Cops Take New Policing Over the Line

It’s an eerie feeling, living up in Humboldt County as I do, to read local papers such as the Humboldt Beacon and find polite letters to the editor saying that it was just fine for the Sheriff’s Department to daub pepper spray on the eyes of women who were demonstrating in Rep. Frank Riggs’ local office.

These, mind you, were letters from nice folk in the logging town of Fortuna, from women signing themselves as “Homemaker” and the like. It’s hard to guess where these people would draw the line.

Certainly those Humboldt deputies felt they were acting well short of the permissible frontiers of coercive action, since they were planning to use the footage of pepper spray daubers as a training film.

Humboldt Sheriff Frank Lewis and Eureka Police Chief Ernie Milsap have since claimed that the use of cotton swabs to apply the pepper spray on the women’s eyes was not only cost-effective but safe and somehow humane.

The sotto voce theme here is that more or less anything that doesn’t involve violent beating with a club is inherently virtuous and should be esteemed by the citizenry. Back in the 1950s in the Algerian War, the French military authorities claimed that when it came to humane interrogation techniques, the clipping of wires from electric car batteries to the suspect’s genitals was the way to go. Why, they’d cry indignantly, Gen. Massu had even tried it on himself to make sure it was safe.

Those Humboldt cops felt they were operating with the full social sanction of the people who mattered. In this calculation they were correct in assuming that the Board of Supervisors wouldn’t make a stink, the legal establishment would say nothing and the local press would be similarly supportive.

Cops will always push things as far as they feel it’s safe to go, then push a little further. Think of it in terms of the “broken window” theory of crime. This is the notion that a supposed “culture of crime” starts with minor infractions--graffiti, turnstile jumping in the subway, vigorous panhandling--which lower the social tone and encourage the perpetrators to advance to more violent activities, like muggings and armed robberies. Ergo, prosecute turnstile jumpers vigorously, hound beggars mercilessly, give graffiti artists a hard time and in many and diverse ways harass the poor, thus fixing the “window.”

Apply this paradigm to the police. It starts maybe with a cop faking a reason to stop and search a car. Next we have cops beating the suspect in the precinct house and telling a novice cop to write up the report, alleging falsely that the suspect “became violent and had to be subdued.” Thus the novice is integrated into the overall lawless police culture and is soon lying his head off in court, knowing that the judge will take his word for it. Keep this up, amid manifestations of approval from elected officials, amid the deference or powerlessness of civilian review boards and you get those deputies in Humboldt County blithely swabbing on pepper spray and cops in New York torturing Abner Louima with a broom handle.

There’s plenty of evidence across the country that after years of grandstanding on crime by politicians and the stimulus of TV shows like “America’s Most Wanted,” policing is often out of control. You can find examples the length and breadth of the country. A couple of years ago in Mendocino County, police ran amok in Covelo in the wake of a shooting incident that left a deputy and a Native American both dead. Houses were smashed up and elderly people brutalized.

That case led to the trial of Bear Lincoln, a Native American, who ultimately was acquitted this fall on capital charges of murder. This week, Mendocino sheriff’s deputies were quoted in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat as saying that they considered the jury verdict a “slap in the face” and as speculating that it will be difficult to get deputies to patrol Covelo. In other words, let the sheriff’s department run amok and railroad a man onto death row, or they’ll go on strike.

Clearly, this response, along with pepper spray torture in Humboldt County and broomstick torture in New York, shows where the broken windows paradigm has taken us. Lawless cops, not lawless criminals, are the true indictment of a nation that has abandoned civilized standards.