Editor’s note: This commentary is by Vidda Crochetta, who is a novelist, poet and newsprint/online commentator since 2002. He grew up on a small farm not far from the western shore of the Chesapeake, and as an adult, was educated and lived in New York City, until he became an expat living in the Wantastiquet river basin of Brattleboro for the last nine years.
[O]ur nation’s police departments’ primary objectives have to be enforcement of existing law as enacted by the various state and federal legislatures.
The latitude exercised by each department is affected by a dizzying array of various police departmental and community circumstances. There is no template except that which falls back upon established law.
In a real sense, the executive summary and therefore the full report of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to the White House Task Force on Community-Police Relations (January 2015) is putting the cart before the horse.
The summit participants “outlined three conceptual elements of building community-police relationships. The report defines those elements (as) communication, partnerships, and trust.”
However, the lack of confidence in those three elements actually begins with the legislatures. The legislative branches are in fact the disconnect hurdle that is the most difficult to overcome. There are three distinct elements of lawmaking that cannot be addressed by community-policing — the victimless crime statute syndrome, faith-based moral lawmaking, and the judiciary’s failure to remain independent of the legislature.
Police are not and should not be community social, behavioral workers. Enforcement is a very recognizably different official responsibility that carries an inherent and alienable danger of getting too close to the private lives of people in the conduct of their individual freedoms and interests.
It isn’t the integration of community-policing that the community needs. It is an independent judiciary that can identify and overturn laws that do more harm than good and are subject to undue political, corporate and religious influence and interests, not common law.
Without the reform and possible overturn of current unjust victimless crime laws, the intimate intent and goals of benign community-policing violate the separation of officialdom from our innate private community life, and once established it will set a precedent not easily amended.
Police are not and should not be community social, behavioral workers. Enforcement is a very recognizably different official responsibility that carries an inherent and alienable danger of getting too close to the private lives of people in the conduct of their individual freedoms and interests.
The greatest evil of men is their treatment of all things as property, where people and nature exist at the pleasure of their dominion and disposition. It is there where laws against human nature and individual conscience are more than injustice. It is the shame of law that upholds any atrocity against its citizens. There is no morality, no dogma, no tradition and no political will that is greater than the innate commune of free will that victimizes no one.
The first breath of air is the same in all of our bodies. It is the one freedom that cannot arbitrarily be denied. But how much longer can we survive if we cannot see the malaise and ignore the injustices our legislatures lay upon us for the sake of their red and blue blooded absolute loyalty? If it remains so, we are a nation where hope is lost.
When a community cannot secure for itself the rights and freedoms of self-determination to insure their happiness and tranquility, a state of unsound union will always exist.
