{"id":97368,"date":"2013-12-09T08:07:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T08:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/time-to-be-afraid-in-america-the-frightening-pattern-of-throwing-police-power-at-social-problems\/"},"modified":"2013-12-09T15:16:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T15:16:09","slug":"time-to-be-afraid-in-america-the-frightening-pattern-of-throwing-police-power-at-social-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/time-to-be-afraid-in-america-the-frightening-pattern-of-throwing-police-power-at-social-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to be Afraid in America: The Frightening Pattern of Throwing Police Power at Social Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Policing overkill has entered the\u00a0DNA<\/a>\u00a0ofAmerica<\/a>\u2018s social policy.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

If all you\u2019ve 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 \u201csolving\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where \u201cthe War on Crime\u201d and \u201cthe War on Drugs\u201d are no longer metaphors but bland understatements. There is the\u00a0proliferation<\/a>of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of\u00a0shock-and-awe<\/a>\u00a0tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of\u00a0drugs<\/a>\u00a0that 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\u2019s\u00a0blog<\/a>\u00a0and in his book,\u00a0The Rise of the Warrior Cop<\/em><\/a>.) But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It\u2019s also the way police power has entered the\u00a0DNA<\/a>\u00a0of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.<\/p>\n

The School-to-Prison Pipeline<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2013\u00a0doodling<\/a>\u00a0on a desk,\u00a0farting<\/a>\u00a0in class, a kindergartener\u2019s\u00a0tantrum<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked at the local precinct. Such \u201ccriminals\u201d can be as young as seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was\u00a0handcuffed<\/a>\u00a0and interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a classmate. (Turned out he didn\u2019t do it.)<\/p>\n

Though it\u2019s a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has\u00a0imposed<\/a>\u00a0felony charges on schoolchildren for \u201ccrimes\u201d 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 \u201czero-tolerance<\/a>\u201d discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.<\/p>\n

Despite a long-term drop in youth crime, the carceral style of\u00a0education<\/a>\u00a0remains in style. Metal detectors \u2013 a horrible way for any child to start the day \u2013 are\u00a0installed<\/a>\u00a0in ever more schools, even those with\u00a0sterling<\/a>\u00a0disciplinary records, despite the demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no guarantee against\u00a0shootings<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0stabbings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Every school shooting, whether in\u00a0Sandy Hook<\/a>, Connecticut, or Littleton, Colorado, only leads to more police in schools and more arms as well. It\u2019s the one thing the National Rifle Association and Democratic senators can\u00a0agree<\/a>\u00a0on. There are\u00a0plenty<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0successful<\/a>\u00a0ways<\/a>\u00a0to run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom, but politicians and much of the media don\u2019t seem to want to know about them. The \u201cschool-to-prison pipeline,\u201d a jargon term coined by activists, is\u00a0entering<\/a>\u00a0the vernacular.<\/p>\n

Go to Jail, Do Not Pass Go<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0space<\/a>\u00a0are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths\u00a0arrested<\/a>. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an\u00a0arrest<\/a>, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying\u00a0drugs<\/a>, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing \u2013 you will be\u00a0sent the bill<\/a>\u00a0later.<\/p>\n

Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and\u00a0arbitrary<\/a>\u00a0rules that many experts see as nothing more than \u201csecurity theater<\/a>.\u201d 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 \u2013 a case that is\u00a0hardly<\/a>\u00a0unique.<\/p>\n

Overcriminalization at Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u00a0targeted<\/a>\u00a0by a federal prosecutor for the \u201ccrime\u201d of incorrectly processing a travel agency\u2019s bid for state business. She spent four months in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or Judy Wilkinson,\u00a0hauled away<\/a>\u00a0in handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George Norris,sentenced<\/a>\u00a0to 17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork to an undercover federal agent.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance,\u00a0Human Rights<\/a>\u00a0Watch reports that a new law\u00a0funnels<\/a>\u00a0delinquent (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\u2019s prison as an institution was supposed to have ended in the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Criminalizing\u00a0Immigration<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The past decade has also seen\u00a0immigration<\/a>\u00a0policy ingested by criminal law. According to anotherHuman Rights<\/a>\u00a0Watch report \u2013 their U.S. division is increasingly busy \u2013 federal criminal prosecutions of immigrants for illegal entry have\u00a0surged<\/a>\u00a0from 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 onimmigration<\/a>\u00a0than the civil law system that preceded it. Thanks to Arizona\u2019s\u00a0SB 1070<\/a>\u00a0bill, police in that state are now licensed to stop and check the papers of anyone suspected of being undocumented \u2013 that is, who looks Latino.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, significant parts of the US-Mexico border are now\u00a0militarized<\/a>\u00a0(as increasingly is theCanadian border<\/a>), including what seem to resemble\u00a0free-fire zones<\/a>. And if anyone were to leave bottled\u00a0water<\/a>\u00a0for migrants illegally crossing the desert and in danger of death from dehydration, that good Samaritan should\u00a0expect<\/a>\u00a0to 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\u00a0immigration<\/a>\u00a0reform.<\/p>\n

