Your Civil Rights Only Apply When They’re Easy
You may recall that concurrent with the WTO coming to Seattle, there were some riots (often by people with nothing to do with the protests) and some bad acts on the part of the police. Apparently the bad behavior on the part of the police doesn’t count (either for individual members of the force or the people who should have been overseeing them) to the Seattle chapter of the Federalist Society.
Last Monday, a class-action trial began in federal court alleging various civil rights violations of people who were arrested during the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Specifically, according to the plaintiffs, the issue is this:
[P]olice arrested about 200 demonstrators gathered in Westlake Park — primarily for pedestrian interference and obstructing an officer — without any individualized evidence that they had broken the law.In pretrial proceedings before U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman, the city recanted earlier testimony and admitted that the police didn’t order the demonstrators to disperse before arresting them. Once they were in custody, police used a boilerplate, photocopied arrest record for everyone.
It always chaps my hide when violent protesters - or those who refuse to self-police their fellow protestors - whine about the violations of their rights. The rest of the people of the city, who actually work and contribute to the economy, could not get to work, suffered tremendous damage to their property, and in many cases, feared for their safety. I would love to see a class action suit from those folks against the professional protest groups who spearheaded the destruction.
Given how the vast vast majority of the protesters were non-violent, given how many people were arrested who didn’t do anything wrong, and given that even though I was on a proscribed march route and it took me years to get the tear gas out of my suit, what the fuck?
(All of this property destruction and wasted tax dollars, I might add, in the name of restricting the ability of the Third World to join our prosperity by denying them the ability to engage in capitalism. American liberals love the myth of the Noble Savage, and will fight to preserve it - wishes and life expectancy of said “savages” not withstanding.)
Well there were about as many reasons for people to be there as there were people there. But for my part it was to make the agreements make sense. To get labor rights and environmental protections into the agreements.
But even if these particular people weren’t breaking the law, should a different standard apply when a city is under siege? When large groups have broken into full scale riot, arson has been attempted and is being threatened, city and personal property is being destroyed, and the safety of innocent citizens city-wide is in question, should we be as strict with standards of probable cause as we would be with an individualized suspect at a routine traffic stop?
No. While I certainly have no idea of the difficulties of being a member of the police force, during a riot or any other time, they do train for it. And we expect them to be professionals at all times.
When a large disaster takes place which injures many people at once, acceptable standards of medical care change. Doctors in a triage situation make decisions they would never make even in an emergency room. They give up on certain patients who might otherwise be saved, they
provide the most cursory of diagnoses, and they don’t bother with minor injuries that otherwise would be treated to prevent infection. We accept and understand this change of standards, because we understand the heightened danger, limited resources, and speed at which decisions must be made requires it.
But there are things that are unacceptable no matter what. That’s why healthcare workers are being charged with murder for actions taken during Katrina. They stand accused of doing things that they would never contemplate in normal times. Nonetheless, they are expected to follow some standards of decency and of humanity. The same with the police. While they can’t give everyone the same attention they would give in normal times, they always have to act like trained professionals. And they have to respect people’s rights.
The same thinking should apply to police responses when civil order has broken down, and the city faces immediate and direct threats to the safety of a city’s property and citizenry. “Probable Cause” should encompass the situation - groups of protesters ignoring the police are more likely to break the law when wide-scale lawlessness brought about by their fellow protesters is already underway. We can’t and shouldn’t issue blank checks to riot police, but we need to be honest with the way riots and their participants work.
We can’t issue a blank check to riot police, but if they want to rob a bank, we can look the other way.
The price of not doing that is to allow riots to become even more violent, and indeed deadly. This is not idle conjecture, but exactly what happened in Seattle two years later when Mardi Gras revelry became violent, but the mayor and the police were afraid of “over reacting.” The results were far worse riots (despite fewer people being involved), leaving one man dead. And I believe that Seattle’s current rise in violent crime is directly related to a continuation of this failure to learn the right lessons from the WTO disaster.
Holy fuck on toast. A rise in crime in Seattle (that’s accompanied by a rise in crime nationally) is the fault of not violating people’s rights at some point. And we’ve gone from exceptional circumstances to every case. Wow.
In the meantime, the best way for hippy protesters to safeguard their rights - and ours as well - is to behave and police themselves. If civil disorder and property damage is threatened every time a rally takes place, then we’ll start seeing some real encroachments on free speech and assembly. Licensing schemes will become more onerous, police will become less willing to hope for the best before they start swinging batons, city officials will face enormous incentive to lie, and an even wider swath of innocent bystanders will be impacted.
Yes, if instead of staying at segregated lunch counters, if those filthy hippies had just politely asked them to desegregate, we wouldn’t have had all those problems. And if people opposed to Viet Nam had just politely asked Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford to please stop, then they totally would have stopped.
