This commentary is by Lee Russ of Bennington, a retired legal editor who was the lead editor/author of both the third edition of “Couch on Insurance” and the Attorneys Medical Advisor.
Demands for “law and order” are as common as the common cold. Poke any candidate for office and “law and order” reflexively pops out.
Champions of law and order conveniently leave out any specifics. Law and order for whom? What “law” is going to be enforced? Which lawbreakers will be held to account, and which will be allowed to slip away unpunished?
Still, law and order sounds good and it gets a lot of public support in chaotic times. People want to feel secure. They don’t want to be worried about being attacked, robbed, or raped as they walk around outside their homes or watch TV in their living rooms.
Essentially, law and order means keeping the peace. People who feel secure have no need to resort to various forms of vigilantism to achieve what feels like justice.
One problem with calls for law and order is that the people demanding it seem to want only a narrow form of it, and that form usually ends up being enforced against one group of Americans in order to protect other groups of Americans.
A prime example of that is the quagmire resulting from law enforcement officers breaking the law. They do this with some frequency and are often supported by other members of law enforcement who help cover up the crime. When the assigned keepers of law and order are the very ones breaking the law and creating disorder, people’s security is in dire jeopardy.
There is no law and order when two women are shot multiple times by police officers as they attempt to deliver newspapers, and the officers are not even charged with wrongdoing.
There is no law and order when unarmed Amadou Diallou is shot 19 times outside his own apartment in New York City, the case against the police is removed to Albany, and a jury acquits the police. Nor when Abner Louima is sodomized by police officers inside a police station, and other officers try to cover up that crime.
There certainly can’t be law and order if Black families are afraid to call the police when they feel threatened or simply need help for a family member in distress. Like everyone, they don’t want to be worried about being attacked, robbed, or raped as they walk around outside their homes or watch TV in their living rooms.
When law enforcement officers break rather than enforce the law, their victims often have no remedy except for public demonstrations against the disruption of law and order in their own lives. But this public disruption often makes other groups feel insecure and we end up with victims’ efforts to achieve law and order for themselves being suppressed in the name of law and order for others.
Calls for law and order usually focus on crimes of violence and theft of property, but law and order has to mean more than that. It has to mean protecting people from all knowing, wrongful actions of others, including the institutions and businesses they deal with, regardless of how powerful the wrongdoers are.
People want to feel secure in using a bank, investing money, buying items large and small. They do not feel secure when they have to worry about being ripped off by bankers, sold dangerous drugs by pharmaceutical companies, or forced to drive dangerously defective vehicles.
Law and order in this context has to include punishing wrongdoers sufficiently to deter them from repeating their bad behavior. Yet it’s common knowledge that punishments for misbehaving business institutions are often woefully inadequate to achieve that deterrence.
Is there law and order when a large corporation deliberately breaks environmental laws, damaging the health of thousands, and is fined a tiny fraction of its annual profit? When a manufacturing company produces products that it knows will kill and injure some of its customers, but has calculated that its punishment will cost it less money than it would take to fix the defect?
The closer we come to providing true law and order, the better off we all are. We need to reach the point where all the people have confidence they will be protected from wrongful harm from others, regardless of who they are, how poor they are and who is causing the harm.
The most telling indicator of how far we are from law and order for everyone is this: The past president of the United States encouraged armed rioting and has so far not only skated free of responsibility, but plans to try to regain the presidency.
There will be no law and order — no peace — as long as law and order is “for me, but not for thee.” Law and order needs to be for “we.”