Digital Over-Policing<\/strong><\/p>\n

As for the Internet, for a time it was\u00a0terra nova<\/em>\u00a0and 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 capaciousComputer Fraud and Abuse Act<\/a>\u00a0for violating a \u201cterms and services agreement\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Since the summer, thanks to whistleblowing contractor Edward\u00a0Snowden<\/a>, we have learned a great deal about the way the\u00a0NSA<\/a>\u00a0stops and frisks our (and apparently\u00a0everyone else\u2019s<\/a>) digital communications, both email and telephonic. The security benefits of such indiscriminate policing are\u00a0far from clear<\/a>, despite the government\u2019s emphatic but\u00a0inconsistent<\/a>\u00a0assurances otherwise. What comes into sharper focus with every volley of new revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can only be called a\u00a0police state<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sex<\/strong>\u00a0Police<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sex is another zone of police overkill in our post-Puritan land. Getting put on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy \u2013 as has been\u00a0done<\/a>\u00a0to children as young as 11 for \u201cplaying doctor\u201d with a relative, again according to\u00a0Human Rights<\/a>\u00a0Watch. But getting taken off the registry later is extraordinarily difficult. Across the nation, sex offender registries have expanded massively, especially in\u00a0California<\/a>, where one in every 380 adults is now a registered sex offender, creating a new pariah class with severe obstacles to employment, housing, or any kind of community life. The proper penalty for, say, an 18-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old can be debated, but should that 18-year-old\u2019s life really be ruined forever?<\/p>\n

Equality Before the Cops?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It will surprise no one that Americans are not all treated equally by the police. Law enforcement picks on kids more than adults, the queer more than straight, Muslims more than Methodists \u2013Muslims<\/a>\u00a0a lot<\/em><\/a>\u00a0more<\/a>\u00a0than<\/a>\u00a0Methodists \u2013 antiwar activists more than the apolitical. Above all, our punitive state targets the poor more than the wealthy and Blacks and Latinos more than white people.<\/p>\n

A case in point: after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, a police presence, includingsurveillance<\/a>\u00a0cameras and metal detectors, was\u00a0ratcheted up<\/a>\u00a0at schools around the country, particularly in urban areas with largely working-class black and Latino student bodies. It was all to \u201cprotect\u201d the kids, of course. At Columbine itself, however, no metal detector was installed and no heavy police presence intruded. The reason was simple. At that school in the Colorado suburb of Littleton, the mostly well-heeled white families did not want their kids treated like potential felons, and they had the status and political power to get their way. But communities without such clout are less able to push back against the encroachments of police power.<\/p>\n

Even Our Prisons Are Over-Policed<\/strong><\/p>\n

The over-criminalization of American life empties out into our vast, overcrowded prison system, which is itself over-policed. The ultimate form of punitive control (and\u00a0torture<\/a>) is long-term solitary confinement, in which 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners are encased at any given moment. Is this really necessary? Solitary is no longer reserved for the worst or the worst or most dangerous prisoners but can be\u00a0inflicted<\/a>\u00a0on ones who wear Rastafari dreadlocks, have a copy of Sun Tzu\u2019s\u00a0Art of War<\/em>\u00a0in their cell, or are in any way suspected, no matter how tenuous the grounds, of gang affiliations.<\/p>\n

Not every developed nation does things this way. Some 30 years ago,\u00a0Great Britain<\/a>\u00a0shifted<\/a>\u00a0from isolating prisoners to, whenever possible, giving them greater responsibility and autonomy \u2013 with less violent results. But don\u2019t even bring the subject up here. It will fall on deaf ears.<\/p>\n

