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p>I have a big deadline right now, but I feel compelled to respond to this bulletin from the Chicago Police that asks people to “immediately report any or all … suspect activity” including note taking, camera usage, video usage and map usage. [via BoingBoing, link to flyer image].
Before 9/11 I would have said that this sort of thing makes me want to explode, but I’ve expurgated such language in the same way that I no longer say hello to friends named Jack at the airport. I’ll simply say that the bulletin makes me sad and upset. You know exactly whose photo taking will be reported as suspicious and whose wont; Chicago has the third largest South Asian American population in the country, there are plenty of browns to drop a dime about.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this myself. Once I took a pad and pen to the courtyard behind my office to try to figure out how to craft a memo for work and was interrupted by the police who said that there had been a report of “suspicious activity” namely somebody “suspicious” “taking notes”.
I showed them my note pad and explained my behavior (which wasn’t unusual for that area at all), but that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted my ID and then they followed me back to my office so that they could verify that I actually did “belong” there. All for sitting around on a nice spring day and writing on a pad. And this was in a liberal town where they actually decided to follow procedures rather than detain first and ask questions later.
While I was able to get the whole thing straightened out, this sort of policy is deeply flawed for a variety of reasons:
- The list of suspicious activities is so broad that basically you get calls about “suspicious people”, i.e. brown folk. This means that the cops waste a lot of time with false alarms which crowds out their ability to do things that actually make us safer from terrorism, like investigate. Conservatives understand opportunity costs w.r.t. economics but seem to forget it when it comes to security, which baffles me.
- Cops are less able to actually investigate terrorism because they have alienated the very people who might help them get important leads. After my experience I think twice before reporting even a stray bag somewhere, can you imagine how hesitant an immigrant Muslim might be to go to the police if they heard something suspicious?
- Not only do cops do less productive anti-terrorism work, they also do less policing overall. The last figures I saw showed the FBI reduced the number of important crime prosecutions (drugs, organized crime, etc) by 30% in the aftermath of 9/11! There were 17,448 deaths due to drunk driving in 2001 — think about how many lives might have been saved if more resources had been spent on road safety. That’s almost a 9/11 death toll every two months.
- Innocent people get arrested and swallowed up. Purna Raj Bajracharya was a tourist from Nepal who took a video of a street that had a building with an FBI office in it. He was arrested and vanished entirely, his case was wiped from the public record. He got out only because the same FBI agent who arrested him got concerned and even that FBI agent couldn’t get the system to release Bajracharya, he had to go to the Legal Aid Society.
Security theater makes white people feel safer, but it is deeply pernicious and makes us all less safe. Every security expert I’ve spoken to has strongly criticized these sorts of policies (and I’ve been friends with some fairly high ranking security folk), but the politics of security seems to over ride all other considerations.
People shouldn’t drink things clearly labeled “Ass” on them… for once there might be truth in advertising 😉
shite! You got me good there, pingpongpingpongpingpong…. As a token of my appreciation, I’ll let the overused alanis morissette joke slide…
Khoofia, not to disagree, but the population of canada will fit into mumbai and a few suburbs, so its not really surprising that mps have much closer relationships with constituents (hell what you describe will not even happen in the u.s.; it has also to do with canada’s strong labor unions; we can have a discussion later about how unions promote solidarity even in the larger society). by the way, your whole comparison is patently unfair (again i do not disagree with your factual observations), as was the initial commentator’s comparison (which prompted you to comment); india is a very poor country; in fact it is somewhat of a theoretical anomaly (in the literature on democratization). it is not even supposed to be a democracy, given its level of inequality, social problems and lack of development.
What’s the big deal??
So the cops ask a few questions, and you can forcefully demolish any accusations. You do this diplomatically and vigorously such that the next time they think twice about approaching someone in a similar position. Get the police badge number and precinct to follow up on it. Write to your local editor. Post on blogs.
The police and state troopers in this country are by in large a conscientious group. They follow protocols and are trying to combat on a daily basis violence, drugs, prostitution and robbery.
After 9/11 cops have stopped me in the NY/NJ area. Big deal. I stood my ground and defended myself. This is what makes America great — if you perceive an injustice you have ample means to take corrective action. I continue to believe the law enforcement and justice in this country is almost universally on the side of innocents.
I don’t know Pingpong, but after throughly researching Sepia’s lexical history, it must be said that there’s nothing like going meta on a Friday night.
Camille, I guess you’re much more subtle than I am 🙂 I might have to take a lesson from your laid-back NorCal playbook.
yay, civic conscience! good for you, khoofia.
There are many people who claim to be dispassionate in their quest for justice. But most often than not they have pet concerns that focus their outrage in pretty predictable directions. Some people will play Chicken Little over Padilla and Lodi, for others Ruby Ridge & Waco cause extreme heartburn and pronouncements about law enforcement/judiciary being “jack booted thugs”. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing because I think a healthy society requires some conflict between competing interests. I would recommend that those of you who are trying to reach out to people like me who are not modern day Solons be more selective in who you choose as poster boys. Taliban groupies like Padilla/Guantanamo Britons are pretty poor choices. While it is true that these people may not be guilty of anything besides having disgusting opinions and keeping bad company, at the end of the day we the unwashed masses will know that they were instrumental in bringing about their own misfortune. I am far more moved by the fact that many of the Guantanamo Afghans were not taken on the battle field and may just be innocent peasants turned in for reward money.
