July 13, 2016 at 4:01 p.m.
Police power in the Age of Orwell
Police power in the Age of Orwell
Instead of just mourning the innocent officers, who were killed protecting protesters who despised them, instead of letting the police re-examine their security protocols, and moving on, the politicians have tried once again to score political points.
And it was politicians from across the political spectrum.
First, on the Right, we have lawmakers here in Wisconsin and elsewhere proposing legislation to add police officers to the list of already protected political classes, along with Muslims, gays, women, blacks, and others, meaning murders and assaults against them could be prosecuted as hate crimes.
That's absurd, and those proposals should be defeated. It's absurd, first, because there should be no protected political classes at all in a society that strives for equality, in a society that eschews elevating some groups of people over others.
But that's what being a "protected political class" does, it elevates that population over others. Such classes of people are otherwise known as special interests, or elites, and they are marked for advantages and opportunities others don't have. That's not the personality of a democratic society whose goal, however imperfectly achieved, is to be classless and born equal.
And neither is the very notion of "hate" crimes.
Traditionally, before we sold our souls to Leftism, crimes were defined by the conduct engaged in, not by the motive that prompted the conduct. Thus beating up granny was a crime because of the assault, not because you were motivated to smack her because you thought she was lazy or because she was a woman.
You should have the right to think she is lazy or to hate her because she is a woman, in other words, but not the right to hit her. That is as it should be in a nation in which freedom of speech and thus thought is a bedrock first principle of our enshrined liberties. The Right simply should not embrace the 'thought police' notions of the Left.
The prosecution of hate crimes penalizes the motive, the thought behind the action, as well as the action itself. But that takes us down a slippery slope indeed, for attaching criminal liability to a thought or motive associated with an action logically implicates the thought and motive as criminal, too: You can't prosecute the "hate" part of crime unless hate itself is illegal.
Prosecuting hate crimes is thus a violation of our First Amendment rights. We should be free to hate freely, if we want, whether that's blacks, gays, or police.
On the Left, President Obama and Hillary have gone even further. After the Dallas shootings, Hillary told white people she needed to have a talk with them about the need to change their ways.
So, in her mind, an entire race of people is guilty of hating. This takes hate crimes to a whole new level.
Even sadder is President Obama, who has taken every opportunity he could over the past few years to vilify police as a uniformly racist, hate-mongering tribe out to kill blacks and other minorities.
We are not prone to blame violence on the inflamed rhetoric of politicians. That would give every would-be killer an easy excuse.
But it is to say that, while the mainstream media searches for ways to blame the bombastic language of Donald Trump for instigating violence, it is actually the president's specifically overwrought language against the police that is more likely to plant the notion of victimhood in a person's head, and to cement the idea of a racist war being waged by law enforcement.
It's a racist war that exists only in Obama's head, and in the imaginations of like liberals.
Amid all the barnyard's political excrement, a few voices of reason have been heard on this issue. One is that of Heather MacDonald of the conservative Manhattan Institute.
Despite a few incidents of actual racism, overall the narrative about a systemic, deadly police racism is false, she says, and she reminds us that that was true in Ferguson, Missouri, where a completely false narrative about that shooting actually gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
She has other impressive evidence she lays out in the Wall Street Journal: A "deadly force" study at Washington State University found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios, she wrote, and in 2015 a Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found white police officers to be less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.
That and other evidence shows the racist narrative to be false.
That said, we must acknowledge, there is a serious problem inside law enforcement, one which Ms. MacDonald and other conservatives don't discuss enough, or at all, and that is the amount of power police have accumulated in our society, and their brutal exercise of it against whites and blacks, men and women, young and old.
There are many reasons police power is out of control. The very way officers are trained instills in them a confrontational attitude more appropriate in a war zone or prison yard than in a small town. The courts, too, have increasingly allowed police agencies to obtain warrants for almost no reason and to engage in search-and-seizure conduct once considered unconstitutional on its face.
All the while, the federal government has militarized local police agencies, to the point of putting armored cars in rural America. As Sen. Rand Paul stated: "There is a systemic problem with today's law enforcement. Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies - where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most ... Americans think of as law enforcement."
The truth is, out-of-control power is the major problem with law enforcement today, not racism. Police kill too many people, period, and they kill more whites than blacks. The rate of blacks killed might be higher, but only because their overall socioeconomic circumstances place them in criminal or potentially criminal situations disproportionately.
Reducing police power in general is the way to reduce the number of blacks shot by police. Curtailing police overreaches of authority overall, demilitarizing and reintegrating police forces into the communities they serve, and restoring a balance in the courts between the rights of police and the rights of private citizens - all these are ways to solve the nation's police brutality epidemic.
Those remedies would certainly be more effective than the race-baiting and inflammatory demagoguery of the president and of Hillary Clinton, and they would be far more appropriate in a democratic, civilian society than giving law enforcement one more weapon in its already overstocked arsenal, that of being a protected political class, an Orwellian outcome indeed.
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