What Is The Threshold For Martial Law? – OpEd
I cannot help but wonder what the standard is that triggers the martial-law response we’re seeing in New England. If these bombers had murdered three but not caused as many injuries—if the sheer terror of their crime had not reached this magnitude—would Boston look like a totalitarian state right now? What if the police needed to find a serial killer? Or what if a city was home to lots of violent crime in general?
If the suspect escapes into another city tomorrow, can the police lock down one city after another until they find him? And how long will this go on? They might catch him and it might all end and Boston could be back to normal, if we can call it that, by the end of the weekend. What if he isn’t caught for a while? What if a future suspect implicated in a gruesome and dramatic criminal act next year manages to escape justice for months? Can the police now just shut down cities, transportation, and—as they did on Monday—cell service for as long as they deem necessary? Should normal denizens really have no say of their own on whether they will risk the violent threats that might await them outside? If they have no right to walk about freely today without expecting, at a minimum, serious harassment from authorities, can the same be true on any other day?
People tolerate extreme police powers when they seem temporary. The martial law after Katrina gave way to more civilized policing, such as it is in New Orleans. But what if the emergency persists? What if the U.S. becomes home to a crime plausibly labeled terrorism every couple months—can we expect a state of constant siege? Even then, the threat to any given American would be very statistically low. Yet the gruesomeness and horror could legitimize all sorts of overreaction.
Not long ago, American law enforcement embraced the pretense that it sought to arrest suspects and bring them to trial. The advertised standard seems to have shifted. In February, the LAPD appeared to target ex-cop Chris Dorner, who allegedly murdered police and families of police, for summary liquidation. They drove around shooting at trucks they thought might contain the suspect. They surrounded him in a cabin, deployed CS gas, and the building went up in flames. Almost no one make a big deal of the fact of what had happened—everyone just assumed he was guilty and that there was no reasonable way to apprehend him alive. Or people didn’t care.
The same is true of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the nineteen-year-old suspect who managed to escape an army of law enforcement. Everyone assumes he’s guilty, and I would surely bet that he is, but that is not supposed to be America’s standard of legal justice. We also have every reason to want him alive, to know about his motives, to learn as much as we can to guard against future threats. Yet the standards of guilt have seemed to decline in recent memory, along with the standards for the state abolishing civil liberty. And in this case, even if he’s certainly guilty, the standards for how the state tries to bring someone into custody seem to have eroded as well.
Whatever it takes right? Maybe we should go back to the days of walled cities but this time with sniper perches and checkpoints...oh and don't forget the security cameras. We all need to be kept safe! Even from ourselves!!
