"The last thing the police should be worried about is being sued for kicking in your door"
Siad by FBI profiler and man-about-town Cliff Von Zandt (or whatever his name is) while talking about the very real difficulty involved in trying to search houses where nobody is home.
In my view, the police should do all sorts of emergency things in emergency situations... in "hot pursuit" and life-and-death type situations.
The problem is not kicking in a few doors, in itself. Again, the problem IS NOT KICKING IN DOORS. I don't want to be misunderstood in that point. If a door must be kicked in then it must.
The problem is that in these authoritarian terrorism frenzies (like the one that caused us to *ooops* murder 100,000 people because we essentially decided the pizza delivery guy was a burglar) people start getting off on how much contempt they can muster for the underlying fabric of our society.
The more contempt you have for anything not featured in a John Wayne movie or a techno-thriller the tougher you are. The more serious you are. People get into stuff about our distinguishing virtues as a tough people. Actually Genghis Kahn was probably a lot tougher than we are. Our real greatness does not lie in punchin' some guy in the mouth or wrasslin' a bear.
And you start saying "reasonable" sounding things like the last thing the police should be worried about is being sued for kicking in your door. The last thing the police should be worrying about is whether Snookie is losing weight too fast. The kicking in doors thing should usually be first on the list, and in rare cases may go down to second.
"Being sued for" is long-syanding code for doing things that our systems of laws does not permit that somebody like the ACLU might complain about.
It should not be obvious that "the last thing police should care about" is rules or procedures or the Constitution. Maybe in some circumstance it is not paramount and bows to exigency but it should never be a freaking joke... something facially trivial.
It is like Bush and Cheney chortling about how the last thing they were worried about is how some international convention defines torture.
The problem is not kicking in doors.
The problem is thinking that kicking in doors is what make you serious... proves your virtue. Shows that you are not Jimmy Carter or Wavy Gravy or whatever.
Big disasters and crisis provoke a lot of primal right-wing feeling and make people sort of CRAZY. FDR did not grow up hoping that someday he would get to intern American citizens along ethnic lines. But sometimes events make people so desperate to be sure that they have left no stone unturned that they lose their way... in the heat of war even really good people do stuff like setting up ethnic camps.
That's why war is the greatest enemy of democracy and liberty. Even reasonable people can turn into "tough guys" under the wrong circumstances.
But it should never be something to feel big about.
Also, civilian control of law enforcement is like civilian control of the military. It is the military's JOB to ask for too much. Really... they should, because if they ask for two little in a resource-competitive world they will reliably get too little. It is the civilian's JOB to not give them everything they ask for.
There is never a situation where civil authority's only concern should be giving the police whatever they say will make their job easier.
The police are supposed to ask for stuff they don't get.
Again, a question of mindset. I am all for extraordinary measures that are needed to achieve an extraordinary thing, but it does not follow that questions reduce to "what makes the police's job easiest?"
If skepticism regarding authority is only appropriate only when there is not a crisis of some sort then it would really never be appropriate.
= new reply since forum marked as read
