JUSTIFYING POLICE BRUTALITY.

The National Review has enlisted L.A.P.D Officer Jack Dunphy (pseudonym) to give some advice to President Obama and "his Ivy League pals" some advice in case a police questions you:

At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

Now, this is to some degree, simply true. It's why I never talk back to the police. But Dunphy's casual acceptance of this kind of relationship between citizens and police is one of the reasons why so many people have issues with the police.

We can argue about to what degree race was involved in the original incident between Gates and Crowley. But I think it's obvious that the reaction to the incident was highly racialized, that it fell largely along racial and partisan lines, and I think that says something about the right's grotesque justification of the Gates arrest or even the suggestion here that any police officer is justified in murdering anyone they please with the flimsiest of pretexts. The only reason Dunphy or others justify this type of behavior is that they envision it being applied to others, and I mean that in both the literal and abstract sense. If Gates had been white, or had he been a conservative, had he been say, Sarah Palin, the right would be using the incident as another example of the ruthlessness of the Obama police state.

The right's paranoia over guns is instructive in this instance. At least some of those rushing to buy weapons and ammo are not concerned simply about the prospect of gun bans, but about their ability to "resist tyranny" from the government. They're talking about armed resistance--who else would they be violently opposing but armed agents of the state such as police?

So understand, it's not that the state is always justified in repressive behavior. It's that the state is always justified in repressive behavior when the target is someone the right has identified as an "enemy." Their opposition to "tyranny" is not a matter of policy or principle, it's about who is being crushed. Because Gates is black, and because he is a liberal, he is identified with the other side, and therefore any police response, no matter how brutal, would have been justified. It doesn't matter what happened. What matters is whether you're an "us" or a "them". If you're black, as far as the National Review is concerned, you're a "them" that has it coming.

-- A. Serwer