As most of you know, I work as a letter carrier. Of the many things I like
about my job- including the exercise (I walk 11 miles a day), the fresh air, the
generous leave policy (5 weeks a year, plus 11 federal holidays)- I would have
to include the rotating days off. That is, one week I have Monday off, the next
week I’m off Tuesday, and so on. As the work week begins on Saturday, that means
that every six weeks I get a three day weekend. This makes up for not getting
the two day weekend every week that most of you take for granted, fruit of the
sacrifices of the labor unions a century or so ago.
Generally, we travel to Michigan on my long weekend, to visit my widowed
mother and my sisters and brother.
My mom is 80, but could pass for much younger, a family trait. To give you
an idea of her youthfulness, last summer she came to Ohio. The children took her
to see their fort in the woods adjoining our backyard. "That’s nice," I said
when they told me they had taken Grandma to the fort. Then, a few days after she
left they took me to the fort and I realized that getting to it involved
crawling under a fence and scrambling up a brush-covered hillside.
This past weekend the children were more eager than usual to visit Grandma,
as the previous long weekend, six weeks before, I had gone to Alabama to see
Maclin’s daughter, my godchild, marry, and they had stayed home.
So it had been a good long while, especially to a child, and we had a grand
time, even though my brother and his family were out of town and there were
therefore no cousins to play with. The weather was bad too, cold and wet, and we
were housebound except for a trip to the Flint Institute of Art, a very fine
museum for a city that size, let alone one that has endured decades of
decline.
But all good things must end, and Sunday, after Divine Liturgy and a quick
lunch we headed back to Ohio.
The trip was uneventful, aside from the increasing agitation of Michael
Seraphim, who is a year and a half and our fussiest baby so far. He was, as an
infant, known as "Fussy Fussmore", "Doctor Cutie and Mr. Fuss", and "The
Horrible Adorable Baby", among other things.
He is also, by the way, incredibly cute, so we cut him considerable
slack.
But his annoyance grew the longer he was confined to his carseat. As it is
illegal in Ohio to take a baby out of his carseat, even to nurse – which is
legal in Michigan- we are loathe to do so unless the alternative is a screaming
fit.
The children did their best to distract him. Maria, who is nearly four, and
who told me last week "I’m half wild and half magic", is particulary adept at
consoling Michael, but even she was unable to get his mind off the woes of
confinement.
When we were about a half hour away from home, driving in the dark, we
started telling him that it was all right, that we were almost home.
Then I saw a sign: "RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD". No big deal; traffic wasn’t
that bad and it shouldn’t slow us down much.
Then I saw the brake lights, and soon it was stop and go.
"Must be an accident", I said.
And then I saw the next sign: "OVI CHECKPOINT AHEAD".
"What the heck is ‘OVI’ " we asked. We know a Romanian priest named "Father
Ovidieu", "Ovi" for short, and we joked that it was Father Ovi, stopping every
car and incensing it.
We decided that "Ohio Vehicle Inspection" ws the most likely candidate, and
we started worrying. Maria is not quite four, the age when it is legal to be out
of a carseat. Does she weigh more than 40 pounds, the other criterion?
I began getting pretty outraged at this random police stop and quietly
prayed that I would hold my tongue. I mean the nerve. Here we are, innocent
citizens- well, mostly- driving home from Grandma’s, for heaven’s sake, with a
fussy baby and we’re stuck in a traffic jam because of some random checkpoint.
What is this, Iraq? The Soviet Union?
The children, true to form, had exciting theories. The police were looking
for a escaped killer! Or there had been a kidnapping and they
were trying to rescue the victim!
Patric, who is nine, told Joey, who is six, "Make sure your seat belt isn’t
too loose or the police will take Mommy and Daddy to jail !"
When we got nearer we saw Lawrence Township, Stark County, and Ohio State
patrol cars and dozens of police officers and deputies, wearing reflector vests
and waving flashlights around. There was a large sheriff’s bus on the side of
the road. Spinning police lights were everywhere.
