Stupidity and Authority

It is the kind of thing which makes us think that maybe the civil libertarians have a point after all. The City of Detroit Police Department, in the settlement of not one but two lawsuits, has agreed to respect the First Amendment rights of citizens and visitors to the city by not writing tickets tickets for behaviors which are not in fact illegal. You see, the DPD has been found to write tickets where no offense was committed. One case in particular involved ticketing a man for loitering in a known drug trafficking area. Yet he was legally parked at the time (he was in his car) and no such statute was ion the books.

The rank stupidity of such actions confounds reason. As that actions itself took place in November 2008, it further boggles the mind that it would take more than three years for a resolution to the issue. How could any lawyer reasonably represent the DPD under such circumstances? How could they not expect the ACLU (the driving force behind the legal action) to make hay of it?

Detroit police officers must now be reminded that those who merely verbally oppose, criticize and question them cannot be threatened with arrest. We admit having our qualms about the whole question authority idea as a philosophic point. It's one thing to question authority if you honestly seek knowledge, which of course you have the right to do in potential arrest or ticketing situation. Yet it is quite another to question valid authority simply to incite, or to question it's very validity when it is in fact valid.

But, admittedly, that is a sidebar issue here. How this case even became a case is the real question. What kind of police do we have in Detroit when at least some of them feel compelled to issue tickets for nonexistent infractions? It seems there are things at work beyond simple Constitutional matters. There should be no officers on the street who do not know what is and is not a ticketable or arrestable offense. This requires more than reminding the men and women in blue to respect the Constitution. It seems to call for structural changes within the selection of training, and retention of officers.

The incidents, to be fair, are likely isolated. But that makes then no less an affront to the rights of the people, especially, of course, the people directly involved. It even offends perhaps more the good officers who we are sure form the vast, majority of the ranks. Yet we must suppose that they respect the action taken, or they would not be the good guys themselves. We are all the better for that.