Discipline at Your Door
The Supreme Court recently upheld the side of state power by permitting “no-knock” home incursions by police serving search warrants. The decision in Hudson vs. Michigan rekindles the militarization of the police that began with the formation of SWAT teams in the mid-1960’s. The acronym for “Special Weapons and Tactics”, SWAT was the official response to radical political movements and generalized social unrest in dense urban areas.
No-knock warrants are a special extension of police powers designed to cope with what the state sees as an evolved criminal element. In 1969 SWAT debuted against the Black Panthers, a group known for its armed drills and indifference toward police authority. The concept was simple: the Panthers would resist, they had the weapons to do so, and past experience had shown that normal police forces are no match for an up-armored, upgraded criminal possessing the will to fight. SWAT could now publicly demonstrate its high velocity weapons, body armor and its trademark tactic: the explosive entry to disorient the target through confusion and terror. No-knock incursions reassert the authority of the state by inflicting tremendous chaos at the boundary-line between public life and private domain. The significance of Hudson can be seen at a definite point in space, at the doorway, where the relationship between the individual and the state is internalized in the form of the door itself. The integrity of the doorway is a measure of how society values liberty.
When police have the unrestricted tactical advantage to deploy no-knock force it is hard to see the distinction between military power and rudimentary policing. The consequences of losing a clear distinction between the two are devastating for political agency and symptomatic of a larger process of incremental growth in police powers to survey, apprehend and detain.
It sometimes seems necessary for the state to have these powers, and numerous gun battles have proved the inadequacy of regular police against those better armed and better trained. In the 1997 Bank of America robbery, later dubbed the “North Hollywood Shootout”, police were overpowered, even in the age of SWAT. Eventually the police won out, but it was a battle of attrition so brutal that it seemed to justify not just the spread of SWAT teams, but the wholesale militarization of normal police forces; making high-velocity, high caliber weapons, airpower and tanks available for regular deployment throughout the police system. Combined with Clinton’s hysterical anticrime initiatives, the North Hollywood incident reanimated public support for militarization of the police. In small towns where no SWAT budget existed, local groups raised money for police procurement of M-16s to combat the threat.
But the threat of what, exactly? Earlier this spring Dr. Culosi, an optometrist, was killed by SWAT agents serving a no-knock warrant at his home in Fairfax, Virginia. AWOT contacted the Fairfax Country Police Department, whose representatives say that there is no policy on the use of SWAT-level force, that in fact all such deployments are made at the “discretion of the department” after looking at the type of warrant and the history of the suspect. The FCPD noted that the deciding factor is the “safety of the officer” and that no standards have been set on the use of SWAT because every case has to be taken up individually, “in its totality”.
Culosi was under investigation for 3 months for betting on sports and had no criminal background of any kind. The fact that he was killed makes this case distinctive, but also clouds the issue. The problem is not that SWAT is disproportionate with respect to the suspect’s alleged crimes, but that there is no clear justification for SWAT deployment that can separate it from regular policing. If the only official consideration is the “safety of the officers”, then the threshold has been lowered to the floor and SWAT teams will be able to justify their deployment in very mundane situations. Or, more to point, SWAT style military tactics and weapons will come into normal use by regular police.
This normalization of extraordinary tactics conceals a deeper rot. No-knock warrants preemptively escalate the violence of police searches as if every home were Ruby Ridge or Waco. In this way no-knock tactics erode publicly held ideas about an individual’s capacity for rational engagement with legal regimes. The suspect is imagined to be eminently threatening, irrational and chaotic—rather like a child or the stereotypical terrorist, and the resulting no-knock breach is designed to generate the very crazy, confused situation that justified the preemptive use of force in the first place. So with no-knock we see a loss of etiquette but also a loss of faith in ideas of rationality and human interaction. Most importantly, and most dangerously, these trade-offs are made in a uniquely preemptive manner and justified in the name of security—which in this case is the bodily security of the state-agents serving papers.
When the security of state servants is prioritized in situations that are necessarily risky, (like the search or surprise invasion of someone’s home), there is then a corresponding shift toward authoritarian guarantees: the guarantee of safety, the guarantee of certainty and repetition—these are the promises of a police state. Liberty is always in some sense a function of risk, uncertainty and exploration, even reconnaissance into the unknown. For the state to operate on the premise that its agents must always walk in an aura of protection means that ordinary subjects have lost their freedom, and must instead live in a condition of total transparency—so that the police can traverse the doorway contented by their overriding tactical and technological prowess, thus reducing to near-zero the threat of whatever mysteries lie concealed behind our doors. Police can sleep easy knowing that their overkill entrance can match any unknown—a climate perfect for cultivating expanded executive power against the aspirations of diminished political agents. This is what happens when risk aversion takes the form of an official state policy—a policy that will always informally be one of preemptive violence against its citizens in an effort to reinforce the authority of the state itself, but also in an attempt guarantee a risk free workplace for those who bring the law to your doorstep and infantilize you in the process.
No-knock warrants are a special extension of police powers designed to cope with what the state sees as an evolved criminal element. In 1969 SWAT debuted against the Black Panthers, a group known for its armed drills and indifference toward police authority. The concept was simple: the Panthers would resist, they had the weapons to do so, and past experience had shown that normal police forces are no match for an up-armored, upgraded criminal possessing the will to fight. SWAT could now publicly demonstrate its high velocity weapons, body armor and its trademark tactic: the explosive entry to disorient the target through confusion and terror. No-knock incursions reassert the authority of the state by inflicting tremendous chaos at the boundary-line between public life and private domain. The significance of Hudson can be seen at a definite point in space, at the doorway, where the relationship between the individual and the state is internalized in the form of the door itself. The integrity of the doorway is a measure of how society values liberty.