But as we neared they just waved us on; apparently traffic was backed up
too far and they wanted it to move.
The next day I bought a local paper, trying to find out what it was all
about, but there was nothing. Nada.
When I got home from work I called the Lawrence Township police and asked
what was up on highway 21 last night. The policeman explained that it had been a
checkpoint for the Ohio Vehicular Intoxication unit, coordinated by the State
Highway Patrol.
I understand that being a cop in rural Lawrence Township is probably a
pretty boring job, and that participation in the OVI checkpoint is likely the
most exciting thing that’s happened all year, but that did little to stem my
outrage.
"Isn’t that like a police state, or a communist country, just stopping
people randomly?" I asked.
"But sir, we apprehended one seriously intoxicated driver. Wouldn’t you
rather endure a little inconvenience rather than have a drunk driver injure or
kill your family?"
"By that logic we should all just give up our rights and allow the police
to randomly strip search us for hidden weapons. I mean, what if someone has gun?
What’s a little inconvenience?"
He protested that it wasn’t the same at all, but I was unconvinced.
The police are supposed to be public servants, and there is a world of
difference between stopping a criminal in the act and stopping passersby in
hopes of nabbing a criminal.
But then too many police officers have forgotten their vocation these
days.
I remember a story in the local paper a couple years ago. There had been a
drug raid in Millersburg, the county seat of Holmes County, just to the south of
us. For some reason, like all the local drug busts I recall, all the people
arrested lived in the poorer, rundown parts of town. Real kingpins, I always
think.
There was a photo with the story, a group of deputies walking down the
streets of Millersburg after the raid. They were wearing camouflage clothes and
black berets, like commandos.
Huh? I thought. Why do they need camouflage? This is a small town street,
not a jungle, in Millersburg, biggest town at 3,500 or so in the county with the
largest Amish population in the world. Real camouflage would be straw hats and
suspenders.
Such nonsense reveals a dangerous attitude toward law enforcement, a
militarization which is the antithesis of our traditions of common law, common
sense, and the common good.
Statism, bigness, and centralization take many forms today, all symptomatic
of the alienation of citizens and the arrogance of their erstwhile
overlords. And from the Bush administration to the Lawrence Township Police, the
argument is the same: we must endure inconvenience and loss of freedom if we are
to be safe and secure.
We almost take it for granted, though occasionally it is made clearer and
more vivid than usual, sitting in traffic with a crying baby, eager for
home.
—Daniel Nichols
The State becomes larger; the Citizen becomes smaller.
It’ll stop–the only questions are “when?” and “how?”
It’s the second one that worries me a bit.
I had a similar experience a year or two ago. I had been off to some work-related conference for several days and flew back in on a weekend night. Driving home from the airport I ran into one of these roadblocks. I never sleep well on those jaunts for some reason, and flying these days is at once fatiguing and nerve-straining in a weird way, at least for me, so I was kind of foggy, though I had not had a drop to drink. The cop was perfectly nice but I could see he was wondering about me, at least a bit, and I thought, “He could actually take me to jail, for nothing, and there would be nothing at all I could do about it.” Although I guess I would have had to fail some sort of sobriety test. It wasn’t till afterward that it hit me what an odd and intrusive thing it was.
The child-restraint laws are downright creepy. What’s that line from Tocqueville about democracies tying people up in a web of petty regulations?
The phrase “keeping us safe” coming from the Bush administration, which has obviously adopted it as a phrase to be uttered as often as possible, is also creepy, more than a bit. I want to say “Damn it, safety is not the ultimate value.” It’s downright scary when you know that one of the means by which they’re “keeping us safe” is torture.
I think the idea and practice of the government acting proactively to keep us ‘safe’ started with drink driving. That had begun in the early 1980s. My teacher in grad school didn’t like it – a real Southern Lady Catholic this is – she said it was destroying the best way people had to relax together after work, having some cocktails. You could say that 20 years down the line, the Bush doc of acting proactively to keep people safe from terrorists is a development of the same mentality. Once the idea that the government has to intervene in advance to make sure people are safe from themselves is in place, it can be used to protect them from anything. ‘We wanna protect you’ as the man from Casa Nostra said.
