Good old LAW
& ORDER always makes conservatives and those who see
themselves as the Silent Majority, Tea Party advocates or Minute Men feel good
or at least better than most!
It is particularly important to
understand what Law and Order really means to Right-wingers. What they want others to understand differs
from its covert but true meaning. They
want people to equate Law & Order with “respect for and obedience to the
rules of society”, with synonyms like lawfulness, peacefulness, and harmony as
preferred concepts to convey to people. But hidden within its actual practice
are meanings and consequences that often reveal its true intent.
Perhaps some glaring examples of Law
& Order “campaigns” will help to illustrate more clearly its basis and
intent.
1) NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “Stop-Question-Frisk” was a supposed crime control technique that was
“a New York City Police
Department practice of temporarily
detaining, questioning, and at times searching civilians and suspects on
the street for weapons and other contraband. The rules for the policy are
contained in the state's criminal procedure law section 140.50 and based on the decision
of the US Supreme Court in the case of Terry v. Ohio,“ hence
why the stops are also referred to as Terry stops.
Until those
decisions, a police officer could search only someone who had been arrested,
unless a search warrant had been obtained. In the cases of Terry v.
Ohio, Sibron v. New York, and Peters v. New York,
the Supreme Court granted limited approval in 1968 to frisks conducted by officers
lacking probable cause for an arrest in order to search for weapons if the
officer suspects the subject to be armed and presently dangerous. The Court's
decision made suspicion of danger to an officer grounds for a "reasonable
search."
The
"frisk" part of the equation did not come into play except in two circumstances:
· if possession of a weapon was suspected, or
· reasonable suspicion of a possible crime
escalated to probable cause to arrest for an actual crime based on facts
developed after the initial stop-and-question.
Advocates
for the policy strongly endorsed the idea that crime was being widely affected
and reduced because of this policing technique.
(On average, from 2002 to 2013, the number of individuals stopped
without any convictions was 87.6%). According to the Washington Post fact-checker,
the claim that stop-and-frisk contributed to a decline in the crime rate is
unsubstantiated.”
One of the
things that did become substantiated was the unfairness of the system that was
applied disproportionately to African Americans and Latinos. A 2007 study in
the Journal of the American Statistical Association found that under the stop-and-frisk
policy, "persons of African and Hispanic descent were stopped more
frequently than whites, even after controlling for precinct variability and
race-specific estimates of crime participation."
But there
were other incriminating pieces of evidence that emerged to question the real
intent of the policy:
· New York police officer Adrian
Schoolcraft made
extensive recordings in 2008 and 2009, which documented orders from NYPD
officials to search and arrest black people in the Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood.
· In early July 2012,
stop-question-and-frisk protesters who videotaped police stops in New York City
were targeted by police for their activism.
· In October 2012, The Nation published
an obscenity-filled audio recording that revealed two NYPD officers conducting
a hostile and racially charged stop-and-frisk of an innocent teenager from
Harlem. The recording triggered outrage and "shed unprecedented
light" on the practice of stop-and-frisk
· The NYC Bar Association cast doubt on whether
police were applying the "reasonable suspicion" rule when making
stops: "The sheer volume of stops that result in no determination of wrongdoing
raise the question of whether police officers are consistently adhering to the
constitutional requirement for reasonable suspicion for stops and frisks."
· In February 2020, an audio recording surfaced of
Michael Bloomberg defending the program at a February 2015 Aspen Institute event. In the speech, Bloomberg said:
“Ninety-five percent
of murders- murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. They are male,
minorities, 16-25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every
city…. people say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are
all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority
neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the
crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them
up against the wall and frisk them”
2) In June 1971, Nixon officially declared
a “War on Drugs,” stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.”
Drug use and abuse has been around since the early days of our Republic. A history of the “Drug War” Is found on www.history.com
and I have used it to summarize a rather long and complicated story:
“The
War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims
to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing
prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the
1970s and is still evolving today. Over the years, people have had mixed
reactions to the campaign, ranging from full-on support to claims that it has
racist and political objectives.”
