I’ve recently read a fairly trenchant piece from my former home town of Denton, Texas that makes a few of the observations I make here today. In spite of the fact that its author looks a lot younger than I am in his profile photo, he makes the following apology: “The last thing we need is another old white guy talking just to be talking.”

Speaking as an old white guy, I’m amused at the thought that I should probably shut up and let experts, or pundits, or other more official speakers than myself have the only say about what’s happening in my country. It seems to me that the official speakers aren’t doing a particularly good job these days, and that many of their opinions are bought and paid for. It’s refreshing to see that Charles Krauthammer, with whom I have never agreed about anything before, has called the New York grand jury’s decision in the Eric Garner case totally incomprehensible.

Krauthammer brings up the issue of double jeopardy as he speculates about the federal civil rights investigation in New York, suggesting that any further state action in the matter would constitute double jeopardy for the officer accused. But about Missouri, it has been suggested fairly forcefully that Darren Wilson could still be tried for murder since the grand jury hearing did not constitute a trial. Missouri Attorney General, Chris Koster, has also admitted that the Ferguson grand jury was misled about the law.

Now, as outrage grows over the New York grand jury’s refusal to indict Eric Garner’s killer, the NYPD echoes Congressman Peter King’s inflammatory claim that Garner caused his own death and that his repeated cries of “I can’t breathe” meant that he could breathe. It’s interesting to me, at least, that this claim was issued in a particularly strident fashion by the Patrol Benevolent Association, the New York City police union.

Here in St. Louis City, where police are represented by two unions, it turns out that city police not only tear gassed Mokabe’s on November 25 but also tear gassed my church and a good many residential streets in Tower Grove Heights. Police chief Sam Dotson has responded to criticism in a particularly arrogant and cavalier manner, citing the usual police justifications for excessive force:

MoKaBe’s wants to think that they are center of the universe. This was not about MoKaBe’s, this was about safety and security on Grand, . . . When the order to disperse is given, it applies to everyone. People always say, “It’s not me, so I don’t have to leave.” The challenge for law enforcement is that we don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are, because the bad guys intermingle with the good guys.

It’s pretty clear in Dotson’s remarks that he simply doesn’t care that his officers did physical harm to a large number of citizens. He, and Congressman King and the NYPD don’t seem capable of seeing human beings as such in the crowds on the street, or behind the personae of those they may take into custody, but merely unruly objects that require being bullied into submission.

Did [the tear gas] blow into the Bread Company? Yes. Did it blow into FedEx? Yes. Did it blow into MoKaBe’s? Yes, . . . [a]nd that’s just how it works. It’s in the wind, and where the wind goes, it blows. There was never any gas specifically directed toward MoKaBe’s, the business, the people on the patio, but people were given a lawful order to leave the area [emphasis mine].

Actually a number of tear gas canisters landed on Mokabe’s patio, and police were observed directing tear gas directly at the parish hall door of my church. Aside from my general anger that events like these are now part of the normal life of my city and my country and that they call up the memory of Bull Connor and his officers attacking protesters with water canons in Birmingham years ago, there are a good many things that trouble me about these reports and others I see today.

The first is the scorched earth approach to policing when crowds are involved, which affects (as in this case) large numbers of innocent folk as well as any who may be guilty. Chief Dodson cited arrests on South Grand but made no attempt to connect those arrests with his officers’ carpet bombing tactics, probably because he could not have made the connection if he had tried. This is policing that is entirely about the projection of police power. It is parallel to our national use of drones and air power in the middle east and of course to the infamous bombings of North Viet Nam and the use of Agent Orange a generation ago.

Another troubling circumstance is the contemporary policy in many U. S. cities of policing through crackdowns on minor offenses such as jaywalking, as a way putatively to discourage serious crime. It is the escalation of situations involving minor offenses that often results in the abuse or outright murder of citizens. Sometimes there is no original offense at all, and an “offense” (usually resisting arrest) is manufactured in the confrontation. It is this aspect of contemporary policing that particularly penalizes ethnic minorities, the disabled, and the mentally ill simply for being where they are and/or who they are. Contemporary news reports are replete with accounts of mentally ill or challenged individuals who have been brutalized and savaged by police when they didn’t understand why they were being detained in the first place.

