the mood is spreading.
Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008 and the rising cries of progressives for
the criminal prosecution of Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally
sound financial system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were
running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate about how to
restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in their focus on
individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of the authoritarians. A few
high-profile prosecutions for insider trading (which had nothing to do with the
last crash) have, of course, not changed Wall Street one bit.
Criminalizing Immigration
The past decade has also seen
immigration policy ingested by criminal law. According to another Human Rights
Watch report—their US division is increasingly busy—federal criminal
prosecutions of immigrants for illegal entry have surged from 3,000 in 2002 to
48,000 last year. This novel application of police and prosecutors has broken
up families and fueled the expansion of for-profit detention centers, even as
it has failed to show any stronger deterrent effect on immigration than the
civil law system that preceded it. Thanks to Arizona's SB 1070 bill, police in
that state are now licensed to stop and check the papers of anyone suspected of
being undocumented—that is, who looks Latino.
Meanwhile, significant parts
of the US-Mexico border are now militarized (as increasingly is the Canadian
border), including what seem to resemble free-fire zones. And if anyone were to
leave bottled water for migrants illegally crossing the desert and in danger of
death from dehydration, that good Samaritan should expect to face criminal
charges, too. Intensified policing with aggressive targets for arrests and
deportations are guaranteed to be a part of any future bipartisan deal on
immigration reform.
Digital Over-Policing
As for the Internet, for a
time it was terra nova and so relatively free of a steroidal law enforcement
presence. Not anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and
activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading masses of
scholarly articles (all publicly subsidized) from an open network on the MIT
campus. Swartz was federally prosecuted under the capacious Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act for violating a "terms and services agreement"—a
transgression that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on his or her laptop
has also, technically, committed. Swartz committed suicide earlier this year
while facing a possible 50-year sentence and up to a million dollars in fines.
Since the summer, thanks to
whistleblowing contractor Edward Snowden, we have learned a great deal about
the way the NSA stops and frisks our (and apparently everyone else's) digital
communications, both email and telephonic. The security benefits of such
indiscriminate policing are far from clear, despite the government's emphatic
but inconsistent assurances otherwise. What comes into sharper focus with every
volley of new revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can
only be called a police state.
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