As part of
the War on Drugs initiative, Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control
agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for
drug crimes. He also announced the creation of the Special Action Office for
Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP).
Nixon went
on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is
a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in
the United States. At the start, the DEA
was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today,
the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.
During a
1994 interview, President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman,
provided inside information suggesting that the War on Drugs campaign had
ulterior motives, which mainly involved helping Nixon keep his job.
In the interview, conducted by
journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine,
Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies: “the antiwar left
and black people.” His comments led many to question Nixon’s intentions in
advocating for drug reform and whether racism played a role. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be
either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the
hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both
heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders,
raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on
the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we
did.”
3)
Reagan’s
“War on Drugs” was seen by
supporters as a war on crime, and thus a program that would bring Law and Order
to a society hell-bent on anarchy, permissiveness, and non-adherence to norms
of conduct
In the
mid-1970s, the War on Drugs took a slight hiatus. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixon’s
War on Drugs policies. In
1984, his wife Nancy Reagan launched
the “Just Say No”
campaign, which was intended to highlight the dangers of drug use.
President
Reagan’s refocus on drugs and the passing of severe penalties for drug-related
crimes in Congress and state legislatures led to a massive increase in
incarcerations for nonviolent drug crimes. In 1986, Congress passed the
Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for
certain drug offenses. This law was later heavily criticized as having racist
ramifications because it allocated longer prison sentences for offenses
involving the same amount of crack cocaine (used more often by black Americans)
as powder cocaine (used more often by white Americans). Five grams of
crack triggered an automatic five-year sentence, while it took 500 grams of
powder cocaine to merit the same sentence.
Critics
also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on
suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites. Overall, the policies led to
a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in
1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 2014, nearly half of the 186,000 people serving
time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on
drug-related charges, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Public
support for the war on drugs has waned in recent decades. Some Americans and
policymakers feel the campaign has been ineffective or has led to racial
divide. Between 2009 and 2013, some 40 states took steps to soften their drug
laws, lowering penalties and shortening mandatory minimum sentences, according
to the Pew Research Center. In
2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which reduced the
discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine offenses from 100:1 to 18:1. The recent legalization of marijuana in
several states and the District of Columbia has also led to a more tolerant
political view on recreational drug use.
Technically, the War on Drugs is still being fought, but with less
intensity and publicity than in its early years.”
4) So why is the Drug War and Law and Order being
resurrected in the Trump Campaign? Precisely because it is meant to target
certain groups that are not particularly friendly to Trump and Trumpism
– like young protestors, many of them college students; African Americans, and
to a lesser extent, Hispanic Americans, and Democrats. He lumps them all together as anarchists and
socialists, attempting to make them into a mob to be feared above all.
By
these examples, we can begin to ferret out the real meanings behind the
euphemism of “Law and Order”:
· keeping others under control so the
privileged may feel safe and secure;
· keeping certain people in-line with
what is seen as their assigned role in society by those in control
· maintaining a system that controls all those
of lesser standing who might threaten them and/or that system;
· making sure that those at the top of the
hierarchical Pyramid are accorded special treatment, exemptions and
privileges that apply to them as society’s creator class but not to any of
the ‘underclasses’ who are most often viewed as destructive
· unreviewable and minimally regulated police
given greater freedom to take actions that will restrain, restrict, and prevent
certain potentially criminal acts and actors; with exemption from blame for
out-of-bounds behavior
· definitions of charges and punishment
(sentence lengths) that will discourage those who are members of the
under-groups
Law
and Order has never applied equally to rich and poor; to white people and
people of color; to acceptable groups and scapegoats; to ‘normal’ and
‘abnormal’ people. Why? Society is naturally divided into hierarchies
and predetermined statuses (like families, tribes, clans, parties, nations,
etc.) but further divisions are often created by those who have wrested control
or power over the others, and want to maintain or gain additional power and
control. And those human beings who have
never cared to see similarities quite as easily as they see or sense
differences and threats in others, go along with the fabricated divisions, so
that their standing in the order of things will be secure.