NOt only that, Maclin, under the recently passed Military Commissions Act if the President deemed you an enemy combatant, you can be held indefinitely without charges being filed, and submitted to “rough interrogation” (ie, torture). This applies even to US citizens…
The tradition of British (but not French) law is that someone is innocent until proven guilty (in an English court of law, the prosecution must prove guilt; in a French court, I think, the defence must prove innocence (v. open to correction on the French, but that’s my current understanding). If you think about it, esp., in the light of the more recent anti-terrorist measures, any highly proactive public safety campaign (like the drink driving one, the ensuing seat belt ones, and now the child-seat ones) *borders* on infringing the assumption of innocence. From the drink driving campaigns onward, the police have been empowered to stop and test at random. Public criticism of such measures has been muted at best – the outstanding counterexample being the late Auberon Waugh who used to inveigh against the ‘drink driving terror’. It’s a brave journalist or ordinary citizen who speaks out against the consensus created by the government propaganda campaigns, which use television footage showing children killed by speeding cars driven by drunks etc. It’s only an extension of the same logic to take the same measures against the threat of terrorism.
Yeah, you have to wonder why it’s considered so important to prevent some crimes but not others. I guess to some extent it’s a question of what’s feasible. Anybody seen that Tom Cruise movie (based on a Philip K. Dick story, I think) where psychics foresee crimes that the police then prevent? What was the name of it?….
I think the root of a lot of this goes back to WWII and the immediate segue into the Cold War. We’ve basically been on a permanent war footing ever since. It tends to be forgotten that there was a lot of worry about this stuff under Clinton and Nixon, to pick just the two presidencies where it was most pronounced, in part I guess because each was hated by large constituencies. Reagan was, too, but the worry there was more that he was the Mad Bomber.
I think I saw that movie as a DVD with some younger friends and just *could not* follow what was going on. I think I complained I wasn’t enjoying it and they got bored explaining it to me and we gave up and watched “The Incredibles”.
OK, I had to go look it up. All I could think of was Mission Impossible, which I knew wasn’t correct, but I also thought it started with an “m”. Minority Report. I enjoyed it, but then I have a big weakness for sci-fi.
Maclin- While that is true, the difference is that Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton didn’t manage to get laws passed giving them such broad powers to order torture and suspend habeus corpus, which Bush has.
I was talking about this incident at work and one guy said “Well you were driving on a state road; therefore it is their road and they should be able to stop you if they want.”
I responded that that was precisely the problem, viewing the road as belonging to the state, instead of to the people, who pay the taxes that keep it drivable and provide police salaries. They are not our lords but our servants, and when we forget this we become servile.
It also occurred to me today that by tying up so many police on a single stretch of a single highway they were defacto leaving long stretches of other highways unpatrolled; what about the drunks who would have been caught if they hadn’t had their checkpoint? Doesn’t that make you suspect that the real reason is that they enjoy making a big dramatic scene, where they get to throw around their weight?
While I largely agree with the sentiment, y’all are missing the foundational point: submit to the mechanical jacobin and you must likewise submit to the jacobin state.
where’s my horse collar …?
Francesca –
Presumption of innocence is actually included both in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and in the French code of criminal procedure.
It often seems to those who live in common law countries to think that civil law districts do not have presumption of innocence. This is because the investigating magistrate who supervises the police used to have the power to order remand of a suspect in a case he was supervising (something which now requires approval from another judge). This is not really a presumption of guilt – it has no effect on the trial – but it is a hardship on the suspect prior to conviction.
I actually think that the inquisitorial system used under civil law (not to mention canon law) actually has numerous advantages over the adversarial system used under common law. I won’t belabor this, but some more information about the differences & history of the systems can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_until_proven_guilty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial
But the horse is long out of the barn, Caleb. I think it would take some kind of catastrophe to put us back in a pre-mechanical/electric world. Of course a catastrophe is entirely possible.
