If All You Have Is A Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Nail

Know your rights.  When confronted with police – don’t be bullied.

You know things are bad when Mother Jones publishes an article about the U.S. becoming a police state.

If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail.  And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated like a criminal.   This has become the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems by throwing cops at them.  Wall to wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

By now the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where “the War on Crime” and “the War on Drugs” are no longer metaphors but bland understatements.  There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns, the use of shock and awe tactics to bust small time bookies, the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members, and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war.   But over-policing involves more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local law enforcement.  It is also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.

It started in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to police.  What not long ago would have been seen as normal childhood misbehavior can lead a kid in handcuffs, removed from school, or even booked.

Even something as simple as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed.  Waiting for a bus, you could be charged with loitering;  driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest; if the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offering.  Air travel entails intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than security theater.

Office and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police and prosecutors but criminal law has found its way into the white-collar workplace.  Staying at home carries its own risks as well.

Even the internet is under siege.  Thanks to contractor Edward Snowden we have learned a great deal about the way the NSA stops and frisks our digital communications, both email and telephonic.  The security benefits of such indiscriminate policing are far from clear despite the government’s emphatic but inconsistent assurances otherwise.

Sex is another zone of police overkill.  Getting your name on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy as has been done to children as young as 11 for playing doctor with a relative.  Getting taken off the registry is extraordinarily difficult.

The term ‘police-state’ was once brushed off by mainstream intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids.   Not so much anymore.  Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system, the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with greater frequency and intensity.   You’re Probably A Criminal is the accusatory title of a widely read essay coauthored by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.  A Republican appointee, Koozinski surveys the morass of criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for law enforcement.   Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has written an entire book about how an average American professional could easily commit three felonies in a single day without knowing it.

A hammer is necessary to any toolkit.  But you don’t use a hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato, or brush your teeth.  And yet the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our domestic order.   The result is not peace, justice, or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about freedom.

“None are more hopeless enslaved than those who falsly believe they are free.”  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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