Category: Police Abuse

The mission for Responsible for Equality and Liberty has been to work in promoting a culture where mutual respect for our common universal human rights is part of our lives around the world. These include our universal human rights of life, security, safety, dignity, equality, and freedom as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

One of the most fundamental aspects of promoting human rights is being actively involved in defending these rights. That defense requires multiple methods: education, activism, defying oppressors, and defending those whose rights are being denied. Defense of human rights also includes the mission of law enforcement.

Local laws in free nations reflect such universal human rights. Where such laws do not reflect such universal human rights, it is our responsibility in democracies to get such laws changed. When it is not understood that the mission of law enforcement is in defending such human rights, history shows this is where nations get into trouble.

We cannot tell the world that we stand for human rights of oppressed people, but also say that when our brothers and sisters are being attacked by human rights violators and law breakers that we will just wait only for government law enforcement professionals to act.

If we think we have no role in law enforcement, then we are human rights hypocrites.

Some would think that speaking or acting when our brothers and sisters are attacked would be too brave, and perhaps that we should “mind our own business.” Being responsible is not “brave” at all. Our culture must work to make it clear that such responsibility is a basic part of being a citizen anywhere our world.

How could human rights activists not defy those criminals threatening human rights and associated laws? If we choose not to act with every little human rights abuser, how can we ever hope to have effective activism when confronting major human rights abusers? Our responsibility for human rights never comes from fear, but must always come from real courage. Every day. Everywhere. With no exceptions. If we need an army to protect the rights and law in our world, we are that army.

In the 21st century, we have also vividly been shown that the public cannot “outsource” the mission of law enforcement only to those government professionals.

If law enforcement is necessary to protect human rights, than support for law enforcement is not just the responsibility of government professionals. Law enforcement is also OUR responsibility. We have gotten away from this thinking. We have come not only to be dependent on government professionals, but also to believe we have no right to have a say in the enforcement of our own laws designed to respect our human rights. We have come to believe that this is someone else’s responsibility.

This misguided view has become so pervasive that even our government professionals within the police and courts have come to believe that indeed they are the only ones who can speak and act on law enforcement matters.

How can we surrender our role in law enforcement to only a limited number of government professionals versus a potential sea of human rights abusers and criminals? How? But this is the view of too many today.

Such government professionals cannot and will not be there all of the time when rights are abused and laws are broken. Building an ever larger army of such professionals in the delusional belief that will really ensure the protection of our rights and law is deceptive.

Who should stop a thug beating an elderly woman in the street?
Who should help protect a child being sexually abused, a woman being raped, or any of us being violently attacked?
Who should tell a thief to stop their actions, and take efforts to stop them or photograph them?
Why would this not be OUR responsibility as citizens?

Do we really think we should surrender our role in law enforcement in these areas?
Is this really just “someone else’s problem”?
Is this really only a problem for when the government professionals are available to act?

Thankfully for me as a child, such a “regular person” understood that we are all responsible for law enforcement. Mrs. O was an elderly black American woman in the public housing project where I grew up in Pennsylvania. I was a young boy delivering papers when I was knocked off my bicycle in the night by a criminal with a knife. The white criminal man came from behind me with a knife to my throat. He wanted my “collections” – a whole ten dollars.

Let me tell you, we almost never saw the police when I lived in the housing projects, and when we did, God love them, they were always too late. I understand many frustrated people on that topic. I know – I lived it too, and it in that case, it didn’t matter what your race was, we just were simply viewed as a “different class” of people. That is simply the way it was. Years, later, we eventually moved out of the project housing, and we still loved the police so much that my mother worked as a local policewoman, and I went to work at the FBI. We have loved the police. But we always understood that law enforcement is the responsibility for every citizen.

Mrs. O looked at the window in her house in the projects where I was being held at knife point. She could have done anything, and most would not blame her for looking away. She could have called the police, who everyone in “the projects” knew would show up when they felt like it. She could have let two white guys settle it out. She could have let some other, younger, neighbor deal with it. She could have rightly been afraid that the man with knife might do something to her, if not then, he could retaliate later. When we choose fear and indecision, we have so many options and choices.

But it was a dark winter night, and Mrs. O didn’t do any of those. She stepped outside in the cold dark unafraid, and with the sternest voice she could muster, she told that man to drop that knife and leave me alone. And he did and fled. So Mrs. O is always going to be my personal hero. But she wouldn’t view it that way at all. Not at all. It was simply the responsible thing to do. If she hadn’t been responsible, everything I have done to try to help in human rights or anything in my life might not have never happened. That’s how essential it is for us to be responsible for the law enforcement and human rights of our fellow human beings.

We don’t have to surrender to those violating our human rights and laws. We don’t have to depend on government professionals to solve all our problems in human rights and law enforcement. But this is more than just being responsible, we really need to rethink if we are taking the right approach to law enforcement in general.

Over the past decade or more, in the United States of America, we have come to think that we need to supersize our law enforcement agencies and their resources, mostly due to terrorist threats. The downside to this type of thinking is the idea that we can somehow “outsource” our individual responsibility for law enforcement. I can tell you from personal experience, and I am sure many of you could too, there is no way that we can do that. We need to all be responsible for law enforcement.

