October 13, 2006
On Thugs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that a thug is “‘a brutal ruffian or assassin: gangster, killer.’ That is not a description of Michael Bloomberg, even metaphorically.” I’d thought a thug was literally a murderous disciple of Kali, and metaphorically can be a number of other things, one of those things being police or secret service agents who use force in contempt of law, to, for example, improperly and illegally arrest or intimidate people lawfully and peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. I’m not kidding: All my life, I have heard people, including prosecutors, use the word thug to mean, among several other things, law enforcement officers using physical force in contempt of law. With respect to the case of Steven Howards, Mr. Gordon writes that “I have no knowledge of the incident. . . . If protecting the lives of our elected officials requires the Secret Service to prevent some jerk from exercising ‘free speech’ in a possibly threatening manner in the immediate vicinity of the Vice President, I imagine that is just fine with 99.9 percent of the American population.” Since Mr. Gordon concedes that he knows nothing of the incident, why does he assume that Steven Howards was “some jerk”? Why put “free speech” in quotes? I can imagine that Mr. Howards acted in what might have seemed to a reasonable person a threatening manner, and I can also imagine that he didn’t. If he didn’t, and the Secret Service thought they could arrest someone with impunity, when that person was merely peacefully exercising free speech, they were indeed acting like thugs. Is Mr. Gordon absolutely certain that the Secret Service detail couldn’t possibly have acted that way? If so, why? As for the demonstrators locked up during the 2004 convention, the courts did look into that one, and found that the city had acted unlawfully. I know honest and intelligent people who were there, and they reported that some of the police acted with admirable restraint, and that some acted—this really is the word they used—thuggishly. I know an assistant district attorney who looked over some of the evidence and thought the same thing. People who assume that the police invariably act with deceit and brutality are fools. People who assume that they never do are at least as foolish. I would want to ponder a while before hazarding a guess as to which sort of fool is more dangerous, if you care about the preservation of liberty under law.
|
