Crime Central

Its a hard enough life, without having to walk through the legislative minefield known as criminal law in the United States.  According to the Wall Street Journal there are over 4500 criminal laws in our country.  This ridiculous number doesn't even include the endless regulations, misdemeanors, and civil codes.  With all these laws in place it's no wonder the US incarceration rate is the highest in the world.

In class on Friday, we spent a good amount of time talking about the concept of 'Over-Policing,' so this blog post will be my take on the situation as well as how it might relate to existentialism.  For starters it was honestly surprising to hear the term 'Over-Policing' used in such a negative connotation.  Police are supposed to be a sign of strength and selflessness, people who put their lives on the line to protect and defend society.  Why then is it a bad thing to have to many people such as these?  At first I thought the term was simply being used to express the dissatisfaction with a lot of how a section of police have been acting in the recent years, considering the depressing number of racially motivated wrongs committed by them.  Next, I thought maybe it was meant to talk about how there's simply to many laws and the government is 'over-policing' by trying to regulate and outlaw seemingly everything.  However, the more we discussed the topic I began to get a different picture all together.

When we discussed 'Over-Policing,' the intention simply meant what it would imply: our police are doing to much.  Too many arrests, to many incidents leading to incarceration, to many police.  A large focus of the talk centered around minorities and poorer neighborhoods or schools and how these are prime examples of too much police intervention.  Honestly, this concept boggles my mind.

Simply put it doesn't make sense to me how we can get mad at police for arresting someone for committing a crime.  Whether the crime is that of illegal immigration, vandalism, underage drinking, or smoking pot, there are consequences and I don't think it makes sense to pin the blame on the police.  Even personally, I've had a few run ins with law enforcement and each time I've disagreed with the consequences.  I really doubt anyone ever thinks they deserve punishment for the infractions they may commit, because a lot of things deemed illegal by the government done't seem to have someone being harmed.  The missing link seems to be that whether or not something like smoking marijuana hurts society is factually true, doesn't change the legality in certain places.  Unfortunately, in reality laws don't always reflect facts.  In the context of police then, I have a really hard time accepting that 'over-policing' can be a problem.

We can rationally argue over the consistency at which policing is applied.
We can rationally discuss the myriad of unnecessary laws.
We can even rationally debate the brutally steep punishments.
We can not though ignore the rule of law.

Jean-Paul Sartre's main arguments of existentialism is that humans 'are condemned to be free."  We as a society have the ability to do everything we can to either discuss the three statements above, or we can actively chose to brake the law.  No one is stopping you from the action in a lot of circumstances, most punishment is reactionary.  I agree with Sartre though in that we are ultimately left without excuse.  If we commit a crime we factually deserve the consequence.  Again, whether or not those consequences are at all rational is irrelevant to the concept of 'Over-Policing.'  In the end our spat should be with the laws not the enforcers.  If cops are obeying the law and are acting in accordance to procedure, then the responsibility lies with the person who committed the crime.  Something certainly needs to be done.  I believe though that it needs to start with questioning the laws themselves, not the people enforcing it.