Jun

Statism and Myth as a Tool of Survival and Perpetuation Part III B: Controlling Narrative By Banning Citizen Surveillance

Perhaps nothing is so annoying to a statist than an individual who places himself in a position of superiority, as opposed to the ancillary function which most statists believe is the proper role of citizens. In the world of statists, citizens are to complement the state by conforming to its every demand, no matter how unreasonable or intrusive. Buckle your seat belt, go outside to smoke, and don’t drink a drop before you get behind the wheel of a car, ever. Be kind, rewind; don’t be a litterbug; say no to drugs; recycle and reuse. Though the state builds roads and bridges with your tax dollars, don’t you dare run the toll booth. And whatever you do, no matter how unpleasant or unprofessional the police are during a routine stop or a traffic violation, do not reciprocate their attitude with one of your own.

That last part is one that we can all identify with. I’ve always been a pro-law enforcement sort of man. My wife’s father is a policeman, and he and his eldest son are both constables, as is the step-uncle of my niece. A cousin of mine is a city police officer in my hometown. I have never been arrested or detained by the police. I take great pains in my adult life to abide by the law, even when I’m late for work or an engagement.

I’ve had tickets for various offenses throughout college and afterward. I once ran three stop signs in succession at about a quarter to 7 a.m. on a summer morning in a sleepy residential area. I’ve had tickets for speeding, improper backing, and the like. I even once had a ticket for DOWSOR.

Now, for those of you who don’t understand what DOWSOR is, I’m going to explain it to you as it was explained to me when a friend of mine drove me to the local precinct to ask. But first, a little background: I, like most individuals out of college, frequented the cheapest drink and dinner specials around town. One of my favorite haunts was a local watering hole with constantly changing management and names. When I first arrived in town, the establishment was known as Sidelines, and by the time I departed, it was Double Play. Its iterations of nomenclature aside, it had a wonderful set of dinner specials including 10 cent wing night and a $5.99 ribeye night.

I went to $5.99 ribeye night one particular evening, and along with my ribeye, I quaffed two beers. I hadn’t been feeling myself at the time, or I would have had more beer, because in those days, I drank quite heavily. The disappointment on the bartender’s face was evident, but the bouncers looked relieved at my restraint. I shot a half dozen games of pool, and between my ineptitude and that of my playing partners at billiards, the games took close to three hours. They had been drinking far more than I had, and I played far better drunk than I ever did while sober. It was a recipe for longevity.

My Pyrrhic victory at long last attained, and my wrists and arms sore from the exertions of the night, I departed into the crisp night air to my car. I took the back road to get home, and one of Montevallo’s finest was coming round the curb when I was turning. He immediately did what we in Montevallo affectionately referred to as a “blue turn,” and pulled up behind me at the stop sign. His lights were not flashing. For several miles we rode on, and when I turned onto the street leading to my apartment, the officer flashed his lights and I dutifully obliged by pulling over onto the curb.

What followed was a basic exercise in futility: the officer asked me an honest question and I gave him an honest answer, which one should never do when speaking to a police officer. He asked if I had been drinking. I informed him that three hours ago, I had imbibed two beers. He requested that I step out of the car.

As he examined my license and registration, I stood in front of my car awaiting further instruction. Across the way, my friends were sitting on the balcony of their apartment, recognizing in their own alcohol induced stupor that I was indeed pulled over on the side of the road with a policeman. The officer then asked me to stand on one leg, touch my index finger to my nose and stretch my arm out straight to my side while reciting my ABCs backwards. To his disappointment, I was able to comply with little if any difficulty.

It was at this time that the officer informed me that he would be writing me a ticket, and when I inquired as to the violation, he snapped at me that he hadn’t been drinking before he had been driving. I informed him that such a revelation was a relief to me, and then asked yet again what my citation was for. He was not in good humor. He tore the ticket off and handed it to me, and after a cursory perusal, I noted that my violation was DOWSOR. I asked him what DOWSOR was. He snapped that I had been the one drinking that night, and I needed to hurry home ASAP. I informed him of my familiarity with ASAP and inquired yet again as to what DOWSOR stood for.