That
is why a Republic that idealizes equal justice under Law must emphasize the
latter, because “under Law” is the only criterion on which equality of justice
can be fairly established. Law and Order
depends upon division and control, not on unity and equality under law like
justice does. It is a metaphor for
‘taking charge’ for ‘being in charge’ and for deciding ‘charges.’
CONTROL
is not an acceptable criterion for equal justice because it is inherently
dependent not only on exploiting differences but on acquiring greater power
able to control those who may seem to be destructive, intent on criminal
conduct or who may be made to
seem as though they are destroyers of what those above them cherish. For example, Donald J. Trump has worked long
and hard to make African Americans, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, strong women,
and Democrats look like destroyers of American ideals and virtues. Why is that? Politics, of course. But could it be that he is afraid of their
potential to rise above the station that he believes they hold, and therefore
needs to prevent them from gaining any power, status or position that might
detract from his? Certainly, a question that needs to be answered by every
potential voter in this next election, and by every citizen who cherishes the
democratic ideals of “liberty and justice for all.”
I
leave you with some additional questions that arise from our exploitation by
the questionable concept of Law and Order:
· Have we as a people been shaped more by
dominance over others than by a common cause of seeking freedom and justice on
an equal basis for all?
· Are we more concerned about control of others
by rule of law than promoting equal justice under Law?
· Are we so weighed down by a past of
enslavement, punishment, and separation that we have essentially allowed a
caste system to overrun our ideals of a united nation with equal rights and
equal justice for all?
· Are we entrenched in a caste system that is so
hierarchical that we feel we must control others lest they gain control over
us?
· Are we trying desperately to keep ‘suspicious’
people and groups in ‘their place’ (below us) while we seek security and
privilege for a dominant group (in which we can at least claim closeness if not
membership)?
I recommend for your reading, a book that attempts to deal with most of
these questions, and which may awaken you (as it did me) to a deeper
understanding of our society, government, politics and social strata. It is titled by one word –” CASTE” by Isabel
Wilkerson (Pulitzer Prize winner) – and it explores the similarities of caste
systems of India, Nazi Germany, and America.
If you have already read it, perhaps you have found such quotes as the
following to be as jarring as I did:
“The tranny of caste is that we are
judged on the very things we cannot change: a chemical in the epiderma, the
shape of one’s facial features, gender and ancestry – superficial differences
that have nothing to do with who we are inside.”
“The caste system in America is four
hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person,
no matter how powerful; laws like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 can be weakened
if there is not the collective will to maintain them. A caste system persists in part because…each
and every one of us, allows it to exist…in our everyday actions, in how we
elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to
people’s physical traits. If enough
people buy into the lie of hierarchy then it becomes the truth or is assumed to
be.”
“…all of us can sharpen our powers of
discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person
rather than demean those who are already marginalized, or worship those born to
false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free,
but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true
strengths to humanity”
“The fact is that the bottom caste,
which bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste
system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the
dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often
been least likely to want to.”
” With our current ruptures it is not
enough to not be racist or sexist.
Our times call for being pro-African American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian,
pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations. Every spiritual tradition says love your
neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.”
“Caste is a disease, and none of us is
immune. It is like a cancer that goes
into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is
weakened. Thus, regardless of who
prevails in any given election, the country still labors under the divisions
that a caste system creates, and the fears and resentments of a dominant caste
that is too often in opposition to the yearnings of those deemed beneath
them. It is a danger to the species and
to the planet to have this depth of unexamined grievance and discontent in the
most powerful nation in the world…if we haven’t dealt with the structure that created
the imbalance in the first place.”
False concepts and structures like Law
and Order help create that imbalance and deter us from the reality of equal
justice under law! Please – read the book
if you haven’t already done so!
====================**********==================
(Once again, a promised
addendum of behaviors we must not forget emanated from Donald J.
Trump):
RECENT BEHAVIORS BELIE TRUMP’S COMMITMENT
TO EITHER LAW OR ORDER
1)
Trump’s newly
appointed Postmaster General is “slowing the mail” by confiscating
Post Office boxes off the streets in districts where Democrat votes might be
diminished; destroying ultra-fast mail sorters that would help to process
ballots quickly; ordering slow-down in mail delivery and the abandonment of
certain mail products; firing of many senior employees and replacing them with
Trump loyalists who will do as the Leader (Fuhrer) directs in order to win
re-election.