I find it deeply disturbing that police now consider that they have the right to detain me when I am going about the normal business of my life. I find it even more disturbing that police claim to be able to give me orders on the public thoroughfare and if I do not respond instantly to their satisfaction have the right to assault or to kill me. But this is the consequence or our present system of laws and concomitant police procedures. This is what the rule of law has come to mean in the post 9/11 United States, and I note additionally that the U. S. Border Patrol and TSA are being given permission to continue racial profiling as part of their screening processes. I am reading that police feel alienated from the public in the wake of reaction against the murder of Eric Garner, but I see nothing but arrogance and contempt for the public in their behavior as in their claims of innocence and/or grievance.

Then there is the question of corruption. Since I have lived in St. Louis (about twelve years) police here have been caught running a ticket scalping swindle and a car theft ring in collusion with a local towing service. I need not mention the racketeering laws that have made it legal for police all over the country to seize money and property from individuals without warrants or other due process. That police are using asset seizure as a funding source is appalling. Whether they spend seized funds for equipment or on perks makes no difference. The entire practice is corrupt from the beginning, and it is of a piece with the practice in some communities of using revenue from traffic stops as a funding source. This practice is epidemic in St. Louis county, as described in this recent Post-Dispatch editorial.

In addition, though I am in general a supporter of unions, the power of police unions to frustrate reform and protect the deep corruption of policing disturbs me, just as it disturbs me that my reaction to seeing a police vehicle nowadays is a wariness bordering on downright fear. I don’t deny the fearfulness of crime. (Though I do deny the validity of the drug war, and I think any sane person has to deplore the rise of our present system of for-profit prisons.) Still, there is much authentically serious crime. Two recent murders of Bosnian Americans in St. Louis seem to qualify as hate crimes and were apparently committed by African Americans. I do not deny that police live regularly close to violence and squalor; but in a culture of policing such as that we have around us now (police and civilians alike) that fact softens no hearts but is rather corrupting in itself. Moreover, our statistical approach to crime and crime rates in this country now provides police incentive to abuse citizens in order to meet arrest quotas, and unions are implicated here, as well.

Finally, the arguments that state the conclusions of grand jury deliberations in Missouri and now in New York seem particularly lawyerly to me. They are not the arguments of ordinary citizens. They share a deep claim that in the realm of public policy supposed good ends justify bad means, and (transparently in the case of New York) they involve appeal to exculpating technicalities that do not accord with commonsense reading of the facts. That present day law courts allow this remains a wrong without remedy. Though protest is growing around the country and beyond, it is meeting with the usual violent containment response we have come to expect.

The rallying cry of protest is the charge of racism, and while I agree that deeply embedded institutional racism is an important consideration as I attempt to understand what is presently going on around me, especially in my city, I don’t think racism is the chief cause of it. Policing has become an industry in my country. It operates with the logic of industry, demanding and using resources and materials opportunistically without regard for morality or the stewardship of life in our cities or on our planet. Ethnic minorities, the disabled, the mentally challenged or ill—these are targets of convenience. Those of us who live in the safe enclaves reserved to the privileged classes do not see them by and large, and thus they can serve as a constant source of human fuel for our corrupt municipal courts and the prison industrial complex.

I do not claim that industrial growth is the conscious end and goal of present day policing; though I do claim that industrial growth has become its real end, masked as a guilty secret behind the myth of public service. And thus police manhandling of protestors and journalists is coming more and more to seem a violent response to the possibility of public exposure of the real end of policing and (perhaps more to the point) organized resistance to the possibility of citizen regulation. At long last we shall be establishing a police review board in the city of St. Louis. But the new board is a sham and a mere adjunct of police power as presently constituted. It seems yet another design to give police political cover, like Governor Nixon’s Ferguson commission and our newly constituted presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, headed by a police chief whose appointment is problematic to say the least.

I don’t have much hope, and I don’t know where to look for hope these days. I think my country is as uneasy an occupied place today as it was in the time of my childhood and youth. Perhaps this is an argument for prayer. I’ve skipped church this morning in order to finish this polemic, but I will go to my parish home, which has now served as a bunker in my city’s war with its own police, at 5:00 today, and perhaps find some comfort in the antique language of common petition.