During my Disco Duck ABC routine, my compadres on the balcony had begun hollering obscenities at me in order to encourage me to dance better. By now, they had reached a fever pitch in their drunken and slurred cheers. The officer glanced at them, and then stared at me. He thumbed towards them and informed me that one of my friends could likely assist me with the meaning of DOWSOR.

He then told me to get off of the road. I pulled into my friend’s apartment complex, and requested a ride to the precinct from the girl who owned the apartment. She was miraculously sober. I relayed my confusion over DOWSOR, and none of my friends could clarify for me what DOWSOR meant, although one got as far as slurring out “Dick…Over West Side…” At that point, I knew I need a professional’s assistance. Off we went to the precinct, where I endured the laughter and ridicule of my friends in the car. When we arrived, I stormed in to find myself staring at the lieutenant, who looked like one of those high school Explorers who do ride-alongs and what not with local law enforcement. When I asked to speak to a real police officer in an even tone of voice, he took offense. His voice cracked as he notified me that he was a lieutenant police officer. He then cleared his throat and hooked his thumbs in his utility belt.

I asked him if I appeared intoxicated, and he stared for a moment and replied in the negative. I then presented the DOWSOR citation to him. He immediately looked up and informed me that I had been cited for Driving On the Wrong Side Of the Road. I told him that his department ought to make it a policy to include definite articles in their acronyms so that stupid people like myself would not need to ride all the way up to the precinct for deciphering, and he asked me to leave. My agitation was palpable. Nevertheless I left, and upon counsel from the local judge that an officer is an expert witness (who apparently never lies in such matters), I paid the ticket.

It was the first time I’d ever been pulled over for anything where I had been 100% innocent of wrongdoing. The other times I’d been pulled over, I’d acknowledged my guilt without reservation. It’s rather obvious when you run three consecutive stop signs. No use lying about it. It was also the first time I’d been cognizant that such things could happen to white guys with clean cut hair and a respectable appearance. I got screwed, and law enforcement lost a bit of its lustrous reputation that night.

Back in those days, a camcorder was bulky and hard to conceal, and quite expensive as well. Apparently the officer’s dash mounted camera was out of commission when he pulled me over, so I had no way of using the footage to dispute his expert testimony. And that’s the point, really, from the perspective of statists and their counterparts within the various enforcement and bureaucratic apparatuses which proliferate like so many weeds over time.

They can surveil us, they can put up multiple cameras at every intersection, and on the off chance that their cameras catch us in an incriminating act, the footage proves beyond all doubt our guilt. Only inadvertently does our surveillance state and the society which is its outgrowth exculpate ordinary citizens, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team, who were exonerated in large part because footage from an ATM camera proved that the alleged participants were not at the location in question during the timeframe alleged by their accuser. One has to wonder what the outcome of a subpoena for intersection footage would if a defendant did in fact petition the court for potentially exculpatory footage from the state. Would the state’s interest outweigh an individual’s interest in trying to establish his innocence, or at least his whereabouts in a manner which contradicted the state’s timeline in a criminal complaint or indictment? Give the wide latitude that judges seem to give states nowadays, we can say with some certainty that the state could very well win and shut down any such subpoena on the grounds that it would be too great an expense, or that it might establish a precedent whereby states and communities would be required to archive such footage in perpetuity.

But when we surveil the state and its officials, especially those enforcement officers who routinely act in an unprofessional manner with impunity, we could very well find ourselves on the receiving end of a felony wiretap charge. In no fewer than 12 states, it is now illegal to videotape police officers (Watching the Watchers, Popular Mechanics, http://bit.ly/9LPinc). You can face felony charges, much like Christopher Drew, who was arrested for a misdemeanor charge of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area on the streets of Chicago. Both original charges were dropped, but now Drew faces a Class I felony charge of illegal recording and a potential sentence of 4 to 15 years in jail (Are Cameras the New Guns? McElroy, Wendy http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3315).

