My Road to Anarchy

Years in the future, when I'm asked when I became an anarchist, I'll be able to point to this paragraph in an incredibly powerful and moving piece by Laurie Penny titled Inside the Whitehall Kettle:

They want to make you uncomfortable, and then desperate, putting your route back to warmth and safety in the gift of the agents of the state. They decide when you can get back to civilisation. They decide when the old people can get warm, when the diabetics can get their insulin, when the kid having a panic attack can go home to her mum. It's a way of making you feel small and scared and helpless, a way for the state's agents to make you feel that you are nothing without them, making you forget that a state is supposed to survive by mandate of the people, and not the other way around.

I'm being more than a bit hyperbolic. I'm not an anarchist, and I doubt very much that I'll ever actually be one. At the moment, I'm more afraid of the callousness of the average citizen than I am of the malicious strength of my government (or the governments of our Western European allies); and I don't see that changing any time soon - though I do recognize that a lot of that has to do with my own personal level of privilege. However, I have an ambivalence that is swiftly heading toward distrust when it comes to police and police action, especially large scale police action at the behest of the state. Any state.

There is something terrifying and immobilizing about recognizing how little recourse we as people have against our governments - even those that claim to be representatives of "the people", that large nebulous group that is always being trotted out with rhetorical flourish to assail or support a political point or a politician's plans and ambitions.

What enrages me the most about this particular incident is who this form of oppression happened to. These weren't seasoned and hardened political warriors. These weren't "professional" protesters. These were children - teenagers the age of or younger than my sisters. This is a group with little political capital, because they have yet to be able to vote. This is the group whose political activism we as a global community should nurture and encourage and recognize as being key to our good future.

What the British police did to these teens, who took the chance to try to make their voices heard and their presence felt, is despicable. The message they imparted was loud and clear - Sit down, shut up, and take whatever lumps we as a government decide to give you. Do not organize. Do not become politically active.

This is how states create apathy. This is how states destroy idealism. This is how states betray their citizens.

You's A Dick

Not you. Well, maybe you. It kind of depends on who you are.

But definitely these people in the first act of This American Life's most recent episode Bait & Switch.

Here's the accompanying article.

I'm, to put it mildly, not exactly happy with the idea of bait cars. I understand the impetus to make those criminally minded think twice about taking a car that looks like the perfect target. At the same time, I don't see how this isn't entrapment. And, possibly owing to my own admitted ambivalence toward the police and their authority, I see this as a potential conflict of interest.

In the article, there's one quote that stands out to me as particularly problematic.

"Let me ask you something: If you see a car with the keys in it, would you take it?" Tate said. "There are hundreds of people walking by these cars, and they make the choice to keep walking. The bottom line is this: If you see a car that doesn't belong to you, don't take it."

And sure, that is the bottom line. But that bottom line gets blurred when the person leaving the car open and inviting to be stolen is the person who is responsible for catching those who steal cars. The car would not have been there if the cops didn't think they could lure someone into taking said car.

And so, here we have a crime (or, in the case of Mark Ledford and Asia Ward, not even that) facilitated by the officers in question.

The same sort of morally grey case building has been highlighted before by This American Life, notably in Arms Trader 2009. That case had all the hallmarks of this one, had the same moral questions of setting someone up, of giving them all of the opportunities to commit a crime they otherwise may have never had the inclination to commit, and then arresting them and trying them for that crime. Another case highlighted in Act II by the This American Life episode Turncoat discussed Brandon Darby, a radical activist-turned-FBI informant who pushed two fellow (and fledgling) activists into more extreme actions than they otherwise would have participated in.

The moral implications of a nation whose policy it was to facilitate fake terrorist actions in order to smoke out people who would or could potentially turn to terrorism disturbed me. I would really rather not have a government goading people who perhaps do have some inklings or some potential to do some pretty bad shit, who have the potential to become arms dealers or crazed lefties throwing homemade bombs at Republican National Conventions, but who would very probably never get to that point on their own.