When considering law enforcement, the only “them” versus “us” that there should be are those who respect human rights and the law, and those who do not. It really must be that simple. That begins with the view that we are not waiting for someone with a badge to protect the rights and safety of our fellow human beings.

The other problem with the idea of a “standing army” of law enforcement government professionals is how to keep them effectively employed. We cannot have any such domestic law enforcement armies who become beholden to arrest rates and statistical averages to justify their professional employment.

The New York Post recently reported with horror that the NYPD will “only make arrests when they have to,” as if this was something bad. If we have so many idle police professionals who think that they need to be making arrests when they DON’T have to, we have a real problem there. Perhaps we need more citizens willing to stand up to criminals and less of a “standing army” looking for something to do to justify budgets and salaries.

In the local Washington DC area, especially over the past several years, I have witnessed excessive use of police activity for questionable productivity. Last week, I saw traffic stopped for miles as a 40 motorcycle police force delivered a police officer dressed as Santa Claus to some event. I am sure it was worthy, and I am certainly I am big fan of Santa Claus (!), but we really need to have some degree of balance in the use of our government resources. A “standing army” looking for something to do is going to increasingly do less to protect human rights and the law, and get more in the way of such human rights and disrupt public order. Our police should be busy enough that they do only arrest those they need to arrest. When we think that balance is a problem, we need to reconsider our professional resource allocations in law enforcement. But the fundamental answer has to be more involvement by the public in law enforcement. Professional law enforcement cannot and will not be everywhere.

The same city in Pennsylvania, where Mrs. O stood up against a knife-wielding attacker to save my life, has changed a great deal in the past decade. No doubt much of this is economic pressures. But there is something else, the growing view over time that law enforcement is someone else’s job. The street I moved to after leaving the housing projects has become a war zone, with gun fights in the street, and shooting in front of churches. In this city, the ice cream stands have become a haven for drug dealers and criminals. Elderly women are being robbed, beaten, raped, and killed for a handful of dollars – in broad daylight. Children are being regularly sexually abused by predators, starved to death by their parents, and thrown in the trunks of cars and abused by “upright parents.” Even a nun is raped in broad daylight. This is where I grew up. It makes me sick to my stomach. That is what happens when you abandon respect for human rights and law, and you surrender your law enforcement responsibility to the “professionals.”

The government professional police in this city? Well, they learned the lesson our nation is going to learn. There aren’t enough police, and there can’t ever be enough police. More badges wasn’t and isn’t the answer for effective large-scale law enforcement. The local area simply can’t afford it, and even if they could afford it, there wouldn’t be enough. Until more of the people have a zero tolerance attitude towards criminals, there couldn’t be enough police.

When you surrender your responsibility for law enforcement, you surrender an important part of being the citizen of a community. We in human rights need to be a part of that. Criminals are enemies of human rights. Criminal are enemies of the human rights of security, safety, dignity, liberty, and equality. Criminals have rejected those shared human rights priorities for their own rules and their own selfish priorities.

It is our responsibility to defy and stand up to such criminals, whether they are a thug on the street or they are Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. A criminal is a criminal. A human rights violator is a human rights violator. They don’t need to just fear the enforcement by government law enforcement professionals. These criminals need to expect the rejection, the contempt, the disgust, and the active defiance by the citizens of the world. The answer to law enforcement is seen by looking in your mirror. They are our responsibility.

The answer to protecting human rights and stopping criminals is not simply more arrests, but more public rejection, contempt, and defiance to criminals. I wouldn’t be writing this, if Mrs. O hadn’t come out her door on that winter night. This type of story is repeated many times around the nation and the world. These stories of public law enforcement don’t make the headlines or the professional statistics, but without a public responsibility for law enforcement, we can’t possibly have enough police professionals to do their job.

Work in professional law enforcement is grim and demanding. When I worked in the FBI, every day was about murder, rape, sometimes finding out information on body parts of mutilated people to help find their bodies. It was about every amoral thief and psychopathic killers. That is very grim stuff. But with all due respect to those brave men and women in law enforcement, I disagree with the politicians who say that professional law enforcement is the “toughest job in the world.” We have people in every profession with the “toughest jobs,” including medical personnel dealing with the terminally ill, soldiers literally facing life and death situations, those trying to teach the disabled, those saving lives in our hospitals and clinics, and men and women working their hearts out every day to provide a basis for this nation and for this world to survive. They all have very “tough jobs.”

Our politicians need to stop denigrating every other profession, and politically positioning government professionals in law enforcement as the only exceptional position as the answer to crime. That is not true, and does no good for law enforcement and law and order. It perpetuates this misguided “blue” versus everyone else thinking.

Most dangerously, it perpetuates the misguided myth that without government professionals there would be no law enforcement. Wrong. If we are not sharing the “toughest job” of law enforcement, our social responsibility for one another needs to change.

Human rights and law enforcement are the responsibility for all of us. Everywhere. All the time.

We are all responsible for equality and liberty.