From Portland to Pittsburgh: These totalitarian times
There’s a reason law enforcement is kept on a short leash in properly functioning democracies. For those who swear an oath to “protect and serve” the public, the idealism that proceeds the first day on the job usually fades quickly.
That idealism is often replaced by a literal fear of the citizenry. There is a growing contempt for the laws they are sworn to uphold. It grows with every negative encounter with the public. It is insidious.
The more experienced law enforcement officers are, the more aware they are of the arbitrariness of the laws and how they’re enforced. They know that laws are not enforced uniformly or fairly across what is a diverse population of citizens in the United States.
They know this because they are a major part of the enforcement mechanism. They know there is often an unbridgeable gap between what is lawful and the elementary expectations of justice.
Because they are in law enforcement, they are acutely aware that our current system tolerates a lot of injustice toward minorities and that there is little incentive from the top to correct these injustices in real time.
In Pittsburgh, expediency and ruthless efficiency at the expense of justice (as long as it conforms to the letter of the law) is the ascendant mentality among law enforcement officials who have lost the ability to be outraged by totalitarian police tactics.
Heavily armed plainclothes officers snatching a civilian off the streets and into an unmarked van during a peaceful protest is considered a much more enlightened alternative to the bareknuckled brutality of the past.
This strange theory of how much latitude law enforcement has to violate civil liberties in the name of maintaining the social order at all costs has been showcased in cities as disparate as Portland, Ore., and New York City.
It was put to the test in Pittsburgh on Saturday. Plainclothes officers scooped up a protester in Oakland by using a ruse to convince him to let his guard down. In the most Pittsburgh of ways, an undercover cop asked for directions.
Instead of reacting to the constitutionally sketchy arrest of Matthew Cartier, a 25-year-old protester who, at best, would’ve been subject to a summary ticket and fine in less totalitarian times, local law enforcement officials retreated to the most amoral of defenses for the arrest — it was legal.
David Wright, a longtime police official with nearly three decades of experience, insisted that despite the secret policelike optics on display in Oakland last Saturday, the “pop up” tactics used by local police to arrest the protester didn’t violate any laws, were consistent with best police practices and were rooted in precedent.
Mr. Wright uttered what would become the local quote of the week when he said that the brouhaha resulting from Mr. Cartier’s arrest was an example of “politics getting in the way of policing.”
It isn’t clear from the context of Mr. Wright’s statement whether he is simply being cynical or is genuinely under the impression that law enforcement occupies a Platonic space outside the realm of politics and public accountability.
In emphasizing his years of training officers in defensive tactics that never question the morality of “pop up” arrests of protesting citizens, the precedent of the G-20 arrests in Pittsburgh in 2009 and the narrow question of their legality, Mr. Wright reveals the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy at the heart of the law.
According to Mr. Wright and those defending the arrest of citizens snatched off the street by plainclothes officers and whisked away in unmarked vehicles, there’s nothing odd or diabolical about it because the technique is surgical.
They don’t see it as totalitarian on any level. They insist they are dealing effectively and humanely with an alleged threat to the civic order that falls far short of a felony.
Never mind that the city’s legal department, the Allegheny County district attorney’s office, most city and county officials and the American Civil Liberties Union disagree with law enforcement officials at every level about the morality, efficacy and execution of the arrest.
The fact that Mr. Cartier will not be prosecuted for a serious crime despite the elaborate ritual behind his arrest doesn’t sway law enforcement from claiming that any denunciation of the tactics used on Saturday can be reduced to “politics.”
One can be forgiven for being under the impression that despite the bad press the tactic generated, the police are proud of themselves for pulling off a kidnapping in front of witnesses that would embarrass them if morality were a serious consideration.
What goes through the mind of law enforcement agents engaged in such constitutionally aberrant behavior, even when it is sanctioned by local law?
When heavily militarized police in Portland and Seattle use tear gas and rubber bullets on their fellow citizens, what are they thinking? Can they empathize with their fellow citizens at all at that point? When two armored cops are simultaneously beating a lone protester with batons, do they truly believe they’re following the spirit and intention of the law they’ve sworn to uphold?
We haven’t seen the full-scale meltdown of police restraint in Pittsburgh that Portland has experienced, but we can no longer labor under the illusion that it can’t happen here. It can and it will if ordinary citizens look away, even from a seemingly isolated and “legal” event like the snatching of David Cartier from the streets of Oakland.
In these totalitarian times, Pittsburgh can no longer take comfort in the fact that it is perpetually five years behind the rest of the country.