The Moral Outrage of ‘Police Militarization’ Can’t Be Resolved

The violent worldwide demonstrations provoked by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO are purportedly motivated by moral outrage over police militarization. In my previous column on this topic, “Who Curb-Stomped Officer Friendly,” I wrote:

Automatic rifles, APCs, tanks, gas, drones, helicopters, and ceramic plate armor are all necessary to maintain order in a society that is disorderly, culturally chaotic, and ridden by internal political conflict.

As long as the underlying conditions remain unresolved, it’s not possible to restore the historic rights that the American people expect, guaranteed to them by the legal system that they still believe to be in force. Having failed at using rhetoric to restrict the freedom of action and the armaments of police forces charged with impossible missions, agitators have instead turned to inciting mob violence, a PR campaign, and legal pressure to replace the oppression of the militarized police with the even more dangerous oppression of lawless criminals who kill, loot, and destroy with near impunity.

The impetus for the escalation of the American Drug War was riots like these. When they happened, it became the moderate, responsible position to demand that the police gain new powers to handle ‘drug violence,’ in part because some of the legal system’s previous punishments had been removed in favor of leniency. Drugs are a useful pretext to help law enforcement put criminals in jail for longer, and to arrest them more frequently. It’s a sham policy, and the sham has lost the support that it once enjoyed from America’s opinion-molding organs.

Reducing the ability of the police to arrest on the pretext of drugs pushes the police to either find other pretexts or to withdraw from the necessary work of policing a diverse, fractured, and dysfunctional society.

Liberal supporters of protesters, especially moderate ones, will often frame their arguments in terms of the necessity of police to follow due process, to respect the fourth amendment to the constitution, and to otherwise behave as if they’re law enforcement officers in a peaceful nation of Englishmen who respect the traditional liberties accorded to Englishmen.

As many of the same liberals are fond of telling us, America is no longer an English nation. Because it is no long an English nation, it’s mistaken to expect a people from Africa, Germany, Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti, France, Saudi Arabia, China, and Morocco to care at all about the traditional rights of Englishmen. The cultural tune played by American libertarians in particular sounds mostly foreign to these people from far-off lands with entirely different cultures, family structures, and histories. The rights that Americans take for granted have particular historical roots that are usually ignored. Those roots can’t be transplanted to someone by a dumbed-down citizenship quiz or an insipid compulsory education system.

The irony is that, with opened borders, the internal borders must be more heavily policed. When there is no common culture and limited fellow-feeling among the people who live in a place, internal security must be intensified to handle all of the ensuing conflicts and misunderstandings.

When external security is strong, then internal security can be lax, because it discriminates against those who are likely to cause trouble or otherwise be a poor fit with the host culture. You see this even in corporations: retailers who hire anyone have to pat down store clerks to check for stolen goods. On the other hand, if you’re intelligent enough to get a job at a higher class firm, they’re unlikely to even drug test you for screening. The same principle operates on the political scale.

When external security is weak, then internal security must be strong. If both falter, then the polity ceases to exist as a coherent entity.

In the case of the Michael Brown shooting, the white police officer intervened when a black man had just finished robbing an Indian man. After the white man shot the black man, months of controversy ensued in which some white people fought another group of white people who hate the previous group, while different factions of black people unified to ‘fight’ against the poor relations between their people and other people within the same country.

That’s chaos for you. It comes from mistakes piled upon mistakes over the centuries, most of them coming from the most recently elapsed one. Resolving the most recent mistakes doesn’t resolve the ones on the bottom. Without resolving the mistakes at the bottom, more chaos keeps flowing up from them. This is why Ferguson burned down, and it’s why other towns are going to burn down in the same way.

Liked it? Take a second to support Social Matter on Patreon!