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Arresting the arresting tendencies of authorities
Michael Swickard
In a free society, the ultimate loss for a citizen is his or her personal freedom when arrested. Lately, some people I know have been arrested for what seem to be administrative rather than criminal offenses. I do not run with a rough crowd of thugs, thieves and bully-boys. We are mostly pillars of the community.
To be sure, criminals should be arrested and incarcerated. But should regular citizens who run afoul of an administrative rule be treated as criminals? There is a difference between criminal activity (robbery, rape and murder) and administrative violations (yard weeds or dogs in someone’s garden). Tickets for no insurance, seat belt use and parking are administrative in nature, as opposed to extreme speed and reckless driving.
In the gray area are tickets for driving a few miles over the speed limit or not using a turn signal. These are intended to provide revenue rather than extinguish behavior. Should failure to pay parking tickets ever get a citizen handcuffed and perp-walked into the jail? Where is the dividing line?
Where to draw lines
Government is about where to draw lines. When government hassles a citizen, our free society must ask if the hassle was worth the effect upon the citizens as a whole. Our leaders govern with the consent of the citizens, so every time a citizen is in conflict with their government, it brings into question that consent. At all times we must not allow our government to become oppressive to citizens.
Oppressive governments understand they cannot oppress all of the citizens at once, so they oppress one citizen at a time. For individual citizens, there is no resisting the entire government because of the government dog-pile principle. If one member of law enforcement cannot subdue a citizen, two more jump in, etc.
Most citizens understand resistance is futile; therefore, only real criminals resist. The gray area is the definition of resistance. Not instantly obeying authorities is very much different than intentional resistance to authority. However, at times it seems to me that our government treats both actions equally.
That is the problem for law-abiding pillars of the community. Are we sheep, or do we have a right to confront our government when the actions of the government is wrong without fear of getting our head beaten in by an over-zealous government worker? Saying “Wait, let us discuss this” can lead to a beating.
A friend’s wife was standing on her front porch talking to a policeman who was asking a question about a neighbor. She stopped him, “Take your hand off the butt of your pistol when you are speaking to me. It intimidates me having you touching your pistol.” Yes, the battle was on, and it did not go well for this woman who was protesting her right to not be intimidated.
In the Andy Griffith Show, Deputy Barney Fife routinely put his hand on his pistol as a way of intimidating people. I am not concerned when a member of law enforcement draws a weapon; rather, this is the subtle threat of shooting without pulling the weapon.
Asking servants to draw the line
In both our national Constitutional Convention in 1787 and New Mexico’s Constitutional Convention in 1911, the central aim was to specifically limit the power of government over the citizens. Each constitution is a rule book for our government to follow. Each limits the government, not the citizens. Our founding leaders wanted a limited government, not a government that could do anything it wants to the citizens.
So here is what I am going to do. Every candidate, every legislator and every member of the judiciary is going to be asked: Where is the line at which citizens can and should be arrested, handcuffed and perp-walked into jail? Your bosses want to know. You work for us, not the other way around. Forgetting this one principle of who is the boss will get you thrown out of office unless you are constitutionally mandated to a lifetime term.
All other “servants of the people” will be asked in the coming months to draw the line between administrative and criminal activity. I never want to see someone in handcuffs because they have weeds in their yard. Regular citizens are very different from criminals and should be treated accordingly.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces and throughout the state through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.
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Please wake up Mr. Slickard and support the beneficial laws that benefit us all: Limits regulate traffic that could otherwise range wildlly in speed and following distance in the same stretch. Not checking your speedometer is high risk neglect. A Court appearance and fine are insufficient penalties for a family’s loss.
FAILURE TO USE TURN SIGNALS can tie up traffic for miles, make drivers impatient, and cause fatalities. Where is your finger when it’s not free to apply slight pressure to a lever on your steering column? If you don’t know where you’re going, don’t force others to guess. Just pull over.
The population is much larger than when you & I were young. Would be nice to see rational commentary from you acknowledging that.
