Dallas Police Officers Want to Be Above the Law

Slashdot points us to a Dallas Morning News article about police whining about getting caught by red-light cameras. Shut up.

I already hate red light cameras, speeding cameras, and CCTV in general. The Supreme Court's decision on the matter notwithstanding (in which it found that there was no expectation of privacy on a public street, and so the appellant couldn't challenge cameras being used on the street), I consider it a pretty serious violation of privac. Last summer I lived in London, where there are thousands of government and privately-owned CCTV cameras spying constantly. The people there have, as the UK's own information commissioner Richard Thomas noted, "sleep-walk[ed] into a surveillance society." And now there are cameras that literally "bark orders" at people on the streets, and even George Orwell's former home is surrounded by 32 CCTV cameras. The last thing I want is for the US to turn into another Britain, where people no longer have any privacy. Things like red-light cameras and speeding cameras are the beginnings of that. And don't tell me slippery-slope arguments are always wrong; that's exactly what people in Britain said when the first CCTV cameras were rolled out.

But even more worrying for me than the privacy implications here are the qualms I have about these police. In most states (the US included, mostly), only one group of people is entrusted with the right to exercise violence: the state police. For the most part it's good that police are allowed to exercise this violence; it helps keep the state together by discouraging a whole bunch of crime, and when crimes do occur it can be used to find and arrest or otherwise stop the perpetrators. It's also usually used only in appropriate situations and in amounts commensurate with the requirements of the situation at hand. That said, it's also incredibly dangerous to put these powers into the hands of a small number of individual human beings, who are as corruptible and liable to occasional lapses of judgment as any of us. For that reason, in my view, there need to be gigantic checks on police officers. I want the rules they have to deal with to be vicious, Draconian even; I want to make sure that they have every incentive to use only so much violence and nothing more, and I want to make sure that they obey every rule as much to the letter as possible. Putting gigantic restrictions and penalties on them is, in my mind, the way to do that. These aren't just normal people here, they're officers of the state charged with the exclusive ability to mete out violent force. They need to have different rules.

So when the article says, "The prevailing belief among officers has been that they can run red lights as they see fit," I take issue with that. No, you sure as hell cannot do that, because it's against the law. You are the physical manifestation of the execution of the law, so for you to consider yourself above it (above yourself?) just makes no sense. It goes back to constitutionalism. We have a governmental structure that's all about the rule of law; no man can say he can break the law because the law is above him, it takes precedence over him. So no, police officers, you can't just go running red lights all willy nilly, and if you do, I don't just want you to have to deal with the $75 ticket normal citizens have to deal with. You break the law, you either lose your badge or take a step toward losing it, regardless of how insignificant that law is. It's very encouraging to me to see Dallas Police Chief Kunkle saying, "[police officers] have to drive within the traffic laws," and it's great that the three officers who ran red lights without proper cause will have to pay fines. But again, I think they should have to do more than just pay the fine.

All that said, it's fascinating to me that CCTV cameras, which I consider the embodiment of the encroachment by the state on the civil liberties of American citizens, might also encroach on state officers such that they too are forced into complying more precisely with the law. It's an interesting trade-off I'd never considered before: give up privacy for not just more security from crime, but also more security from the state itself. The same system seems like it can ensure both individual and state conformity with the law. Gonna have to think about that.