So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics. First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then theres the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they dont have to. Its incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because its precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called hot spot neighborhoods. In an alternate universe where this pseudo-strike wasnt the latest sortie in a standard-issue right-versus left political showdown, one could imagine this protest as a progressive or even a libertarian strike, in which police refused to work as backdoor tax-collectors and/or implement Minority Report-style pre-emptive policing policies, which is what a lot of these Broken Windows-type arrests amount to.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 16:37:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015