Steve Chapman at Reason writes:
Isaac Newton formulated three laws of motion, No. 3 being: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If he were still around, he’d propose a fourth: For every action, there is an unequal and opposite overreaction.
[...]
Last week, a 17-year-old knucklehead exposed his idiocy to the world by venturing onto the field at a Philadelphia Phillies game and running around waving a towel. When a pursuing policeman got weary of the chase, he pulled out his Taser and shot the kid.
For that, the officer won praise from players, sportscasters, and city police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who said the cop “acted appropriately. I support him 100 percent.” The cop was in line with department policy, Ramsey said, because “he was attempting to make an arrest and the male was attempting to flee.”
The recommendations from the Taser company themselves, as well as from something called the Police Executive Research Forum says that people should only be zapped if they are dangerous, but I’m sure that nobody is surprised to hear that the officer in question ‘acted appropriately’. No matter what havoc police wreak, they are always found, after the fact, in an investigation that’s secret because it’s a ‘personnel matter’, to have ‘followed appropriate procedures’. The procedures that, appropriately followed, apparently produce results that the public doesn’t think make sense are, of course, never questioned.
I was reminded of all of this by a traffic report I heard while driving around this morning; a couple blocks of 6th St. NW in Washington is closed ‘due to police activity’. This is troubling for a couple of reasons.
First, because in these cases you rarely hear actual information about what’s going on. DDOT says on Twitter that it’s for a ‘suspicious package’. You don’t need to know this to make decisions about your route, but hearing reports of ‘police activity’ just kind of creeps me out. ‘Police business, citizen. Nothing to see here.’ The word ‘citizen’ would be said here with a sneer; it’s not a term of respect. Civis Americanus sum, which, for the benefit of those whose Latin is rusty, these days increasingly means something like ‘Shut up and go away’.
Second, ‘police activity’ always trumps everything else, without any need for further justification. In the case of a ‘suspicious package’, shutting down two blocks of a significant thoroughfare might be the right action; if it’s a bomb and it explodes, people will complain that the cops didn’t shut down enough streets. The real problem is that the threshold for what counts as ‘suspicious’ is ridiculously low. What’s a suspicious package? Any package. Or any bag of old tube socks. You’re not allowed to question this reasoning.
‘Police activity’ of the kind that shuts down roads, though, usually means a collision; sometimes they’ll call this a ‘police investigation’ on the radio. These situations are particularly galling; take a few pictures, and then pick up the bodies and shove the wrecked cars off the road. What’s there to investigate? Two or more cars ran into one another. One of the drivers is probably more at fault than the other; but determining this to 99% confidence does not justify shutting down half the lanes on the Interstate (and creating unsafe traffic for miles around; remember that the official justification for draconian enforcement of traffic laws is to enhance safety) for an hour.
This is no concern of the police and of the traffic authorities, though; they are already where they need to be, and if they’re not, they have sirens and flashing lights. All those people backed up in traffic? Presumably they’ve got some business of their own to attend to, but as it’s non-police business, how important can it possibly be?
And this same kind of idiocy extends to the ‘suspicious package’ business. The traffic report of 6th Street being closed has a timestamp of 8:35 a.m. on it, so the road was closed some time prior to that: let’s be generous and say 8:30. It’s currently 10 a.m., so traffic in downtown Washington has been screwed up for an hour and a half, so far.
Here’s the solution: build a deformable, high-density box — kevlar lined with ferroconcrete lined with lead lined with more kevlar, maybe — with a big hole on one side, and a big hook on the opposite side. Outfit the inside of this box with TV cameras and lights and robot arms. Put this box on the back of a flatbed truck, and equip the flatbed truck with police lights and a siren and a small crane. This truck is a standard item, used for delivering building supplies. Park this thing in a police garage.
When a ‘suspicious package’ is found, deploy the truck to the scene (with a siren and lights, you can get between any two points in DC in 20 minutes at the most), lower this box over the package, withdraw to a safe distance, and examine the thing by remote control. If it’s a bomb, you might have to shut down streets etc. to get it out of there or to detonate it in place. If it’s not a bomb, you now know this and can get the hell out of there and let the city get on about its business.
To the government, though, the police business is the real business of the city.
