In the past year, the USA has seen racial unrest in both Ferguson and Baltimore relating to police killing of unarmed minority suspects. In Ferguson, the federal investigation into the police force found rampant abuses by the police directed primarily against the minority members of the city. The investigation in Baltimore is still on-going, whether it finds similar abuses or not will likely have a strong impact on whether the city sees further rioting. The tragedy in both cases is two fold. First, that the police feel free to use excessive force against suspects with impunity is a travesty. Police should have the highest levels of professionalism; these actions, even if taken only by a small minority of officers, tarnish the reputation of the police, the government and the rule of law. The second tragedy is that both of these incidents resulted in rioting and lawlessness instead of well organized non-violent protests. By resorting to lawless behavior, rioters stole the meaning from the deaths and ruined a good opportunity for a national debate over the proper role of police in our communities and the use of force by authorities against the citizenry.
One of the things that makes (or made, depending on your perspective) the USA great is its citizens' belief in freedom and liberty from the deprivations of government authority. Near the founding of our country, the concerns over the power of the federal government were so great that the states refused to ratify the constitution until it contained protections for individual citizens against the power of government. As a result, we now have the Bill of Rights. Before this, and before the confederacy that came before it, we as a nation fought a war against our then sovereign in the name of freedom. Go back even further into the annals of history and we can see the foundation for all constitutional governments, magna carta, was similarly concerned with protecting the rights of individuals against the actions of their king. The protection of individual liberty and freedom is the basis of all modern democratic societies. And yet still, in the modern age, we see the police acting like street thugs, beating and killing unarmed citizens, actions that in previous generations led to revolution. The results of these actions have already risen to the level of general rioting and lawlessness. When the state and its emissaries act without respect for the law and the rights of citizens, the citizens stop respecting their rule and the authority of their laws. This is the path towards violent revolution. If the state is to maintain some semblance of legitimacy, it should stomp out such abuses. I wish the members of the federal probes into both Ferguson and Baltimore luck reestablishing legitimacy.
Unfortunately, despite how important reestablishing the legitimacy of government and the respect of the rule of law is for a nation, the focus of these federal probes seems to be in establishing blame. While it is important to bring the perpetrators of the horrible abuses by police to justice, it is equally important to correct the institutional corruption that led to the abuses of power in the first place. In focusing too hard on individual bad actors, we are missing the true corruption at the heart of the system. I worry what it means for the nation if, after a few bad actors are made examples of and the feds oversee the local police forces for a few years, nothing changes. Likely we will still have arbitrary laws that will be equally arbitrarily enforced, we will still have police and government agents getting away with horrible abuses, and we will still have a deep and simmering anger among the citizenry over how the government uses its powers to oppress people.
We live in a crony capitalist oligarchy where we are all reduced to serfdom. Historically these kinds of government actions don't end peacefully. If we continue down the path of internal policing with electronic stasi agents monitoring our behavior and communications, with the police violently oppressing the citizens, with the few being enriched at the expense of the masses through crony capitalism, then our glory days are truly over and we are headed for a fall. That said, if we resort to violence in retaliation, we encourage the bloodshed to continue. Instead, I urge the protestors to learn the lessons of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, that non-violent protests are the best way to bring a modern government to its knees without losing the moral high ground. Only by proactively ending the violence ourselves can we end the violence inherent in the system.
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