Daniel, I’m not trying to defend Bush, just making the point that this stuff didn’t suddenly appear with him. Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese springs to mind at once. Waco. And none of those other presidents faced the same security situation as Bush–a serious attack on our own soil by an enemy that doesn’t wear a uniform, doesn’t live anywhere in particular, and wants to maximize civilian deaths. Who knows what, say, Nixon might have done in response to a big successful Communist terror attack in the spring of 1970? A lot of hippies in jail, probably.
The combination of terrorists, modern weaponry, a society that is open and complex and therefore vulnerable, and a very powerful central government is a witch’s brew.
Maclin, yeah, that’s my point. You want to dance with the devil … well, there you go, stranded at a high-way checkpoint.
And the horse (metaphorical or real) is still waiting for those who want to it. Or better yet get Grandma settled on the back 40 then you and kids can just hoof it yourselves.
I realize all this is “impractible” by today’s standards. Tough.
This seems apropos:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried94.html
I have trouble believing that DUI checkpoints are legal under the U.S. Constitution, but they may be legal and moral in Malta. On the other hand, what about checkpoints when a child (possibly yours) has been abducted by a sexual deviant (such as when Amber alerts are issued). Of course, in a just society, such deviants would be executed ….
Mr Anonymous, With the idea of proactive ‘keeping us safe’ campaigns, I’m trying to make a distinction between the police providing protection from a generalized threat (eg, the threat of drunk driving leading to accidents, or driving without a safety belt supposedly threatening deaths through injuries) and the searching for specific crimes or their victims. What I mean by ‘proactive’ is that they are trying to block the threat before it becomes actual. The purpose of stop-and-breathalze campaigns is to not only to capture actual criminals but also to deter people from having more than one drink. There is no danger to liberty if we and our families are stopped in our cars because the police are looking for a specific terrorist or kidnapper or kidnap victim. There is an undermining of liberty if they habitually stop and search *in case* we are terrorists or kidnappers or whatever.
Fran: I have to admit that I dislike DWI checkpoints, given all the alcohol sobriety tests I had to go through on the roadside the last time I drove through one. However, disregarding what the U.S. Constitution says (the US got and courts distregard the Constitution regularly) or may not say regarding liberty, are DWI checkpoints against the natural law or against Church teaching? Also, how do you distinguish between DWI checkpoints and the intrusive and delaying checkpoints we have to go through before getting on a plane? Frankly, I’d rather they just keep the Muslims off the planes, but I guess that isn’t going to pass constitutional muster ….
I don’t know about the natural law or the teachings of the Church. I just say proactive campaigns for our ‘protection’ undermine the presumption of innocence. For they are not looking for a specific guilty person, but for anyone who *might* be guilty. And then anyone and everyone ‘might’ be guilty.
As a legal matter, roadblocks are legal except where prohibited or restricted by a State. For example, Wisconsin doesn’t allow them IIRC. The legal justification is that use of an automobile on public property is a licensed activity, and the State is within its rights to verify the compliance of vehicles and operators with applicable regulations. It is no different than a restaurant being forced to allow a food inspector to view the food preparation area.
In specific relation to the post, I think our use of police is grossly mismanaged and largely absent a pursuit of justice. I am against road blocks in practice outside of urgent necessity due to disproportionate interference it causes in daily life.
I actually think that the inquisitorial system used under civil law (not to mention canon law) actually has numerous advantages over the adversarial system used under common law. I won’t belabor this, but some more information about the differences & history of the systems can be found here:
There is an American lawyer named John Merryman who has written extensively on common law and civil law systems. His books are used as textbooks in U.S. law schools. I read one of them, and his conclusion was that in criminal law, if he were guilty he would rather be tried under Anglo-American common law, but that if he were innocent he would rather be tried under the civil law investigative type system. BTW, I suggest that “inquisitorial” is a word to avoid.