When police have the unrestricted tactical advantage to deploy no-knock force it is hard to see the distinction between military power and rudimentary policing. The consequences of losing a clear distinction between the two are devastating for political agency and symptomatic of a larger process of incremental growth in police powers to survey, apprehend and detain.
It sometimes seems necessary for the state to have these powers, and numerous gun battles have proved the inadequacy of regular police against those better armed and better trained. In the 1997 Bank of America robbery, later dubbed the “North Hollywood Shootout”, police were overpowered, even in the age of SWAT. Eventually the police won out, but it was a battle of attrition so brutal that it seemed to justify not just the spread of SWAT teams, but the wholesale militarization of normal police forces; making high-velocity, high caliber weapons, airpower and tanks available for regular deployment throughout the police system. Combined with Clinton’s hysterical anticrime initiatives, the North Hollywood incident reanimated public support for militarization of the police. In small towns where no SWAT budget existed, local groups raised money for police procurement of M-16s to combat the threat.
But the threat of what, exactly? Earlier this spring Dr. Culosi, an optometrist, was killed by SWAT agents serving a no-knock warrant at his home in Fairfax, Virginia. AWOT contacted the Fairfax Country Police Department, whose representatives say that there is no policy on the use of SWAT-level force, that in fact all such deployments are made at the “discretion of the department” after looking at the type of warrant and the history of the suspect. The FCPD noted that the deciding factor is the “safety of the officer” and that no standards have been set on the use of SWAT because every case has to be taken up individually, “in its totality”.
Culosi was under investigation for 3 months for betting on sports and had no criminal background of any kind. The fact that he was killed makes this case distinctive, but also clouds the issue. The problem is not that SWAT is disproportionate with respect to the suspect’s alleged crimes, but that there is no clear justification for SWAT deployment that can separate it from regular policing. If the only official consideration is the “safety of the officers”, then the threshold has been lowered to the floor and SWAT teams will be able to justify their deployment in very mundane situations. Or, more to point, SWAT style military tactics and weapons will come into normal use by regular police.
This normalization of extraordinary tactics conceals a deeper rot. No-knock warrants preemptively escalate the violence of police searches as if every home were Ruby Ridge or Waco. In this way no-knock tactics erode publicly held ideas about an individual’s capacity for rational engagement with legal regimes. The suspect is imagined to be eminently threatening, irrational and chaotic—rather like a child or the stereotypical terrorist, and the resulting no-knock breach is designed to generate the very crazy, confused situation that justified the preemptive use of force in the first place. So with no-knock we see a loss of etiquette but also a loss of faith in ideas of rationality and human interaction. Most importantly, and most dangerously, these trade-offs are made in a uniquely preemptive manner and justified in the name of security—which in this case is the bodily security of the state-agents serving papers.
When the security of state servants is prioritized in situations that are necessarily risky, (like the search or surprise invasion of someone’s home), there is then a corresponding shift toward authoritarian guarantees: the guarantee of safety, the guarantee of certainty and repetition—these are the promises of a police state. Liberty is always in some sense a function of risk, uncertainty and exploration, even reconnaissance into the unknown. For the state to operate on the premise that its agents must always walk in an aura of protection means that ordinary subjects have lost their freedom, and must instead live in a condition of total transparency—so that the police can traverse the doorway contented by their overriding tactical and technological prowess, thus reducing to near-zero the threat of whatever mysteries lie concealed behind our doors. Police can sleep easy knowing that their overkill entrance can match any unknown—a climate perfect for cultivating expanded executive power against the aspirations of diminished political agents. This is what happens when risk aversion takes the form of an official state policy—a policy that will always informally be one of preemptive violence against its citizens in an effort to reinforce the authority of the state itself, but also in an attempt guarantee a risk free workplace for those who bring the law to your doorstep and infantilize you in the process.
2 Comments:
I very much liked this post! But one implication of it is that this recent SCOTUS decision (Hudson v. Michigan) totally eliminates the need for a police knock prior to entering. It didn't do that, but it did say that the evidence gained in a no-knock entry was still admissible at trial if the police no-knock was "in good faith" (whatever that means). It was a terrible decision and greatly damages and undermines that relationship between the individual and the state for which you aptly use the door as a metaphor, but it would not, by itself, completely eschew it.
I think, more than anything, that what makes this ruling so important and dangerous is that it is a reflection of the evolution of public thinking toward the idea that the state's security policies universally reinforce/protect the liberty of citizens, if that makes any sense. Indeed, this is Bush's too-often-invoked concept of freedom: freedom from potential terrorist attack and other physical threat.
The threat to liberty by a "state policy" of "risk aversion" has become more and more obscured in the public's view since the advent of SWAT tactics and War-on-Terror-related executive policy/practice (not to mention legislation), and Hudson is a reflection of that change in view, I think. This is why I have little faith that the room in this ruling for throwing out evidence obtained during a no-knock search will be utilized by lower federal and state courts.
Sorry to over-comment, but it reminds me of something Hannah Arendt wrote in "What is Authority?"
"We are in fact confronted with a simultaneous recession of both freedom and authority in the modern world. As far as these processes are concerned, one can even say that the numerous oscillations in public opinion, which for more than a hundred and fifty years has swung at regular intervals from one extreme to the other, from a liberal mood to a conservative one and back to a more liberal again, at times attempting to reassert authority and at others to reassert freedom, have resulted only in further undermining both, confusing the issues, blurring the distinctive lines between authority and freedom, and eventually destroying the political meaning of both."
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