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April 23rd, 2013 
Peter Nolan Recently
by William L. Anderson: Who
Will Protect Us From the ‘Protectors’?
As an ambulance
took the seriously wounded Dzhokar Tsarnaev to a hospital, people
in Watertown, Massachusetts, realized that the police hunt was over
and they cheered. And cheered. Some in the crowd began to chant,
“USA! USA! USA!” as though an American team had won an
Olympic competition.
To the relieved
residents who finally could go back to something normal after effectively
living a day under martial law, Gov. Deval Patrick issuing a “shelter-in-place”
order, the police had been heroes, protecting them from two mad
bombers who already had struck the venerable Boston Marathon and
were promising more mayhem and murder:
“Every time
a police car passed by, the cheering became louder, and a sense
of respect and admiration was felt through the crowd,” said Montana
Fredrick, who joined a sea of other Northeastern University students
in greeting the officers.
While the people
of Watertown and the rest of Boston might have been celebrating
a “victory” by police, what they and the flock of journalists
descending upon the story failed to see was that their lives have
changed for the worst, and it was not the Brothers Tsarnaev that
changed things. It was government and more specifically, how government
agencies handled the hunt for Dzhokar, the younger of the two.
After authorities
had gained enough knowledge of who the bombers might be, having
scanned the thousands of photos and videos of the blast scenes,
the next step was finding the two brothers. In retrospect, one should
not be surprised that the two were quickly identified.
Like all big
road race events, photos of the finish line and the surrounding
area are continuously taken. One reason goes back to 1980, when
an interloper
named Rosie Ruiz snuck into the race a half-mile from the finish
and claimed victory. She received the laurel wreath in a public
ceremony, but later that week race officials had enough evidence
to find Ruiz was a fraud, and French Canadian Jaqueline Gareau was
named the women’s champion.
Until the bombing,
the Ruiz affair was the worst thing associated with the nation’s
oldest and best-known marathon but Ruiz’s fraud led to race organizers
setting up an extensive video system to ensure that nothing like
that ever happened again, with the finish area being the most extensively
recorded. And it is not just the professionals doing the video work.
Organizations and individuals have literally hundreds of video cameras
and video recording devices working throughout the race, and especially
at the finish, and it was inevitable that whoever was responsible
would have been caught on camera, and they were.
By Thursday
night, police knew the suspects and in a firefight in Watertown,
the older brother, Tamerlan, was killed. Dzhokar escaped and the
manhunt became even more intense.
Until that
time, the investigation really was about simple police work, a meticulous
effort in which both police and ordinary citizens, including at
least one seriously injured in the blast, were able to piece things
together. (Unfortunately, the New York Post, which distinguished
itself by headlining error after egregious error, committed a journalistic
outrage by showing a photo of two local North African high school
runners and all-but-claiming they were the bombers.)
When Dzhokar
escaped, a police era passed with him and things fell into an abyss
from there. First, hundreds of paramilitary police occupied the
streets of Boston and surrounding areas, showing off their military
equipment and looking every bit the role of the conquering army
that one might expect to see in a bad movie.
For all the
show of force, this had nothing to do either with finding and apprehending
the suspect or “protecting” the citizens of Boston. Instead,
they acted as government enforcers of Patrick’s “shelter in
place” order for the city and surrounding areas, an order that
effectively imposed martial law. These paramilitary “protectors”
were not there to apprehend a dangerous suspect; they were there
to intimidate the local citizenry into staying in their houses and
apartments even though their going to work would have had no interference
whatsoever with the police search.
The government
and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like
the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when
asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where
a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they
had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling
the donut servers “yeah, come to work – no one’s going to get
shot.”
Yes, the police
allowed Dunkin’ Donuts to stay open. In fact, the cops ordered
the business to be open in order to serve the police (who I am sure
did not pay for their coffee and treats), even to the point of enforcing
police stereotypes regarding donuts. That others would have real
costs thrown upon their shoulders in order to serve the whim of
police and to make a political animal like Deval Patrick look like
a “take charge” guy is of no consequence to those that
make a living ordering around others. The people meekly followed
orders because they knew the paramilitary cops would have gunned
them down and faced no legal consequences for enforcing martial
law.
It got worse,
and I would say hilariously worse because the show-of-force tactics,
martial law, and the eternal press conferences featuring Patrick
and other Very Serious People actually ensured it would take longer
to find Dzhokar. Police, in typical bureaucratic fashion, had created
a perimeter in Watertown and they searched everywhere within that
area.
