I've had a thought bubble up to the surface of my mind several times recently in connection to a wide variety of topics: where's the why? Any good detective (or frequent watcher of Law and Order) knows that when there is a crime, or a suspected crime, a central part of the investigation is looking for a motive. The "why". Its occurred to me that this critical piece of analytical thought is completely missing from the public and political dialogue from 9/11 to Occupy Wall St. I don't think its an accident though, I think its a symptom of a polarized and radical way of thinking that is pervasive (but more on this later).
At the wake of 9/11, the United States was shaken to the core. People were scared, equally as much of the prospect of another attach as of the shattered notion we have of US invincibility. Many conversations happened in the public sphere: homeland security, airports, terrorism, extremism, anti-Muslin sentiments, Al-queda, Taliban, Iraq, Afghanistan, war, weapons of mass destruction, etc. One conversation that I never heard was: "why?" I don't want it to be implied that if we could find a good reason than the action would be justified - I don't believe that at all. But even an unjustifiable actor has a motivation. To do what those men did - hijack planes and fly them into buildings - was not 'easy'. It was not a random, thoughtless act of violence. Whether we agree with them or not, human beings almost have justifications for the actions.
But its not even the answer that I'm in search of - its the question. Where was this conversation? Why did we declare war in retaliation before ever discussing why the action took place? We had a knee jerk reaction of 'lets go to war and get them back'. In a 7 year old boy or a pack of wolves this would be understandable but I expect better of adult humans, even moreso of Americans - purveyors of democracy, rule of law and reason all over the world.
One answer given was simply: "They are Muslims and the Koran told them to kill themselves as part of this war on America and the West. The Koran even offers them 72 virgins in 'heaven' - thats why they did it. They are crazy, radical, thoughtless terrorist monsters". But this brings me back to something I mentioned above: the absence of a thorough investigation into 'why' this crime happened against us is a symptom of a larger problem. We've ceased seeing people as our equals - whether it is America vs Muslims or Blue State vs Red State. We've lost the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and try to think like them. We can no longer imagine what it is to think differently than we already do - its a failure of imagination. We boil everything down to: "anyone who thinks differently than I do is a lunatic (or a terrorist) and its not worth trying to consider their motivations".
The connection to Occupy Wall Street is this: so many of the conversations in the main stream media are knee jerk reactions. They look different, we are scared. I heard one of them use the words socialism and anarchy, thats crazy talk. Look at the police in riot gear, this must be a riot. How expensive is it going to be to pay all these cops overtime? Look - they are trampling on the flowers!
And, yes people have asked 'why are you here?' but only really to get a quick answer and move on to 'when will you leave?'
This is a bit of rambler, I apologize. I'm just trying to narrow down what it is exactly that we are missing in American public dialogue. Part of it is the inquisitive 'why' but I guess it really boils down to a deeper, more complex understanding of the issues.
Arg, I'd rate my own blog post a C+ at best.
Thanks for reading.
- Mark
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
To ACD or not to ACD
Usually my blog posts are like radio broadcasts: I have a message to tell the world and here it is. But this one is different, I have something to work out and its easier to do it on paper. But since this is the year 2030 and we've already cut down the last tree, here I am on the blog.
Tomorrow morning at 9:30am, I appear in court in Manhattan in response to recieving a summons on the the Manhattan-side of the Brooklyn-Bound Brooklyn Bridge on Oct 1st. I was marching with a crown of ~1500, which got cut off by the NYPD to about 700 people on the bridge. About halfway across the roadway, the police blocked us in from both sides using orange nets and arrested all 700 of us. I have 2 summonses: Use of a Prohibited Roadway and Blocking Vehicular Traffic. I'm told I will be offered an ACD, which means 'adjournment contemplating dismissal', in other words: we'll drop the charge if you don't get arrested for the next 6 months.
This blog is specifically about whether or not I will take the ACD, if it is offered to me. The following are a few lines of logic:
1. Some people say that the cops behavior gave the protesters the impression that we had permission to go onto the bridge. I did see 2 or 3 cops at the front, one white shirt saying something into a bull horn. Then people just marched through. The argument goes: once we were on the bridge, they had a hundred cops, orange nets and everything. They seemed to work a small fraction as hard to keep us off the bridge and it certainly seems like they basically let us get on the bridge so they could arrest us.
To me, this line of logic is flawed. Firstly, I knew damn well going on that bridge was illegal. You don't have to be stopped by the police in order to know your action is illegal. That being said - I do think its probably true. They did let us on to arrest us.