Extreme policing is exacerbated by extreme sentencing. For instance, more than 3,000 Americans have been\u00a0sentenced<\/a>\u00a0to life terms without chance of parole for nonviolent offenses. These are mostly but not exclusively drug offenses, including life for a pound of cocaine that a boyfriend stashed in the attic; selling\u00a0LSD<\/a>\u00a0at a Grateful Dead concert; and shoplifting three belts from a department store.<\/p>\n

Our incarceration rate is the highest in the world, triple that of the now-defunct\u00a0East Germany<\/a>. The incarceration rate for\u00a0African American men<\/a>\u00a0is about five times higher than\u00a0that<\/a>\u00a0of the Soviet Union at the peak of the gulag.<\/p>\n

The Destruction of Families<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prison may seem the logical finale for this litany of over-criminalization, but the story doesn\u2019t actually end with those inmates. As prisons warehouse ever more Americans, often hundreds of miles from their local communities, family bonds weaken and disintegrate. In addition, once a parent goes into the criminal justice system, his or her family tends to end up on the radar screens of state agencies. \u201cBeing under\u00a0surveillance<\/a>\u00a0by law enforcement makes a family much more vulnerable to Child Protective Services,\u201d says\u00a0Professor Dorothy Roberts<\/a>\u00a0of the University of Pennsylvania Law school. An incarcerated parent, especially an incarcerated mother, means a much stronger likelihood that children will be sent into foster care, where, according to one recent study, they will be twice as likely as war veterans to\u00a0suffer<\/a>\u00a0from PTSD.<\/p>\n

In New York State, the Administration for Child Services and the juvenile justice system recently merged, effectively putting thousands of children in a heavily policed, penalty-based environment until they age out. \u201cBeing in foster care makes you much more vulnerable to being picked up by the juvenile justice system,\u201d says Roberts.\u00a0\u201c<\/strong>If you\u2019re in a group home and you get in a fight, that could easily become a police matter.\u201d In every respect, the creeping over-criminalization of everyday life exerts a\u00a0corrosive<\/a>\u00a0effect<\/a>\u00a0on American families.<\/p>\n

Do We Live in a\u00a0Police State<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The term \u201cpolice state\u201d was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so much anymore. Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity. \u201cYou\u2019re probably a (federal) criminal\u201d is the accusatory title of a widely read\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0co-authored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily\u00a0commit<\/a>\u00a0three felonies in a single day without knowing it.<\/p>\n

The daily overkill of police power in the U.S. goes a long way toward explaining why more Americans aren\u2019t outraged by the \u201cexcesses\u201d of the war on terror, which, as one law professor hasargued<\/a>, are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our distant foreign wars\u00a0seeping back<\/a>\u00a0into the homeland (the \u201cimperial boomerang\u201d that Hannah Arendt warned against).<\/p>\n

Many who have long railed against our country\u2019s everyday police overkill have reacted to the revelations of\u00a0NSA<\/a>\u00a0surveillance<\/a>\u00a0with detectable\u00a0exasperation<\/a>: of course we are over-policed! Some have even responded with\u00a0peevish<\/a>\u00a0resentment<\/a>: Why so much sympathy for this\u00a0Snowden<\/a>\u00a0kid when the daily grind of our justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal? After all, in New York, the police department\u2019s \u201cstop and frisk\u201d tactic, which targets African American and Latino working-class youth for routinized street searches, was until recently uncontroversial among the political and opinion-making class. If \u201cthe gloves came off\u201d after September 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised to\u00a0learn<\/a>\u00a0they had ever been on to begin with.<\/p>\n

A hammer is necessary to any toolkit. But you don\u2019t use a hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato, or brush your teeth. And yet the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is not peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom.<\/p>\n

Follow TomDispatch on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and join us on<\/em>Facebook<\/a><\/em>or<\/em>Tumblr<\/em><\/a>. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones\u2019s<\/em>They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America\u2019s Wars \u2013 The Untold Story<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Chase Madar<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd 2013 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n

View this story online at:\u00a0http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/blog\/175781\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

With permission<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Policing overkill has entered the\u00a0DNA\u00a0ofAmerica\u2018s social policy. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com\u00a0here. If all you\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":97369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-97368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}