War economy gave birth to the
security state and the promotion of endless fears. Terrorism without borders is
the latest on the war front, very possibly aided and abetted by international
cyber-crime.
Billions of US dollars have
been spent annually to put our soldiers in harm’s way and weapons in the hands
of foreign armies, both allies and their enemies. To some extent, United States
foreign policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize the Middle East.
Our involvement there has been more about oil and money than the advertized
promotion of democracy, much less human rights. By contrast, our involvement in
Africa has been next to nil, never mind that human rights are being trampled
all over the place and genocide is on the march. There isn’t, apparently,
enough money in caring about what happens in Africa. This American disinterest
in the plight of African nations has been a boon for China, which has all but
moved in to mine the minerals and themselves, bringing their own workers, to
the impoverishment of each local populace where they make an agreement with the
local despot.
On the home front, billions
of US dollars are spent annually to incarcerate people and to militarize our
domestic law enforcement agencies. To some extent, United States domestic
policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize our inner cities. The law
has seen fit to uphold many of the most egregious cases of police brutality. In
large part, allowing civilians the opportunity to stockpile small arsenals has
promoted the notion that police have the right to shoot at “suspects” in the
kill zone, and ask questions only when the bodies are on the slab. Frequently,
what looks like a brandished weapon is no weapon at all; sometimes it actually
is a weapon, at others there is absolutely no weapon. The militarized police
are claiming, and taking pride while doing so, that they are being “frightened”
into what is later called “effectiveness,” and the courts are upholding that
position in many, too many cases. While the police are “looking out for their
own,” are they also looking out for the rest of us? Shall we bring race
relations into this discussion?
Police and Fire unions are
among the biggest supporters of local government officials’ election campaigns,
followed closely by big development companies. Police and Fire contracts, with
heath and pension benefits, take a huge chunk out of any municipal government’s
general fund. Some contracts allow officers to become vested in their pension
within between five to ten years of service. Some officers “retire” after they
are vested. Some of these officers apply for lucrative contracts in other
municipalities. Double-dippers, sometimes even triple-dippers abound in a pay
and pension system that is not regulated and is completely unsustainable. You
have only to look at the rising number of municipal bankruptcies to know that
this is true.
Taxpayers contribute most of
the money that supports the security state, but are we more secure? My thought
is that we wouldn’t need to have “Security Officers” posted outside our grocery
stores, if we were really secure. Too many of these jobs are just for show. How
can it not be so? Most of the security officers I have seen lately weigh in at
over three-hundred pounds, and are attentive mostly to their electronic media. Would
such a person be able to apprehend a fleeing wrong-doer? You can’t just be
dressed for the part; you actually have to be able to deliver something that
recruiters, these dates, call “proven effectiveness.” The world of privatized
enforcement seems to include anything in a spectrum defined at one end by the small,
well-armed private army (working sometimes outside the law) to the $13/hour
actor from central casting, at the other.
There have been too many high
profile cases, of late, where people had been arrested, tried and convicted of
crimes they did not commit. Better late than never to be exonerated, I suppose,
but these costly mistakes would never have been uncovered if it had not been
for the growing database of forensic DNA. Meanwhile, innocent lives have been
broken and wasted, and some have died before the truth could be uncovered.
The average person’s notion
of how police do their work comes from the television. From what is shown on
TV, most people would think that every law enforcement agency works
methodically from an extremely strict set of protocols. TV police protocols say
that you cannot arrest someone and hold them in custody without strong probable
cause including evidence. In my town (in real life), two people were arrested
for committing a string of arsons. The two do not know one another, and one was
at work at the time the fires he is accused of were set; one has jobs and
family and ties to the community, the other is a transient. The evidence the
police have to bind these two people over has yet to be disclosed in the
courtroom, but Columbo would never arrest two people just because someone said
they saw the person or because a surveillance tape showed a figure that might
just look like the person someone said they saw near one of the fires, if there
weren’t so much shadow. There might well be a number of people on the street,
if there is a fire in the neighborhood, observing. I do not know how this
particular situation will play out; only time will tell. But I find it
disquieting that the police do not need evidence and probable cause to bind a
person over for trial. The person can be arrested, and the police then conduct their investigation while
the one arrested is taken off the street, and isolated from contact with
family. I would put a question forward: Does it serve justice and does it prove
“effective” to set bail nearly twice as high for the transient as for the
workingman? There will be no person raising bail for the transient, so what is
the purpose and what does it achieve? Meanwhile, to some extent, the men have
been tried in the press: the Mayor of the town has promised to prosecute to the
fullest extent of the law. The Mayor is up for reelection. The Mayor’s platform
is, of course, “proven effectiveness.”
Where did I get the
information for this blog entry? I read the newspaper everyday. I hope you do,
too.
Much of what we see is a theater, a masquerade meant to imply order,
which may not exist, at all. All of the issues and stories I touch on here are related; they do not
occur in one-off or in isolation. We need to ask the hard questions about the money we pay for “security.” We need to have better determinations about deadly force. We need to get guns off the streets, period. We
need to vote for people who might really do something about all this, rather
than shoo in the incumbent rubber-stampers, whose campaigns are paid for by security unions and big business interests. Only today, the new head of the FBI,
James Comey, said in interview that cybercrime is the biggest terrorist threat
to our security. An argument could be made that it is the biggest threat to
world order, but no one wants to go that far. Those claims will only come when economies
topple, and then it will be too late.
There is a lot of investment
being made in armed security. There is not nearly the same investment being
made in people and justice. Major infrastructure changes needed to insure
greater electronic security are “too expensive” for big business; it is cheaper
for big business to send out new credit cards and pay off insurance claims than
to invest in better, more secure systems. What investments are made benefit big
business and all the trappings that support big business, including “security
guards.” This investment maintains a crippling status quo of economic divide,
but what are the returns?
Things will not change until
big business gets hurt, and hurt badly. In the event, politics will not be able
to save big business, and neither will security guards. For all that we may want
to change the balance power, we do not want to see what happens when the
hackers bring down the firewalls.
