Words&Dirt

“Correlation, cause.  She would write the words in the corner of her lab notebook, which was starting to fill with small, encrypted notes to herself.

‘Is the parasite sapping the monarch’s strength and preventing a long migration?’ Ovid asked.  ‘We don’t know.  We are seeing a big increase in these parasite infestations.  And we have recorded rising average temperatures throughout the range.  Is the warmer climate giving the parasite an advantage?  It’s tempting to say this, but again, we don’t know for sure.  Not unless we can create experimental conditions that hold everything steady except for temperature.  We cannot jump to conclusions.  All we can do is measure and count.  That is the task of science.’

It seemed to Dellarobia that the task of science was a good deal larger than that.  Someone had to explain things.  If men like Ovid Byron were holding back, the Tina Ultners of this world were going to take their shots.

She stayed a while longer at the microscope slides before she was released again to Pete’s elbow to record his sample weights.  She was getting better at the Mettler balance and dispatched the pans quickly, sometimes having to wait for Pete to catch up.  It thrilled her that Ovid felt she was ready for something more complicated than writing numbers in a book.  She thought of Valia weighing skeins of yarn and recording her crabbed columns of numbers in Hester’s kitchen, on that long-ago day when they’d dyed the yarn.  Two months ago.  Impossible.  Her world had been the size of a kitchen then.  Now she had a life in which she might not see Hester for over a week.  Working left her with so little time, her evenings with the kids were a whirlwind of preparation and catch-up.  She’d skipped church two Sundays in a row, first for the chance to hose down the milking parlor before Ovid and Pete arrived, and the next week doing more or less the same in her own home, which she’d had no chance to clean. If neither of these qualified in Hester’s mind as valid church-excused emergencies, Dellarobia begged to differ.

She wondered how the environment club was making out right now at Bear and Hester’s, if they even managed to find their way over there.  They’d seemed disoriented, in more ways than one.  They should probably be told the logging was on hold for now.  And that evidently it was not the worst thing likely to happen to the monarchs.  Ovid was keeping track as the temperatures crept to freezing, miserably watching the downward march.  After decades of chasing monarchs and their beautiful mysteries, he would now be with them at the end, for reasons he had never in his whole life foreseen.  She wished he could explain this to those kids who’d been in her yard.  Some deep and terrible trouble had sent the monarchs to the wrong address, like the protestors themselves.  The butterflies had no choice but to trust in their world of signs, the sun’s angle set against a turn of the seasons, and something inside all that had betrayed them.

And what could any person do to protest the likes of that?  Bear Turnbow’s business plan was stoppable in theory, but you couldn’t stand up and rail against the weather.  That was exactly the point of so many stories.  Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature.  Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless.  Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.”

––Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, pg. 244-5

“Given that the Founders could never have anticipated police as they exist today, maybe Are cops constitutional? is the wrong question.  A better one might be Are today’s police forces consistent with the principles of a free society?

It’s difficult to say that they are.  Police today are armed, dressed, trained, and conditioned like soldiers.  They’re given greater protections from civil and criminal liability than normal citizens.  They’re permitted to violently break into homes, often at night, to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual acts––and even then, often on rather flimsy evidence of wrongdoing.  Negligence and errors in judgment that result in needless terror, injury, and death are rarely held accountable.  Citizens who make similar errors under the same circumstances almost always face criminal charges, usually felonies.

Police today share a bond tighter than that shared by soldiers who fight in wars together.  There’s a strict code of omerta that’s enforced more ruthlessly and thoroughly than in any other non-criminal profession.  Cops who rat out other cops tend not to remain cops for very long.  Lying and exaggerating in police reports and on the witness stand isn’t just common, it’s routine and expected.  It’s a part of the job.

Today, there are entire communities in which a large percentage of residents refuse to talk to police, under any circumstances.  These so-called ‘Stop Snitch’n’ movements are often derided by politicians and police officials, but there’s a pretty astonishing revelation driving them: There are large swaths of the population who fear the people who are supposed to protect them from criminals more than they fear criminals.

As I’ve written and spoken on this issue over the years, I’ve even had current and former members of the military tell me they object to the word militarization––not because they disagree with the basic premise of what’s happened to police departments in recent years, but because from their own experience, the military is more accountable and disciplined than many police departments today.  Several have even told me that military raids on residences where they suspected insurgents may be hiding are done more carefully and with more deference to the rights of potential innocents than some of the SWAT raids they see and read about today.  The police today may be more militarized than the military.

Police officers are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose.  Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent.

In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated.

This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused.  Generally speaking, we’re free to travel.  We don’t face mass censorship.  We still have habeus corpus.  And the odds of any single person being victimized by militarized police violence are slim to nil.  But perhaps we have entered a police state writ small.  At the individual level, a police officer’s power and authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete.  Absent video, if the officer’s account of an incident differs from that of a citizen––even several citizens––his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will nearly always defer to the officer.  If other officers are nearby, there are policies in place––official and unofficial––to encourage them to back one another up.  Even if the officer does violate the citizen’s rights, the officer is protected by qualified immunity.

In the Introduction, I noted that this is not an anti-cop book.  And it isn’t.  Despite all of this, there are still good cops.  A lot of them.  But we have passed laws and policies that have elevated police officers above the people they serve.  As Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute has written, you could make a good argument that police should be held to a higher standard than regular citizens.  And you could make a good argument they should be held to the same standard.  But it’s hard to conceive of a convincing argument that they should be held to a lower one.  But that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Systems governed by bad policies and motivated by incentives will produce bad outcomes.  Today, laws, policies, and procedures select for personalities attracted to aggressive, antagonistic policing; isolate police from the communities they serve; and condition police officers to see the people they serve––the people with whom they interact every day––as the enemy.  We shouldn’t then be surprised when cops then begin to see a world divided between cops and their families…and everybody else.

Perhaps most distressing of all, not only does the military continue to provide surplus weapons to domestic police agencies, but thanks to the Department of Homeland Security grants, military contractors are now shifting to market resources toward police agencies.  Worse, a new industry appears to be emerging just to convert those grants into battle-grade gear.  That means we’ll soon have powerful private interests, funded by government grants, who will lobby for more government grants to pay for further militarization––a police industrial complex.  It’s a threshold that will be difficult to un-cross.

No, America today isn’t a police state.  Far from it.  But it would be foolish to wait until to becomes one to get concerned.”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 334-6