“For your own protection”

There is no situation that cannot be made instantly and immeasurably worse through police intervention. A splendid illustration of this principle is found in a recent ruling from the the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

According to the court, police were entitled to arrest, taze, and beat a teenager who had done nothing more sinister than speak to his mother on the street in front of their home. A police officer accosted the young man – who, as a juvenile, is identified only by the initials "R.R." – after he saw him approaching a woman who was walking a dog.

The officer, who belongs to a social cohort of people who are distinguished primarily by their timidity, claimed that he was "concerned for the woman’s safety." His fears should have been allayed when it was established that the woman was the teenager’s mother.

If the cop had been an actual peace officer, he would have tipped his hat and left. But he was a law enforcer – that is, someone through whose dark ministrations innocent people are transformed into "criminals" – and so he insisted on detaining and interrogating the entirely harmless youngster. To that end he sent for "backup," and a thugscrum soon coalesced around the puzzled and terrified teen.

As the Court of Appeals summarizes, R.R. was "tasered several times, removed from the backseat [of a police vehicle], thrown to the ground, tasered again, kicked, handcuffed, and arrested." All of this was done because the young man "moved around and wrestled around while the officers held him on the ground, making it difficult for the officers to put the cuffs on him."

Because he didn’t permit himself to be shackled like a slave in front of his own home because he had been seen speaking to his mother, the teenager committed the supposed crime of "refusing to submit to arrest."

The trial court in the case also acknowledged that the victim was "a fine young man, an excellent student, and active in sports, clubs and church activities." The judge reportedly expressed dismay that "an innocent situation … just completely got out of hand" – which is, once again, the familiar and entirely predictable outcome when members of the State’s enforcement caste materialize. Despite these superficial expressions of regret, the Judge sentenced the victim to serve one day in detention – thereby leaving him with a criminal record because he had been on the receiving end of a state-aggravated assault.

Like most communities in its section of the country, Pope County, Arkansas, where that incident occurred, is thickly populated with Evangelical Christians, whose numbers probably include most elected officials, prosecutors, judges, and police officers. At some point in Sunday School they probably read the 22nd chapter of the Book of Acts, which describes how the Apostle Paul, accused of disturbing the peace, was arrested by Roman occupation soldiers and taken to a local barracks to be questioned under scourging.

As the interrogator was preparing to whip the apostle, Paul pointed out to the centurion in charge that it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen unless he had been tried and convicted of a crime. This objection caused the interrogator to desist immediately, and prompted the officer in command to express the fear that he could face criminal charges because he had chained – that is, handcuffed – a Roman citizen.

Every day in this supposedly free country, police commit an act that was impermissible for their antecedents in imperial Rome: In the name of "officer safety," they handcuff American citizens who are not criminal suspects while conducting investigations. Police also routinely inflict summary punishment – using batons, Tasers, pepper spray, or other means – against those who resist being detained without cause. Within a few years police will have at their disposal handcuffs that can impart electrical shocks to detainees.

In an 1894 essay published by The Strand Magazine, Inspector Maurice Moser of Scotland Yard wrote that the earliest historical mention of handcuffs was in the fourth century B.C., "when soldiers of a conquering Greek army found among the baggage of the routed Carthaginians several chariots full of handcuffs, which had been held ready in confident anticipation of a multitude of prisoners."

"My personal experience of handcuffs is small, because I dislike them," wrote Inspector Moser of the restraints. He pointed out that in Belgium, which at the time was the seat of a substantial empire, "the use of handcuffs by police is entirely forbidden."

Like most police officers of his era, Moser was a relatively civilized man who found the act of shackling another human being to be barbarous and punitive. Handcuffing a human being certainly doesn’t enhance the safety of the person being restrained. Nor does it relieve police anxieties about the all-encompassing threat to that most sacred of considerations, "officer safety." Witness the large and ever-growing number of cases in which officers – almost always in the plural, of course – beat, taze, pepper-spray, and even shoot suspects who have already been handcuffed.

Original report here




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