2. The motifs of the cops are clear when the situation is considered thus: had we been unstopped by the police, the march would have blocked the bridge for MAYBE 30-40 minutes. The bridge isn't that long and people were walking quickly because we were excited. We had no plans to stop on the bridge or prolong the crossing. The police, however, DID stop us on the bridge and spent (literally) 4-6 hours arresting us one by one. If the purpose of the arrest was to clear the roadway for cars, it would have been effective to let us continue walking. I think its clear the purpose of the arrest was something else: to make a big show of police power and try to stamp out the Occupy Wall St protest movement by arresting as many of us as they could. All that being said - the intent of the police doesn't change whether the action was illegal, which it was. We were using a roadway intended for cars.
3. No one participating in a protest should accept an ACD because it can be used as a tool of deterring people from participating in future protests. This may, in fact, be true. But in reality, it would be a deterrent from the breaking the law - which the court doesn't really need to secretive about. Plus a second arrest in a short amount of time would look bad in court with or without an ACD. I think this is sort of a weak argument, although it might be true.
[The above 3 arguments were purely theoretical, I had already ruled them out by the time of writing; I just included them for the sake of thoroughness.]
3. I should plead guilty because, strictly speaking, I am guilty of the crimes they are accusing me of. This is not, as some people would like to claim, an obscure case. I am being accused of blocking traffic and using a road ment for cars and I am, technically, guilty of that. This argument is exactly the same for accepting the ACD, which is not an admission of guilt or innocence. If breaking the law was an act of civil disobedience, then accepting the appropriate punishment is part of this disobedience. Breaking a law and running to hide isn't civil disobedience, neither is hiring a good lawyer who can wriggle you out of a guilt ruling.
4. Being offered an ACD is, in some ways of thinking, a very strange thing. The police arrested (or really, detained) me for almost 12 hours on October 1st, supposedly because I was breaking a law. Now, 2 months later, without a trial or even hearing a plead from me, the court is likely to offer me a chance to walk away with no hearing and no fine or punishment. There is a futuristic conditional but, logically, that can't play into whether I did or did not break the law nor whether I should be punished in some way. Why should I be offered a get out of jail free card? The DA has no reason to show me favor, not that I know of. I can think of a few possible answers: 1) They know I am innocent but don't want to spend court time and money on declaring me innocent. 2) They don't care if I am guilty or innocent because the law I broke wasn't important or shouldn't be on the books. 3) They don't care whether I'm guilty or innocent, they just want to deter me from participating in further protests.
I've already addressed #3, so Im going to ignore it. If #2 or 3 is true, then I was arrested falsely and not only deserve an innocent ruling but the rules should be changed. More importantly, both of these options would be evidence of a broken system: not only the court system, which offers get out of jail free cards to people who should never have been up for jail in the first place, but the enforcement system (NYPD). In some ways, accepting an ACD is playing a part in a very unlawful system in which police can arrest people just to break up an event (this is much more broad than crossing a bridge) that they don't like. They don't have to prove or even suspect that someone is breaking the law - they know (and the DA knows and the judge knows) that the detainee can be given an ACD and let off, so the cop doesn't have to ever prove that he or she was in the right when they made the arrest. For the detainee this makes sense because its definitely better than risking being found guilty, but for future protests and actors of civil disobedience its terrible. It means the cops have a system in which to remove you from the street without evidence of guilt, threaten you with jail time and then bribe you to forget about the whole thing with removal of the threat. But if you were never guilty, then there was no threat in the first place.
And this, long as it may be, is a very power argument for not accepting the ACD regardless of whether I think I am guilty or innocent. Because being offered the ACD is part of a corrupt system which allows the NYPD to take people off the street without due process. Yes, its true that the court case might come later but there has been no consideration of justice or evidence when a person was removed from the street and placed in a jail cell. Giving the police this power is dangerous and the process is an abridgment of American freedoms.
Thoughts are welcome.
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Nothing in this blog post or any other should be taken as an admission of guilt; the writing in this blog cannot be used in the aforementioned court case or any other. Everything said here is in a purely theoretical manner and should be considered no more than story telling or a philosophical thought experiment.
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Tomorrow morning at 9:30am, I appear in court in Manhattan in response to recieving a summons on the the Manhattan-side of the Brooklyn-Bound Brooklyn Bridge on Oct 1st. I was marching with a crown of ~1500, which got cut off by the NYPD to about 700 people on the bridge. About halfway across the roadway, the police blocked us in from both sides using orange nets and arrested all 700 of us. I have 2 summonses: Use of a Prohibited Roadway and Blocking Vehicular Traffic. I'm told I will be offered an ACD, which means 'adjournment contemplating dismissal', in other words: we'll drop the charge if you don't get arrested for the next 6 months.