2)
Breaking
several provisions of the Hatch Act
which were put in place to give greater order and fairness to the separation of
the political process from governmental processes and structures by using
government property for political purposes and self-aggrandizement on the
political front. The use of the White
House as a prop for a political convention finale and to allow government employees
to render political speeches (and a background of politicized fireworks) on
that same property was a smack in the eye of every person who worked to ban
such intermingling of resources. It should
have repulsed anyone who ever worked as a government employee (as I have) and
was required to keep political influence at a measurable distance. Such Ignoring of the Hatch Act is called “flaunting
of the law.”
3)
Trump’s
latest excusing of ultra-right violence
is beyond belief. He has done this
consistently without regard to the signal of approval this delivers to every white
supremacist, Nazi sympathizer and hate group member. He followed his precedent set at
Charlottesville where he claimed there were “good people on both sides.” This time he sought to excuse the admitted
Trump supporter who carried a semi-automatic gun into the protest march in
Wisconsin. Although this young man
killed two young peaceful protestors, Trump did not condemn his actions, and
the police did not detain or question him as he followed their trucks in the
streets.
Trump may have outdone himself as he tried to
excuse the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times by
telling his interviewer that it was just the officer’s uptight nervousness like
a golfer choking on a three-foot putt in an important golf tournament.
4)
Instead of
promoting order in relation to the issues and problems of the day, Trump has
reverted to vile demagoguery and disorderly response in every
instance. After perpetrating chaos and
disorder during the worst first few months of the corona virus attack --
resulting in the deaths of over 185,000 persons so far -- Trump decided to
double down on the chaos by asserting lies about effective steps he never took,
medicines he never took and promises he can’t keep. Perhaps his greatest failure was not utilizing
the vast resources of the central government to enforce a national plan and norms
for a united approach to the virus. His
eventual withdrawal from the fight; his devolvement to the state governors of
national responsibilities, and his blaming of everyone and everything for his miserable
failures, he has brought us closer than ever to national anarchy and ruin.
5)
Trump followed
through on bold threats and dispatched a secretive federal force of agents
to Portland several weeks after that city’s most unruly demonstrations had
mellowed out. His intention was ostensibly to defend a federal courthouse that
had been vandalized by dissidents (and to show himself as a strongman who will
not tolerate lawlessness or harmful disorder). Reports from the Washington Post suggest that his real goal was terror and
bedlam: to create an environment of heightened tension and violence that he
could attribute to Democratic misrule and then portray himself as having
quelled it. Agents in fatigues, bearing no identifying insignia or name badges,
snatched protesters off the streets and threw them into unmarked vans in full
camera view. Others guarded the federal courthouse
and engaged in brutal nightly showdowns with demonstrators that caused the
protests not only to grow but to spread to other cities as well. Trump ran for
president in 2016 while evoking Nixonian calls for “law and order” and casting
himself as a foil to the Black Lives Matter movement and its attendant
protests. This type of brutal intervention by secret agents to squelch human
rights helps cement Trump’s role as a Fascist-type autocrat.
6)
Trump is putting
children and adults at mortal risk that will result in greater illness
and death because the virus is lying in wait for all those returning to schools
and colleges, several of which institutions are re-closing already because of
the rise in reported cases that threaten everyone involved. This is an avoidable
increase in viral attacks, but Trump’s inability to separate winning from
caring has placed innumerable bodies in the fatal path of the virus.
The reality is that going back to school, to work, and
opening all businesses without adequate safeguards is nothing short of the use
of our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers for the
personal aims of one man – Donald J. Trump.
He is risking the lives of many more people in his abusive, disorderly,
and murderous campaign to win four more years of authoritarian disorder and
unlawfulness in the White House. ‘Law and
Order’ is just one more tool in his tool kit for use against certain voters and
to put fear into the hearts of those who are bamboozled by his fabricated
conspiracies and self-serving lies.