And in that comment by Sgt. Oliver Tate, it becomes clear as to why. No one should steal a car, or try to smuggle weapons to enemies of America or make plans to bomb places; but there is no moral high ground in creating the perfect storm effect, to push all of the buttons, on those people you suspect may have the want to steal a car or smuggle weapons or make bombs but who - without your help - would have none of the know-how or drive to do so.

What makes the case involving Mark Ledford and Asia Ward all the more abhorrent is what it demonstrates about the people who do plant the necessary buttons, who create those perfect crime-doing scenarios. It is that they don't care about the motivations. Mark Ledford called the car in to the police. He confirmed with a neighbor that she, too, called the car's presence in. And after he got no indication anything was going to be done, he decided to do something about the car himself. Smart? No. Criminal? Not in the least. And instead of admitting that they fucked up, instead of looking over their records and seeing what they could have done differently, instead of looking at the whole "bait" car itself and wondering if leaving a car unattended in a neighborhood may do more to unsettle the neighbors than it would ever accomplish in catching the criminally-minded-but-lazy, the police decided to leave out several salient details and set about bringing a case against Ledford and Ward. Instead of working to make the streets safer, the cops then were just being dicks.

And that's the problem with this "greater good" strategy. It gives too much power to those in authority. It trusts that those in authority are somehow more moral than the average person on the street. It trusts that in the event the authority is proven wrong, the authority will humbly admit to its mistake and take the necessary steps to correct it. And it does not allow for the formation of a crime independent of the entity responsible for stopping said crime. It makes the organization a facilitator in the crime it gets rewarded for preventing. And that? Is pretty heady. It is also possibly among the worst solutions to the problem.

Police & Perception

When I was younger, possibly 14, possibly 12, possible as young as 11 or as old as 17 (time and I have a tendency to not get along very well), my father instructed me to always drive to the nearest police station if I were pulled over later in the evening or not on a main road. There had been a rash of sexual assaults reported, many committed by men who were dressing up as police officers in order to more easily gain power over their victims. But some were actual police officers, who already had more power over their victims. So, my father told me to not forget these instances, to always drive to the nearest police station in the event I was pulled over late at night or not on a main road, and to do so if I felt unsafe in any way even if I was on a highway at noon.

They also had me watch movies like The Thin Blue Line when I was young, in order to start conversations about how the police weren't the ultimate authority, that the badge and the uniform doesn't mean perfection, doesn't mean absolute fidelity to the law, doesn't mean that when there is fidelity to the law that it isn't applied differently to different people. This is also the reason my first episode of Homicide when I was about 8 or 9 was "Black and Blue", an episode that wholly revolves around the police department covering when one of its own kills someone and one officer, Pembleton, fighting against the cover up while also delivering a confession to the murder by the murdered boy's friend.

Over the years, through the stories they told about their (black) friends and their (white) friends, that application differential became increasingly clear.

Because of all of this, I don't truly understand the hoopla that accompanied President Obama's remarks regarding the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. during his press conference, especially since he made it clear that he didn't "know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that". Especially since he quickly shifted the conversation to a larger one about why those who have been directly affected by situations in which race did play a negative role - and those, like me, who only have tangential evidence for how race does play a negative role - have made the assumption that race did play a negative role here, in this situation.

The best break down I can give, myself, is that I don't think the arrest was one of racial profiling. I don't think the officers - any of them - went into the situation thinking, "Let's arrest a black guy today". I don't even think the woman who called the cops thought that because there were two black men trying to enter a house in the afternoon, it was suspicious. I can give the benefit of the doubt and say that if two white guys she didn't recognize were trying to enter the house to the other side of her, she'd have called the cops as well. I've had the cops called on me when I was trying to break into my house in the afternoon, because I have good neighbors. Over the years, my neighbors have become accustomed to my breaking into my own house and now call to confirm that it was me.