You see, Drew intentionally peddled for three months to provoke arrest under the city’s ordinance prohibiting such peddling, so that he could challenge the city’s ordinance in court. The police avoided enforcement because they were aware that a federal challenge to the ordinance would be mounted, but eventually, Drew was arrested and his recording of the arrest was proof which would have established documentary evidence of his standing to challenge the law. In order to obstruct Drew’s ability to challenge the ordinance, the police dropped the misdemeanor charges and brought forth felony charges, the net effect of which would be to chill any ordinary citizen’s challenge of local and state overreach in court. The financial toll Drew is likely to undergo as an individual street artist whose original crime was attempting to sell art at a dollar a piece on the sidewalk will conceivably hamper his ability to function and dampen his enthusiasm for challenge the state. That’s the idea, really: to dampen enthusiasm on the part of those who might actually dissent.

The police cannot demonstrate that their officers were harmed in any way by Drew’s recording of the arrest. This is important, because under tort law, harm is the basis of any complaint. Under criminal law, the government defines crime as “any act which the sovereign (that is, the state) has deemed contrary to the public good; a wrong which the government has determined is injurious to the public and, hence, prosecutable in a criminal proceeding (Barron’s Law Dictionary, Giftis, Steven H.).” In a free and open society, as a republic like our own allegedly is, the people have some input into what is injurious to the public good. It is doubtful that your average individual would define videotaping the police as injurious to their own interest. In point of fact, given Rodney King and many other cases, many of us might define recording the police as aligning with the public interest and not as injurious to it.

The simple reality is that crime is no longer what is injurious to the public good; rather, it is instead what is injurious to the state’s good and the state’s interest. Crime is whatever exposes the state to culpability for its overreach and documents such overreach in an indisputable fashion. This is what lies at the basis of any statute such as the Class I felony charge of illegal recording. It is not a concern with individual privacy, for the police perform arrests and traffic stops routinely without the expectation of such privacy. Hell, they have dashboard mounted cameras on their interceptors which record their stops and encounters with the public. But that’s the footage the state can edit, control, and even accidentally delete. It’s consistent with their root cause of controlling the narrative and establishing the myth as they see fit.

And that’s important to states. That’s actually of paramount importance, because the state routinely does things which are morally, ethically, and even legally abhorrent. Take the following examples of recorded police behavior:

-”In October 2007, an elite unit of the Chicago Police Department was disbanded after video emerged of its members shaking down barroom customers (http://bit.ly/9LPinc).”

-”A policeman in Puerto Rico is under FBI investigation because video–uploaded to YouTube–apparently shows him executing an unarmed man (ibid).”

-”[A] Baltimore woman recently won a $180,000 false arrest and imprisonment lawsuit based on police videotape evidence that confirmed a different but similarly dressed woman was the one buying drugs (ibid).”

We’ve all seen the Rodney King beating, and the recent leak by Wikileaks which shows the military blowing two Reuters reporters to smithereens because soldiers mistook their camera lenses for RPG launchers. You see, citizen surveillance, and leaked footage by whistleblowers, shows the state as it is rather than as it wishes to be seen. The state despises this because its agents cannot control the narrative and foist a myth in place of the truth when the people have information which clearly and plainly shows that the state’s version of events is a total lie.

This is why in 12 states, you can now be arrested and face jail time for documenting on your own what the states document routinely through the use of dashboard mounted cameras, or even what the military documents through helicopter and aircraft mounted cameras. Because if you have the footage, and it isn’t edited to favor the state, the state’s narrative comes into dispute. It’s control, and isn’t that why we established states in the first place? So that they could control us up to the point of leading us to believe in a totally false version of events? Of course it is.

Despite what states seek routinely to establish as crime, I think that we can all agree that the public good aligns with the police being constantly recorded by as many individuals and groups as possible. In fact, though I oppose the expansion of bureaucracy as a general rule, I propose a taxpayer funded stand alone bureaucracy whose level of funding is dependent on a direct vote of the taxpayer as opposed to appropriations committees, and I support this institution’s mission, which would be to follow and videotape elected officials and enforcement agents wherever they go in the course of their daily duties. Once the officials in question clock out and go home, they’re entitled to some expectation of privacy, but when they’re on our dime, I support a policy of total surveillance. If that’s a bit absolutist, so be it. I pride myself on being totally inflexible when advocating the increased authority and power of citizens over their governments, and I firmly believe that transparency is the path to greater citizen authority and power. How much more transparent could we get than having every minute of every working day on videotape where our government and its bureaucracies are concerned?