8ackgr0und N015e has a diary on the Rec List detailing that drug-sniffing dogs have effectively become tools for legalized theft by police. It's no secret that the War on Drugs long ago jumped the shark; police are human beings and where there is potential for abuse and positive reinforcements that encourage it, shit will happen.
And as long as it happens to other people, people without the power to impose consequences, or if it mostly benefits those in power, it can go unchecked and unremarked until it reaches levels bordering on the surreal.
Consider Edward Snowden for example. The message coming out from the media and the political establishment is that A) he's a traitor and scum for revealing that B) the NSA has been engaged in widespread violation of the law and repeatedly lying to Congress about it, and C) demonstrating the utter incompetence of those who hired and supervised him. On CBS Face The Nation today Bob Schieffer matter of factly remarked that Snowden had defected to Russia, when it would be a lot closer to the truth to state that Snowden fled to Russia because there was nowhere else in the world he could avoid imprisonment for revealing that U.S. government spying was out of control. And thus the War On Terror has jumped the shark yet again.
But, and this is a critical but, it's not necessary to have some vast overriding mandate that leads to systematically enforcing laws in a fashion that has nothing to do with actual justice. A lot has to do with expectations - who a person is, who they know, and what kind of connections they have.
Exhibit A: Bernie Madoff. For decades he had been running a giant Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors. It's not as though there weren't repeated signs that something was seriously wrong - yet several investigations by the SEC went nowhere. It perhaps didn't hurt Madoff's schemes that he has was generous donor to associated politicians and moved in the right social circles. A lot of important, powerful people had a huge investment in believing Madoff was a brilliant Wall Street investment guru instead of a con man - and not least because believing so reinforced their own opinion of themselves and their crowd.
Kevin Drum gets credit for bring the next two cases to my attention. The first links to a story at NBC News of a "jaw-dropping" tale of government fraud at high levels.
Until he retired in April after learning he was under federal investigation, [John C.] Beale, an NYU grad with a masters from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy, the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to agency documents.
In September, Beale, who served as a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000. Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court filing.
To explain his long absences, Beale told agency officials -- including McCarthy -- that he was engaged in intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
How did he do it? Read the whole thing for the damning details, but again - despite clear warning signs - the people who should have realized something was wrong did not want to think one of their own was abusing the system, and repeatedly failed to exercise oversight. Expectations (and that darned War On Terror!) led them to overlook what was actually going on.
Drum's second story is even more discouraging. He picks up on the story of a former prosecutor named Bobby Constantino over at The Atlantic who began to wonder about what was actually happening within the justice system he had served. As the tale at The Atlantic starts out,
Ten years ago, when I started my career as an assistant district attorney in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, I viewed the American criminal justice system as a vital institution that protected society from dangerous people. I once prosecuted a man for brutally attacking his wife with a flashlight, and another for sexually assaulting a waitress at a nightclub. I believed in the system for good reason.
But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed – shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings – I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.
When you read what happens when a white guy in a suit walks around NYC with graffiti tools - a stencil and cans of spray paint (an automatic misdemeanor) - you just might be staggered at the official response.
...I would estimate that I passed more than 200 police officers, some from a distance, some close enough to touch. Though I was conspicuously casing high-profile public targets while holding graffiti instruments, not one of them stopped, frisked, searched, detained, summonsed, or arrested me. I would have to go further.
I walked up to the east entrance of City Hall and tagged the words “N.Y.P.D. Get Your Hands Off Me” on a gatepost in red paint. The surveillance video shows me doing this, 20 feet from the police officer manning the gate. I moved closer, within 10 feet of him, and tagged it again. I could see him inside watching video monitors that corresponded to the different cameras.
As I moved the can back and forth, a police officer in an Interceptor go-cart saw me, slammed on his brakes, and pulled up to the curb behind me. I looked over my shoulder, made eye contact with him, and resumed. As I waited for him to jump out, grab me, or Tase me, he sped away and hung a left, leaving me standing there alone. I’ve watched the video a dozen times and it’s still hard to believe.
Constantino did eventually succeed in getting himself arrested - and what happened next only confirms that "Justice" in America can be a rather chancy business. If you've considered the example of Snowden above, or thought about the treatment handed out to Wall Street Bankers for wrecking the economy versus what happened to Occupy Wall Street, you can probably guess - but
read the whole thing. If there is one near absolute at work here, it is that the Justice System Will Not Be Mocked.
Justice is not a simple thing. We claim to be a society of laws, and for the most part we are - for a given value of 'justice'. It's no more contradictory to believe in the importance of government to society as a whole as it is to recognize the anything built and operated by humans is susceptible to flaws and failures. Only an absolutist would demand perfection or nothing; only a naive fool would trust without questioning. Complacency and willful blindness can be just as corrosive as outright corruption. If we would promote the value of government as a positive force in the world, we also must accept responsibility for its failings - and be prepared to do something about them.