There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them.
Garet Garrett, “The Revolution Was”
“We are extremely concerned about recent developments in this country which have imposed new and dangerous burdens on our local police,”frets the “Statement of Principles” of the Support Your Local Police Committee (SYLP). “Harassment and outright attacks against the police, in many instances organized and controlled by subversives, criminals, and illegal aliens, have increased alarmingly. Court decisions have placed unreasonable restrictions on the forces of law and order, while freeing many criminals from prison and imposing only the mildest of sentences on others. And far too many politicians have bowed to the disruptive tactics and outright threats of organized pressure groups.”
Does that paragraph even remotely describe the situation we confront today? The public is in pervasive danger not because the police have been shackled, but because they have been unleashed. We’re dealing with a crisis of impunity, not one of impotence.
According to the SYLP, there is nothing wrong with contemporary law enforcement that cannot be remedied by keeping the police above accountability. This is the material meaning of the slogan, “Support your local police – and keep them independent!” The group properly emphasizes the dangers of federal subsidy and control of local police agencies, yet its six-point agenda focuses entirely on augmenting the privileges and immunities that have abetted criminal misconduct and protected abusive cops from personal liability.
The SYLP’s model “Statement of Principles” urges “all responsible citizens” to do the following:
*Support our local police in the performance of their duties;
*Oppose all harassment or interference with law enforcement personnel as they carry out their assigned tasks;
*Reject any “civilian review boards” or other outside “supervision” of our police;
*Prohibit the creation of any national police force, or any other centralized authority, which would replace and control our local police;
*Oppose any and all efforts to subsidize, regionalize, or federalize our local police, since any loss of their independence from outside controls will inevitably lead to a loss of our protection and safety as well;
*Accept our responsibilities to our local police … defend them against unjust attacks, make them proud and secure in their vital profession, and to offer them our support in word and deed wherever possible.
Every element in this positivist prescription for “responsible citizenship” could be translated and used – without further alteration -- in defense of local police in Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, or any other country whose government was founded on the premise that citizens have “responsibilities” to their rulers, rather than the reverse.
“We believe that the first and most solemn responsibility of all public officials is to protect the lives and property of the citizens of [their] community,” asserts the SYLP “Start-up Manual.” “Our local police, who have been entrusted with this fundamental obligation, have fulfilled their duties admirably, justly earning a reputation as `the thin blue line’ protecting the law-abiding citizen from the lawbreaker.”
This statement is an elaborate and demonstrable falsehood. Police officers have no enforceable legal duty to protect “the law-abiding citizen from the lawbreaker.” Some of them occasionally do provide that service as a matter of individual decency and conscience, but they are not required to do so.
A police officer who fails to aid a citizen threatened by criminal violence can invoke the sacred cause of “officer safety” and suffer no repercussions, even if the citizen is severely injured or even killed as a result of that inaction. New York City resident Joe Lozito can testify that this is the case.
Lozito was severely wounded by a knife-wielding murderer in a subway car while a gallant member of the NYPD cowered behind a protective partition.
After Lozito had subdued the assailant, the officer emerged and took him into custody, thereby qualifying for a commendation and earning plaudits in the press for his “heroism.” When Lozito sought redress from the city, he was told that the police did not have an enforceable duty to protect him, even when he was being hacked to death just feet away from an armed NYPD officer.
The “thin blue line” of public protection is a pernicious myth. The “Blue Wall of Silence” protecting corrupt and abusive cops is an abundantly demonstrated reality. The Support Your Local Police demands that the public buy into the deadly myth, and ignore the even deadlier reality.
Nowhere in the SYLP’s “Start-up Manual” is there an acknowledgment of the fact that police are more frequently a threat to the persons and property of citizens than a protection for them– or even that police could be such a threat. The document focuses obsessively on potential threats to what it calls the “independence” of the police – which in substance means the possibility that they would have to answer to the public they supposedly protect, rather than the political class they actually serve.
The “local” police are geographically proximate, but they are not locally accountable – and the program presented in the SYLP manual would exacerbate this state of affairs.
YLP volunteers are instructed to “investigate the current status of federal grants and aid to your local police along with the rules and regulations attached to that aid…. Find out how much assistance, equipment or financial aid, comes from outside or federal sources. What are the requirements associated with receiving that assistance? How much say or control does the federal government have over the affairs of your local police department? To what extent is the federal government cooperating and coordinating with your local police? What are the involved federal agencies, the NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, etc.?”
Once this information has been collected, continues the manual, it should be “put to good use” in a media campaign “identifying the issue as a local problem.” This is a sound and worthwhile suggestion that abruptly dead-ends against the categorical imperative of supporting the “local” police even after they have become fully federalized, militarized, and an active menace to the public:
“The local police are not your enemy. Your committee is not here to attack them, blame them for violating the Constitution or your civil liberties because they are enforcing a measure of the PATRIOT Act or conducting a joint Federal and State anti-terror drill. These are federal issues, which the local police in some cases may have already have [sic] little to no say if they are to continue receiving their additional Homeland Security funds, new equipment and weaponry.”
How can the militarization of the police be a “local problem” – but any attempt to reverse that situation be dismissed as a “federal issue”? Exposing and condemning systematic violations of the Constitution and abuses of civil liberties by police do not constitute an “attack” on the police, but an exercise of what most Americans would regard as conscientious citizenship. Where the “local” police have become an unambiguous threat to the population, shouldn’t people do everything they can to prevent them from “receiving … additional Homeland Security funds, new equipment, and weaponry”?
In practice, the “support your local police” program will consolidate federal control over police agencies while keeping them “independent” of citizen oversight. While the SYLP manual demands unstinting loyalty toward the police, it preaches unqualified opposition to “civilian review boards,” which are depicted as a part of a decades-old Communist plot to subvert law enforcement.
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