If one looks
at the picture of the boat in which Dzhokar was found hiding, one
can see it is just behind the house, not even 20 feet away. However,
while the house fell within the perimeter, the boat did not, and
it never occurred to the police to look at what in retrospect would
have been an excellent hiding place. The bureaucratic paramilitary
cops, however, did not even think of walking an inch past their
perimeter line.
It took the
owner of the boat who noticed something amiss – after he was permitted
to leave his house when Patrick lifted his “shelter” order
– to find the wounded Tsarnaev, and police flushed him out about
a half-hour later. In other words, despite the show of force and
despite the presence of paramilitary cops, armored trucks, and assault
rifles, the suspect was captured because
a mere mundane was willing to look 20 feet beyond where the
cops would go.
Lest anyone
think the police were “protecting” anyone, the
following video demonstrates just how brutal the police were
to ordinary citizens who had committed the “crime” of
living within the perimeter. As I watched it, I was reminded of
a film I watched last week, “The Hiding Place.” The movie
included scenes of Nazi officials and soldiers herding Jews out
of their homes and up the streets. And, yes, the scene in Watertown
in many ways matched what I saw in the movie, complete with the
barking police dog snarling at people forced to run away from their
homes with their hands on their heads.
(The police
were looking for Tsarnaev, but everyone was a criminal as far as
the cops were concerned. Contrary to what the media has been spinning,
the police were not protecting anyone, nor did they intend to protect
anyone except themselves. They were making a statement to anyone
who was in Boston that the police were the absolute rulers and anyone
who did not obey a police command completely was putting his or
her life in peril.)
The sad thing
was that most people in Boston not only put up with this, but actually
seemed to believe that the show of force and the brutality of the
police were for the good of Bostonians. Notes Anthony Gregory:
One doesn’t
have to be any sort of radical to be appalled that thousands of
police, working with federal troops and agents, would “lockdown”
an entire city – shutting down public transit, closing virtually
all businesses, intimidating anyone from leaving their home, and
going door to door with SWAT teams in pursuit of one suspect.
The power of the police to “lockdown” a city is an authoritarian,
borderline totalitarian power. A “lockdown” is prison terminology
for forcing all prisoners into their cells. They did not do this
to pursue the DC sniper, or to go after the Kennedy assassin,
and I fear the precedent. It is eerie that this happened in an
American city, and it should be eerie to you, no matter where
you fall on the spectrum. You can tell me that most people in
Boston were happy to go along with it, but that’s not really the
point, either. If two criminals can bring an entire city to its
knees like this with the help of the state, then terrorism truly
is a winning strategy.
Massachusetts
is a Progressive state and Boston is the epitome of Progressive
Political Correctness. It is the home of numerous prestigious colleges
and universities that practically birthed PC, at least on the East
Coast, and it is a veritable center of Statism. As a Democratic
Party stronghold, it helps set the trend to where Democrats are
headed, and given the fact that U.S. political demographics are
such that the Democratic Party will dominate the White House into
perpetuity, it is important to know what these people are thinking.
Only a few
decades ago, Massachusetts Democrats such as former Governor Michael
Dukakkis (the Democratic nominee for president in 1988) believed
in civil liberties and were outspoken against police state tactics.
It is clear that those days are gone, as Democrats are as enthusiastic
as typical conservative Republicans for paramilitary police, snarling
police dogs, and all of the boy toys that accompany the modern “warrior
cop.”
It
gets worse. As I recently noted in an LRC blog post, Progressive
Massachusetts does not have capital punishment, but Democratic
officials there and elsewhere want Tsarnaev tried under federal
law, which does have the death penalty. Such things give cynicism
a bad name.
So, we have
martial law imposed in a situation that clearly did not call for
such drastic action, paramilitary police goons roughing up innocent
people in a neighborhood, and police incompetence keeping authorities
from finding an allegedly dangerous suspect. And out of all this
comes effusive praise for the police and their police state tactics.
One can argue
that the music began in Boston almost 240 years ago as American
colonials rebelled against what they saw as British police state
actions. Now we can say that the music has stopped in that same
city, and since the authorities have imposed martial law and received
massive public praise for their actions, Americans can expect more
of it.
April
23, 2013
William
L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him
mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland,
and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute. He
also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit
his blog.
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© 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
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