America Is Not A Police State
While the United States has some serious problems with policing, we're not a police state.
While the United States has some serious problems with policing, Andrew Exum is right: We’re not a police state.
Yesterday, I watched some folks describe the United States as a “police state” because of some allegations of police brutality in Chicago. Without either defending the Chicago police department or agreeing with its critics, I tweeted that those who describe the United States as a “police state” have never lived in or visited an actual police state. I then watched as leftists went berserk in response.
[…]
[L]let’s look at the United States in comparison to other nations using theFreedom House and Polity IV surveys. The 2012 Freedom House survey (.pdf) ranks the United States as among the most free countries on earth with respect to both political rights and civil liberties. And here is the 2010 Polity IV country report for the United States (.pdf), which raises questions about some post-9/11 legislation passed in the United States (and also this crazy thing called the Electoral College) but otherwise gives the United States a clean bill of democratic health.
[…]
At the same time, though, when polemicists and activists on both the left and the right
so carelessly throw around pejoritive terms like “police state” and “facism” and “totalitarian,” the only thing they accomplish is to strip these terms of any real meaning so that when we really do
need
them, they are rendered useless.
After all, if the United States is a police state, can Syria really be that much worse?
Quite right. I’ve voiced my alarm many times over the years with the militarization of American police forces, heavy-handed interrogation, abuses of prosecutorial power, the deplorable state of our prison system, and other aspects of our criminal justice system. Americans are too willing to look the other way at these abuses because they’re overly afraid of crime and overly deferential to the police, who they regard as the proverbial “thin blue line” protecting us from evil.
But we’re not Syria; we’re not even Mexico. The most obvious proof of that is that Americans feel free to rail about living in a police state. That’ll get you dead in Syria.
Indeed, the reason Americans get so exercised over overly-aggressive police responses to peaceful demonstrations that get a bit out of hand is precisely because our expectation of freedom is so high. The very nature of policing is to exercise control–and that’s always in tension with liberty.
Huh…when he said “leftists” I thought there might be more than one.
PS. Protesters are still stupid. And the ones I hear crying most about the police state are Libertarian types.
*”exercised over”, not “exorcised”, which might require a priest to straighten out.
@John Burgess: Indeed. Fixed.
We are a police state in that the police are (de facto if not de jure) above the law in this country. Just because we are not yet a particularly heinous one doesn’t change the basic reality.
@Herb: @Herb: Passing along a lot of NATO Summit news on Twitter yesterday, I got swarmed by the yahoos, too. There’s certainly a hard core out there who likes to scream “police state” and “fascist.”
@Stormy Dragon: Police State Lite.
@James Joyner:
No doubt….especially on Twitter. Slogans and blithe remarks are a perfect fit for 144 characters or less. Intelligent conversation, not so much.
Saw your EVP on CNN this morning, chatting up Soledad O’Brien. Wish I was chatting up Soledad O’Brien….
(Now there’s a comment I should have tweeted….)
@ James
This is off topic, but I would be interested in a post with your take on this story:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/in-conservative-media-a-race-war-rages
So that’s the threshold? That we’re not Syria?
Well that’s just great. That should leave a lot of room for police to step up the abuse. Not just physical abuse, but in all the other ways they abuse their power.
Via Radley Balko,
This is no isolated case. It happens all the time. So when the police can just go around stealing money from citizens… What do you call that?
I wouldn’t use the term “police state” to describe the US either, but when stories like these become a daily read, then how far are we from being accurately described as a police state?
Besides, comparing the US to Syria is problematic anyway.
Just because pile of manure A is not as big as pile of manure B, doesn’t mean that pile A isn’t manure.
Cheers.
@PogueMahone: Both my post and Exum’s make clear that we have some serious problems with our criminal justice system. Our posts are merely calls for perspective and precision in language, not calls to be happy because, after all, it’s worse in other countries.
In other news, water is wet and the sun is hot.
That said, however, the larger story here is the complete cognitive dissociation on the topic of crime and punishment among left-wing academics and journalists. A lot of young kids out there actually would believe America is a police state. People in positions of quasi-authority are telling them so, and the mass media of course is all too happy and zealous to fan those flames of idiocy.
“The most dangerous revolutions are not those which tear everything down, and cause the streets to run with blood, but those which leave everything standing, while cunningly emptying it of any significance.”
—The Danish philosopher: Kierkegaard
Mass data collection isn’t police state like? I’m sure my smart phone is more or less an ankle bracelet.