Comment by hga
11 years ago
And law enforcement weren't "heroes" before 9/11???
Now, I'm probably older than you, old enough to have watched the first run of hagiographic Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. F.B.I. TV series that ran until 1974, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F.B.I._(TV_series) ), but I assure this is nothing new. E.g. I can remember more than a few debates I had with co-workers in the '90s on the War on Drugs, I said we could have that, or a free nation, but they were so petrified by the prospect of their children doing drugs that they preferred they'd live in an eventual police state.
EDITED: added eventual, since this was in the context of where we were going, still a confirmed trend two decades later.
Your definition of police state is an insult to people who have actually lived in one.
It's all a matter of degree. In the 1950s and '60s, African-Americans in Mississippi were terrorized by the State Sovereignty Commission, a kind of Cracker Barrel Stasi that had files on virtually every black citizen in the state, kept surveillance on anyone associated with the Civil Rights movement, and regularly used their power to hound undesirable citizens out of jobs, call in bank loans, deny credit, and so on. They weren't cross-burning Klansmen -- in fact, they saw themselves as anti-Klan -- but they ran a second-rate police state down in the Delta for decades. And where they didn't operate, Hoover, with his voluminous blackmail archives on politicians and his secret campaigns of vilification against civil rights leaders, did.
Today, we have pervasive state surveillance, a culture of secrecy that permeates every level of government, and a society that maintains a separate class of police and law enforcement officials who arguably operate with near-impunity, with tacit sanction for everything from extrajudicial beatings (and, at the risk of sounding overheated, SWAT-based extrajudicial executions) to prosecutorial misconduct. Thanks to Bennis, SCOTUS has ruled that the government may seize your personal property if you are the innocent owner of an item that the government might proceed against in rem (e.g., United States vs. $124,700) -- and those proceeds then go to fund further law enforcement and security operations.
We live in a state where Lincoln's fear that "all the laws but one go unexecuted" is the spoken and unspoken impetus for all security and law enforcement efforts -- every immigrant may be a terrorist, every demonstration a riot, every black man a gang member. In a state that is organized for the security and convenience of the police power, what else is there to call it?
We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis. They don't (well, they might thanks to the NSA and other sources) have extensive dossiers on every citizen. But we do have systemic racism and violence in the current system that leaves a large portion of the population in fear for their safety, and rightly so.
Cops conducting no knock raids for a low level meth dealer scarred a young boy and lied to his family about the severity of his injuries (claiming he'd just lost a tooth) [1]. Just check CNN for all the recent stories of unarmed black men, boys and teenagers killed by cops. An officer in Alabama paralyzed an Indian man who didn't obey his commands because he couldn't speak English [2] (at least he's been charged).
This may not be the same as police states seen in other parts of the world for the majority of Americans. But for many, we've already crossed that line.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-toddler-injured-swat-grenade...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/27...
> We may not have police disappearing people in the middle of the night or conducting summary executions on the street on a regular basis.
You don't need it. You have DA-s and mandatory sentencing ... as effective, but a lot more subtle and less visible.
You have a point due to my lack of clarity, which I've corrected above.
This was in the context of the society they were helping to create for their children and grandchildren. We're not there yet, and the reaction to the gun grabbers of that time (Americans arming themselves like never before after 9/11 and its response told us we were own our own) suggests there's a strong and developing counter-force developing, but the potential is there. There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.
ADDED: as for how things are today, since I can and do legally carry concealed almost every time I walk out the door, and how my police department has changed since back then, it's my considered opinion I am in more danger from the police than criminals. None of the latter have ever pretended to try to run me down with their car.
> There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.
That is Orwellian state. In it the policing is internalized in the individual.
serious: which states are police states? did you / do you live in one?
i live in China and i do not miss the cops in the US.
Just because it's not yet the worst police state ever doesn't mean people can't voice concerns.
By every measure the US has the most imprisonment. America is the première police state, how else would you measure it?
That is perhaps valid, though a counter argument is that in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned.
Typically it means the police are an instrument of whomever is controlling the state to keep themselves in power, e.g. per Wikipedia "Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state).
I also like to define Japan as a police state, a polite one, granted, but policing was done for the convenience of the police, not for "justice" as we at least attempt. I.e. it's more important to close a case than get the real perpetrator, which was made easy by a "judicial" system with a combined "confession" and conviction rate exceeding 99.9% (really). Past tense because citizen jurors of some sort have recently been added to the mix, although I note that the history of that in England suggests it'll be a long time if ever before that becomes anything resembling the common law system.
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