But the King of England may not enter
Addendum to the previous entry: I found a blogpost riffing on "Gatesgate" by a sociologist named Peter Moskos who spent a year as a cop in Baltimore and wrote a book about it. He asks, rhetorically,
Should being an asshole to police get you locked up?. And answers yes with the justification that a police officer "needs" catchall reasons to arrest anyone who disobeys them, in order not to "lose face", and that we simply "need smart police officers to use and not abuse this discretion."
This is appalling, and it is difficult to overstate the danger to freedom that comes from it. In a free society a citizen owes obedience only to the law, and then only when it is a just law. No one owes obedience to the personal commands of the police, nor to the personal commands of any government official. This is an elementary distinction and is precisely what it means to have a rule of law and not of men. A police officer who believes it "necessary" that he or she have arbitrary power to arrest nonviolent, law-abiding citizens simply for disobedience or assholery is little better than the street thugs from which he/she claims to protect us.
I'll bet the Cambridge cop who arrested Gates thought the same way Moskos did. And that's a shame and a horror.
Should being an asshole to police get you locked up?. And answers yes with the justification that a police officer "needs" catchall reasons to arrest anyone who disobeys them, in order not to "lose face", and that we simply "need smart police officers to use and not abuse this discretion."
This is appalling, and it is difficult to overstate the danger to freedom that comes from it. In a free society a citizen owes obedience only to the law, and then only when it is a just law. No one owes obedience to the personal commands of the police, nor to the personal commands of any government official. This is an elementary distinction and is precisely what it means to have a rule of law and not of men. A police officer who believes it "necessary" that he or she have arbitrary power to arrest nonviolent, law-abiding citizens simply for disobedience or assholery is little better than the street thugs from which he/she claims to protect us.
I'll bet the Cambridge cop who arrested Gates thought the same way Moskos did. And that's a shame and a horror.