Friday, 30 September 2011 00:00
No extended society has ever existed without some form of law enforcement. However, it is important to understand that there are two very different approaches to maintaining public order.One of them envisions the police, or whatever the law-enforcement apparatus is called, as public servants, whose job is to protect the public against violent and fraudulent criminal elements that exist in every society. This mindset recognizes that the public must also sometimes protect themselves, since a police force limited to public service by definition cannot be everywhere at once. It also contemplates strict limits on police powers, such as those embodied in civil protections against arbitrary searches and seizures and in the hallowed right of habeas corpus.
Where law enforcement exceeds its carefully defined and limited powers, it is held responsible, and officers guilty of abuse of power are subject to punishment like any other lawbreakers. This view of policing is embodied in the motto “To protect and to serve,” coined by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1955, and now used by many other police departments as well.
The Police and Power
In a free society, the ordinary citizen sees the police officer as a respected and trusted public servant and his presence is welcome. The other, and withal, more prevalent view of law enforcement throughout history is that its primary function is to protect the class that wields political power. This class may be a monarchic dynasty, as in Rome under the Caesars; a tribe, as in Gadhafi’s Libya; or a gang of ideologues, as in the former Soviet Union and modern Communist China and Cuba. Call them what you will — frumentarii, mukhabarat, KGB, Gestapo, or secret police — the function of police forces charged with protecting such regimes from their own citizens is the same: to ensure the maintenance of power by terror and brute force. Their methods vary little from age to age, depending as they do upon their willingness to use violence to stifle dissent and to spy upon the public to identify and keep tabs on enemies of the regime, both real and imagined. They are implacably hostile to the private ownership of weapons; so absolute was the power of the secret police in despotic Venice in the final years of its independence that the possession of a weapon was punishable by death. And secret police by any name are conditioned, in exchange for impunity for their actions, to close ranks around the regime they protect. Thus did the secret police of Ceaucescu’s Romania reveal true priorities when it engaged in wholesale slaughter of peaceful demonstrators in an attempt to terrorize its citizenries into submission.
While recent incidents of police abuse — many of which have been caught on video and posted on the Internet — may make it rhetorically tempting to liken American police to the Gestapos and frumentarii of other times and places, America’s law enforcement has a long way to go before meriting any such comparisons. Most of the officers and deputies of America’s local police agencies, no doubt, still view seriously their duty “to protect and to serve” their fellow citizens and hold sacred their oath to uphold the Constitution. But it is fatuous to dismiss the very real and very dangerous direction in which American law enforcement is headed. It is not so much the transformation of America’s police forces into a full-blown Gestapo that is of immediate concern; rather, it is the more realistic fear that their objective is no longer civilian protection. Many countries of the world, while far from the full-blown tyrannies of Caligula, Hitler, and Stalin, nevertheless make use of a style of militarized law enforcement intermediate between servants of the people and protectors of the regime. The hallmarks of such military police include the surveillance camera, the checkpoint, and the use of some extreme measures with impunity — detention and occasional torture without charge, and excessive willingness to resort to lethal force in adversarial circumstances — while not generally resorting to the systematic terror tactics of true secret police. The usual justification for such police is an extraordinary internal threat like an insurgency or active terrorist network. Military police tend to be corruptible and to favor the rich and well-connected over the poor. Such are the Guardia Civil in Spain, the Carabinieri of Italy, and the Federales of Mexico, among many others... Read more
