In an op-ed published Friday, I argue that the new "normal" policing involves both hyper-policing and militarization – but that these policies can only be sustained, politically, when they are used on under-represented minorities. That's why the UC Davis pepper spray incident - as well as the news from Alabama that the police had arrested a Mercedes executive who couldn't prove his right to be in the United States – are so potent. From the point of view of policing norms, these actions were totally appropriate. But the only way that our society has even come to tolerate these police norms has been with the tacit agreement that they would not be used on white folks. From the piece:
As police culture has shifted, the police seem to have forgotten — or perhaps never realized — that these aggressive policies are really only politically sustainable when they’re employed against disempowered communities. Airport profiling is OK for Muslims. Random street searches are OK for African-Americans. And seat-of-the-pants immigration detentions are fine for Mexicans. But you can’t engage in invasive stops, searches and unsubstantiated detentions of, and attacks on, white folks without other white people getting agitated. What’s good for the goose has never been good for the gander.
That’s why the UC Davis video is so powerful. These are campus cops using the new normal police strategies — the police experts agree — on white people. It turns out, the public isn’t as comfortable with the new normal as the police believed. Meanwhile, in Alabama, the state is trying to figure out what to do when a police officer uses his new powers to detain a German Mercedes executive — visiting the company’s Tuscaloosa factory — on the grounds that he could not prove his right to be in America.
I"m quite sympathetic to this argument, insofar as you're arguing that these sorts of techniques develop and gain initial support when focused on marginal and less powerful groups. I am skeptical, however, that their broader application necessarily makes them unsustainable, particularly once they have become institutionally entrenched and bureaucratized. See, e.g., airport security. Not only the more intrusive security measures applied uniformly, they disproportionately impact more powerful groups (those who fly more often), and yet have been fairly immune to anything more than superficial reforms (at least thus far), and there has been no meaningful effort to replace such strategies with profiling or anything else that would meaningfully narrow their application.
When it comes to local police, there are incidents of "privileged" folk getting hassled, inconvenienced or worse by modern police techniques all the time (see, e.g. any number of Radley Balko's pieces), each of which generates a localized media storm and blog commentary, but relatively little reform. So I'm not particularly convinced these sorts of incidents alter the overall trend.
JHA
"Airport profiling is OK for Muslims. Random street searches are OK for African-Americans. And seat-of-the-pants immigration detentions are fine for Mexicans."
Oh that's cute. Your snark does miss the point that using these tactics against white people is pure masturbatory retaliation on your part. I assume that by "white people," you mean law abiding people who are in the US legally, don't advocate hijack airplanes, or who don't frequent open-air drug markets where there's an astonishing 8.4% arrest rate resulting from Terry stop searches. The UC Davis video? Isn't that one where "white people" stopped being law abiding and started, you know, breaking the law in a hostile manner (occupy implies hostile, no?). Quite an unsatisfactory attempt at analysis.
The German executive is a citizen of a nation with an ausweispflicht, that is, all German citizens and foreigners in the Federal Republic of Germany are required to carry identification with them at all times and to present it to the authorities when requested. An American executive in Germany would have been treated no differently.
If the German had neither his passport with the appropriate non-immigrant visa (L-1??)nor his US drivers license, then under Alabama law the officer acted entirely properly.
Airport profiling of Muslims? Who is doing that? Not the TSA. As for random stops and searches, as far as I can tell here in Atlanta they are DUI checkpoints ensnaring all motorists, whether there is an ethnic angle is far from apparent. That said, the government at all levels but the Feds most significantly, have NO moral and little legal standing for these militarist and totalitarian habits and attitudes. In a slight revision of the old standards of sovereignty, that only the King stands between the subject and God, I would say that NO ONE, including a government of whatever conception, may stand between a competent citizen and himself. Governments are secured among men to preserve their rights. In part this means protecting citizens from other people, either domestically or overseas. The American paradigm is an elaborate Constitutional order that protects citizens from the government itself. In no regard is the government either capable or justified in protecting the citizen FROM HIMSELF. Of course sumptuary laws banning so-called "vices" are foremost here but now you see the inevitable result where every comestible is regulated, if not banned, for your own good. Enjoying that, folks? http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2011/05/13/the-tough-guys/
I detect some butthurt over the treatment of the writer's compatriots at UC Davis. I am sure the writer's reaction to a hypothetical pepper spraying of a tea party gathering would be the tits. Or how Wisconsin state police refused to enforce the law against the union thugs occupying the capital building.
Great op-ed.
Anonymous,
It seems as though you missed the point of the article. Your comment about the "astonishing" 8.4% arrest rate from Terry stops is indicative of this. Terry stops are the "new normal" that the writer speaks of; for every 100 people who are stopped in Philadelphia on "reasonable suspicion" and frisked (which is undoubtedly intrusive), 70 of them are black and only 9 of them are arrested. 93 out of 100 times, the police's "reasonable suspicion" turns out to be unjustified.
The point here is that the only reason there is not more public outrage is because that 70 African-Americans (and most likely much of the 30 as well) are disenfranchised and not in a position to complain. There are no sons or daughters of lawmakers or business executives among them. And the reason why it has become this way is because you're happy to justify those 100 stops because of the 9 arrests. Tell me, when was the last time you were stopped and frisked?
And lastly, the UC students being pepper-sprayed has outraged much more than the writer of this article. Part of the reason for the nationwide coverage is because of their obvious nonviolence. But spend a little bit of time in a public defender's office, hearing the tales of extraordinary police brutality done on a daily basis to people without the same privilege as those at UC Davis and maybe you'll understand what the writer is talking about.