But I do think the race of Professor Gates influenced the dynamic of the ensuing conversation - or, at the very least, I can see where his race would. And I can see where it would because of the excellent write up Latoya Peterson gives in the thread during the conversation ensuing from her post on Gates' arrest. When she says (in comment 102, for anyone interested),

I’m a black woman. I’ve never even been *close* to being in trouble with the law. It just doesn’t happen for me. Plus I grew up in MoCo, I have a great “white” voice and learned to mimic the type of assumptions and entitlement that my white peers (and a few upper class blacks) just knew.

However.

Every last one of my black and latino male friends has been arrested. They may not have been incarcerated. But they have all been arrested. I’ve seen maybe seven or so of these altercations begin. And in each occasion, the tone of the interaction is set by the officer. It’s normally the officer that initiates contact.

And for the life of me, I can’t reconcile these experiences.

I don’t understand why I’m at an out of control party with my white friends, who had a pile of cocaine in the bathroom, and the police come and barely look around, but when I’m sitting on a park bench with my black friend, the *park* police want to come by and harass him for littering since they spotted a cup underneath the bench. (One that was there before we arrived.)

I don’t understand why if the Salvadorean children I baby sat for were threatened with a knife by a white boy in the neighborhood, that the Officer who arrived berates us and their mother, then takes his hat off respectfully when approaching the grandparents of the white boy with the knife.

I don’t understand why I can watch the police get called to my building and watch the man making a ruckus get immediately escorted out, but when I call the police because there are two white guys down the hall screaming curses at a woman who isn’t answering the door, the police want to have a conversation and help solve his problem.

I say this as a person who was mentored by a Montgomery County Police Lieutenant.

I also understand that the very way we talk about race and racial dynamics - how on first pass, instead of writing,

But I do think the race of Professor Gates influenced the dynamic of the ensuing conversation - or, at the very least, I can see where his race would.

I wrote,

But I do think the race of Professor Gates changed the dynamic of the ensuing conversation - or, at the very least, I can see where his race would.

influences how we categorize events at hand. The difference may not seem all that grand, but for me, the difference is huge. In the original sentence, my original thought was that it was the fact that Gates was black that changed a neutral conversation.

But that isn't wholly correct. Race changes the conversation, period. If it were a white professor being questioned about whether or not he lived in this particular house on this particular street, the conversation would still be influenced by race. Depending on the individuals in question, maybe not much. And it might be that Crowley really did act stupidly for reasons wholly separate from race.

There is a part of this that didn't occur to me until I was reading what adelheide said on Ginmar's write-up of her impression of this particular incident:

The part that startles me is that the arresting officer is supposedly an expert on racial profilling and trains other officers how to not to do it. And yet he was completely baffled as to why Prof. Gates was upset about being confronted in his home. I would assume (dangerous word there) that someone trained to not racially profile people would understand that black people have a different experience with the police.

The fact that Sgt. Crowley "had been selected to be a police academy instructor on how to avoid racial profiling" seems to be used as shorthand, along with the fact that he gave mouth-to-mouth to Reggie Lewis, that he isn't a racist. And while that is probably true, I hadn't truly thought about what his being an instructor on how to avoid racial profiling meant in the opposite direction, what it meant for what Crowley himself should have potentially seen brewing in the context of the police's visitation.

These situations are incredibly complex, but there is a reason why many minorities think that Gates' race negatively influenced the arresting officer's actions - and there is a reason why many whites don't think race influenced the decision. It is easier to believe individual actions matter when your individual actions are spun positively, when you are met not with suspicion but with respect. When you aren't pulled over for driving while black, when you aren't questioned on park benches for litter that isn't yours, when these same situations keep happening to everyone you know. It is death by a thousand minute injustices; and those of us who don't have those continuing and continual experiences, for those of us who only occasionally deal with an asshole cop, it is easy to fathom that the way to handle these situations is to be polite, to be unfailingly gracious, to be thankful that a cop has come to your home to make sure you are supposed to be in it. And it could be easier to overrespond to an incident, to one incident after the dozens or hundreds or thousands that came before, incidents that involved you directly or friends or family or acquaintances, and believe that this particular incident has everything to do with your race - when it might only have something to do with your race, and unconsciously at that.