By using the circumstances of an arrest to more correctly define the law under which that arrest occurred, to include giving the police more leeway in times of emergency and large scale disorder, we will actually protect our rights. But if these protesters are successful in suckerpunching the city yet another time, this time with costly lawsuits, all of our freedoms will suffer.
Shorter Orrin Johnson: Look, hippies, we can’t assume the police will be professionals. If they happen to put you in prison for the crime of doing nothing wrong, there simply shouldn’t be any recourse. Think of it like triage. You aren’t dead, so it’s actually a success. At least they didn’t use fire hoses or German Shepherds this time.
January 16th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Nice! I’ve been waiting for something good to rip on from that site. Good to see a federalist society arguing for greater police power. Idiocracy commence!!
January 16th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
In the immortal words of Strom Thurmond, “these so-called civil rights” of ours are mere luxuries, to be jettisoned the instant they present the slightest of inconveniences to folks like Strom Thurmond.
I lived six blocks from the Convention Center during WTO, and I took 30 November 1999 off from work, to attend the peaceful protest and rally. Police attacked us protesters, pure and simple. The police I pay to protect me actually did the most to endanger me. (I put much of the blame on the civil authority, for not preparing better.) The level of historical revisionism in the cited post would have made the most cynical editor of Pravda very proud.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:06 am
“While I certainly have no idea of the difficulties of being a member of the police force, during a riot or any other time…” (emphasis added)
This admission is at the heart of your misunderstanding of my comments, as well as the law, and (along with your straw men) leaves you with very little credibility. You clearly expect police to be “professional,” but by your own admission, you have “no idea” of what that actually entails. Your willful ignorance of the very real fears and problems police and public officials face when rioting has broken out, not to mention the harm being done to anyone besides yourself, is what allows you to not understand your own responsibility in protecting our rights or our freedoms.
I was not arguing that these particular police officers are not liable (they may well be), or that the Constitution doesn’t apply even during times of civil disorder. I’m saying what constitutes “probable cause” for an arrest must take the broader situation into consideration, just as other constitutional terms such as “reasonableness” in searches and seizures do. The alternative is what Seattle has adopted - simply refuse to enforce the law at all. And when you refuse to enforce the law, you get what we have in this city - a rise in violent crime.
If you want to continue to believe the fairy tale that the big bad police were gleefully tossing tear gas into a purely peaceful protest (it gets in their laundry, too) and hauling people off to jail for no reason other than just for fun, or because the city was being run by fascist Republicans and Bushitler in 1999, that’s your business. Similarly, you’re more than welcome to continue to remain in ignorance of the logistics and dangers involved in police response to riots and arson. You can even with a straight face continue to assert that the WTO protests had any similarity whatsoever to the Civil Rights Movement. But if that’s your choice, I’d just ask you to leave policy decisions to the grownups who live in the real world.
In the meantime, please don’t expect anyone to view you as a victim when you made the choice to participate in an event where violence and destruction had previously and publicly been threatened - putting you on notice that being caught up in that violence was a risk you were choosing to assume. The real issue is that your post seems to define “civil rights” as “being able to do anything I want without consequence,” which is not at all what the Constitution envisions.
Thehim, you are always welcome to “rip on” anything from our site at any time. We have a comments section for that express purpose. However, if the above is indicative of your refutation skills, you may want to think twice before submitting your thoughts somewhere your assumptions might actually be challenged (it’s less comfortable than the echo chamber, but more intellectually rewarding).
Thanks for reading.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
“In the meantime, please don’t expect anyone to view you as a victim when you made the choice to participate in an event where violence and destruction had previously and publicly been threatened - putting you on notice that being caught up in that violence was a risk you were choosing to assume.”
Wow, what an ignorant and hateful thing to say. I was part of a huge, peaceful march, down Fourth Avenue from Memorial Stadium to downtown Seattle, on 30 Nov. 1999. We walked past curious spectators and supportive spectators, all in perfect calm. We even passed mounted police, who were sitting and chatting amongst themselves, at the Stewart Street / Olive Way intersection with Fourth Avenue. At Fourth and Pike, a melee involving armed police against unarmed protesters — caught on video camera by King 5 TV News — was already underway, our first sign of trouble. Tens of thousands of peaceful marchers ‘deserved’ to get attacked by the local police, because some of the latter had over-reacted? Why even bother with concepts like ‘civil rights’? (And if everyone knew of threatened violence, why had the Mayor and police chief left the police so completely unprepared for it?)
Also, the original post absolutely stinks with fear of those filthy rabble acting on their unlicensed opinions. Why, they just deserve to get whacked, by their own tax dollars in action! Else, they might get the dangerous idea that their opinions count for something (other than a savage beating). That’s really all dissenters ever deserve, anyway.