Obama admin using the Patriot act to “go after” labor and peace activists.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/activists-cry-foul-over-fbi-probe/2011/06/09/AGPRskTH_story.html?hpid=z2
Outstanding article, and qofdisks is absolutely correct on the prison issue as well, would be worthy of a follow up article by Swickard. I saw a documentary recently on PBS, that said the in the last two decades, the U.S. prison population has skyrocketed to 25% of the worlds total prison population. While we are wagging our Human Rights finger in the face of other countries, about prison reform and political prisoners, we are doing the same thing – just worse.
One big difference is the corporate factor. Since the US relies so heavily on private for-profit prisons, that those prisons spend millions in lobbying for new laws to incarcerate immigrants, for 3 strikes laws, increasingly longer sentences, and other issues that can increase the prison population. Supposedly an inmate in a private prison is far more likely to be denied parole due to claims of behavior issues.
http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2011/05/detention_watch.html
We have a huge imbalance in staffing and funding our public defenders in comparison to our prosecutors, so we have a huge disparity of poor people in prison. We also jail a disproportionate amount of people for drug use, compared to other countries. And we send people with small offenses in to be housed with the worst criminals, where they learn to become like them, or to become their victim. Prosecutors are political, as in DA’s and Attorney General’s since they run for office. They decide too often to serve the populist ballot box of media publicity, instead of serving lady justice. Police can be held accountable when caught abusing the system, by litigation if nothing else. But if a prosecutor is caught with a bias or hiding evidence that benefits the defense, or other misconduct, they have immunity under the law and are never held accountable. http://www.mainjustice.com/2010/12/21/defense-says-u-s-attorneys-office-in-new-mexico-withheld-evidence/
Judges are political, they run for office too. So the real blame is us, as a society we have put increasing pressure on locking them up, gleefully responding to political tough talk at election time, and have not stopped to look at the results. According to a book I read recently on the subject, the dramatic rise in prison population goes against the reasons you would suspect. For example violent crime has been reduced substantially over the last two decades. The book was titled “The New Jim Crow”.
http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/Civil_Rights
Otro
http://drugwarfacts.org
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/10/983932/-Endless-war-on-(some)-drugs-fills-our-prisons,-wrecks-lives-and-wounds%C2%A0society?via=blog_1
The overall prison figures are revealing for what they say about America. A year ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted how vastly out of whack the U.S. incarceration rate is with the rest of the world. Between 1880 and 1970, the rate ran from a low of 100 to a high of 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. Since 1980, however, the rate has soared. Twenty years ago, it had risen to 458. By 2008, it was 753. America is No. 1. In France, the rate is 96; in Canada, it’s 116; in England and Wales, it’s 153; in Mexico, it’s 209; and even in Russia, the next highest, it’s 629. At the state level, this is costing the nation about $52 billion annually, one out of every 14 tax dollars collected by the states.
Is that because violent crime has risen? No. A large amount of the increase comes from the drug war. Since 1980, thanks in part to minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines, drug incarcerations have not doubled, or tripled or quadrupled. They have grown 12-fold.
Someday I must tell you about the thug dressed as a State Police officer who was at the large fire going on at St.Augustine pass. I was with one of the responding fire departments and was staged waiting to be tasked. As I was taking pictures he came up and asked me who I was with. I told him which department and he asked if I shouldn’t be fighting fire instead of taking pictures. It went downhill from that point. He had no idea what my job was even as I explained it. Then he tried to give me a line of crap about his department was the one who had to answer to the public who would complain about seeing a firefighter taking pictures. I explained I knew how a fire ground operation worked as I had been doing it and risking my well-being for well over a decade, thank you very much. This guy then told me if he had a problem it was my problem and he would just sit me in the back of his car. I just turned and walked away. I’m not in the habit of being in a fight with a Barney Fife State Police officer on a fire ground. I couldn’t believe this thug. Within 20 minutes I was standing next to another SP officer who was taking his own photos with his cell phone. Every other car that slowed down and passed was taking pictures. The officer is a hood. And we are seeing more and more of them out there.
Not true as illustrated by our Founding Fathers AND Mothers.
“Most citizens understand resistance is futile; therefore, only real criminals resist.”