This blog is specifically about whether or not I will take the ACD, if it is offered to me. The following are a few lines of logic:
1. Some people say that the cops behavior gave the protesters the impression that we had permission to go onto the bridge. I did see 2 or 3 cops at the front, one white shirt saying something into a bull horn. Then people just marched through. The argument goes: once we were on the bridge, they had a hundred cops, orange nets and everything. They seemed to work a small fraction as hard to keep us off the bridge and it certainly seems like they basically let us get on the bridge so they could arrest us.
To me, this line of logic is flawed. Firstly, I knew damn well going on that bridge was illegal. You don't have to be stopped by the police in order to know your action is illegal. That being said - I do think its probably true. They did let us on to arrest us.
2. The motifs of the cops are clear when the situation is considered thus: had we been unstopped by the police, the march would have blocked the bridge for MAYBE 30-40 minutes. The bridge isn't that long and people were walking quickly because we were excited. We had no plans to stop on the bridge or prolong the crossing. The police, however, DID stop us on the bridge and spent (literally) 4-6 hours arresting us one by one. If the purpose of the arrest was to clear the roadway for cars, it would have been effective to let us continue walking. I think its clear the purpose of the arrest was something else: to make a big show of police power and try to stamp out the Occupy Wall St protest movement by arresting as many of us as they could. All that being said - the intent of the police doesn't change whether the action was illegal, which it was. We were using a roadway intended for cars.
3. No one participating in a protest should accept an ACD because it can be used as a tool of deterring people from participating in future protests. This may, in fact, be true. But in reality, it would be a deterrent from the breaking the law - which the court doesn't really need to secretive about. Plus a second arrest in a short amount of time would look bad in court with or without an ACD. I think this is sort of a weak argument, although it might be true.
[The above 3 arguments were purely theoretical, I had already ruled them out by the time of writing; I just included them for the sake of thoroughness.]
3. I should plead guilty because, strictly speaking, I am guilty of the crimes they are accusing me of. This is not, as some people would like to claim, an obscure case. I am being accused of blocking traffic and using a road ment for cars and I am, technically, guilty of that. This argument is exactly the same for accepting the ACD, which is not an admission of guilt or innocence. If breaking the law was an act of civil disobedience, then accepting the appropriate punishment is part of this disobedience. Breaking a law and running to hide isn't civil disobedience, neither is hiring a good lawyer who can wriggle you out of a guilt ruling.
4. Being offered an ACD is, in some ways of thinking, a very strange thing. The police arrested (or really, detained) me for almost 12 hours on October 1st, supposedly because I was breaking a law. Now, 2 months later, without a trial or even hearing a plead from me, the court is likely to offer me a chance to walk away with no hearing and no fine or punishment. There is a futuristic conditional but, logically, that can't play into whether I did or did not break the law nor whether I should be punished in some way. Why should I be offered a get out of jail free card? The DA has no reason to show me favor, not that I know of. I can think of a few possible answers: 1) They know I am innocent but don't want to spend court time and money on declaring me innocent. 2) They don't care if I am guilty or innocent because the law I broke wasn't important or shouldn't be on the books. 3) They don't care whether I'm guilty or innocent, they just want to deter me from participating in further protests.
I've already addressed #3, so Im going to ignore it. If #2 or 3 is true, then I was arrested falsely and not only deserve an innocent ruling but the rules should be changed. More importantly, both of these options would be evidence of a broken system: not only the court system, which offers get out of jail free cards to people who should never have been up for jail in the first place, but the enforcement system (NYPD). In some ways, accepting an ACD is playing a part in a very unlawful system in which police can arrest people just to break up an event (this is much more broad than crossing a bridge) that they don't like. They don't have to prove or even suspect that someone is breaking the law - they know (and the DA knows and the judge knows) that the detainee can be given an ACD and let off, so the cop doesn't have to ever prove that he or she was in the right when they made the arrest. For the detainee this makes sense because its definitely better than risking being found guilty, but for future protests and actors of civil disobedience its terrible. It means the cops have a system in which to remove you from the street without evidence of guilt, threaten you with jail time and then bribe you to forget about the whole thing with removal of the threat. But if you were never guilty, then there was no threat in the first place.
And this, long as it may be, is a very power argument for not accepting the ACD regardless of whether I think I am guilty or innocent. Because being offered the ACD is part of a corrupt system which allows the NYPD to take people off the street without due process. Yes, its true that the court case might come later but there has been no consideration of justice or evidence when a person was removed from the street and placed in a jail cell. Giving the police this power is dangerous and the process is an abridgment of American freedoms.
Thoughts are welcome.
------------------------
Nothing in this blog post or any other should be taken as an admission of guilt; the writing in this blog cannot be used in the aforementioned court case or any other. Everything said here is in a purely theoretical manner and should be considered no more than story telling or a philosophical thought experiment.
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