W Varaiya @ 154:
Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work where I live, which is the jurisdiction of one of the most corrupt precincts in NYC. I personally know people who have been accosted by groups of police for no reason, and friends of mine have had cocaine planted on them just so they could be arrested and help fill the quotas we have here.
Vikram, honest and understandable mistake. After all, which reasonable person would deem a mere captain’s incarceration and sham trial as worthy of protest? A colonel, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
I guess one must be grateful that the tired old boring opinions of obsessive justice pansies are not deemed disgusting by the arbiters of the acceptable level of arbitrariness in our society. Of course, one wonders why Afghans who, like those illegal Bangladeshi Muslims, are guilty of belonging to the wrong religion and living on the wrong side of a border, should not be summarily judged as capable of the most heinous acts and preemptively dealt the retribution that they would have received in the event that they had committed the crimes that we thought that they intended to commit.
It is indeed the people who worry about erosions of basic rights in an “Al Qaeda is falling, Al Qaeda is falling” frenzy who are the Chicken Littles. Maybe the trail of (how dare he have a name that is a homonym of a known criminal!) bread crumbs must lead to a windowless and keyless cell before we are allowed to acknowledge the risk of a witch hunt.
Pondering such issues kept you up late ?
Perhaps you can infiltrate the FBI or CIA and peek into their secret files to find all those windowless/keyless/doorless/curtainless cells. They have pretty liberal hiring policies… Maybe even offer to do a Martha Stewart makeover on those danged grim sounding cells.
Rahul: There you go again. India does not have a right to detain or torture Bangladeshi illegals and I have never suggested that they do. But the GOI has an obligation to prevent their entry into India and the right to repatriate them without any punitive detention. India does not have the resources to support these people and should be rightfully concerned about demographic shift given the continued support for the Two Nation theory by “progressives” (in quotes because last time I checked religion as a basis for nationhood is illiberal, at least if you are a Hindu or Christian)
Don’t be too surprised by these crazy accusations. For a certain cohort on this blog, its preferable to make random accusations and bring up irrelevant charges than actually debate.
louiecypher, fair enough about calling me out on my unnecessary rhetorical flourish. I don’t want that to distract from my larger point in the comment though.
That said, while an economic argument to keep Bangladeshi Muslims out might be more defensible (although it still has the massive arbitrariness of being born on the right side of a random line on the ground, and we can argue about the (un)fairness of that demarcation), and I don’t know what “progressives” you are talking about, I do not think the answer to the poisonous notion of countries based on a Muslim identity is to create a “secular” country defined by its Hindu identity where all Muslims are treated as guilty of being a fifth column unless they prove otherwise. I will keep from discussing this specific issue more on this thread though, as that would derail it, and I’m sure we will have tons of other opportunities.
For Profool and others who think life is fine and dandy if they have their lives in the hands of the government, read this:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0751,thompson,78685,2.html
A quote below:
“Although he was never accused of committing a crime, Narinder Singh spent years locked up in an immigration detention cell, courtesy of the federal government. He was beaten by a fellow inmate, spent time in the hole, and lived in a pod with 40 other men, deprived of sunlight,..”
The unique thing about the US, which should NEVER diminish, is the respect for individuals’ rights. Whenever you concede an inch on that point, you lose a mile. Not perfect, perhaps, but the best there is on this planet.
The USA is unique among all other countries that NO official takes an oath to protect the people or the land: the oath is to preserve and protect the Constitution. May that always be the case!
For Profool and others who think life is fine and dandy if they have their lives in the hands of the government, read this:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0751,thompson,78685,2.html
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Secret prisons, torture, indefinite detention and weakened habeas corpus are unconstitutional in my view. Americans will never support a Kafkaesque society. With said, we need a coherent policy on illegal immigration. This man appears to be undocumented, and if we had a coherent national policy regarding undocumented his rights would be better protected — as would ours.
Let me give you another example of the GREAT MAGNANIMITY of this country.
Robert Hansen, the most damaging spy of our generation, had nearly a two decade plus spying career for the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War. He was convicted and sent to jail for life.
Do you know what happened to his wife?
His wife receives the FBI pension Robert Hansen would have been eligible for his years of (dis)service in the FBI. The USA determined she was innocent, and thought Hansen spent his time damaging country it chose not to punish her.
This is type of generosity is emblematic of this country.
13 · prafool said
Someone smarter than I am once said “Those who trade their liberties for their security deserve neither.” No one wants another 9/11, but at the same time they would like a basic right to do what you want. Last time I checked, the technology had progressed far enough that no one needs to “intrude” to find out what one is doing IN PUBLIC. I can definitely agree if one is doing something out of the ordinary in a given environment (taking notes near a Nuclear power plant v/s taking notes on a train). As Lewis Black (??) once quipped — “What do you consider suspicious/strange in NYC? I have seen people talking to sandwiches on a train!”