Gene Callahan writes about the police and their unthinking assumption that the law does not apply to them. He notes this important point (especially for “conservatives” who tend to idolize the police):
[The American founders] would have been pretty puzzled by the idea of a professional police force itself: Despite being something the state “obviously” must provide, professional police had never existed anywhere in the world at anytime before the early nineteenth century.
Gene delicately uses tame illustrations of police power abuse. I know from friends who have worked as police or with police (and from my church’s nearly 30 years of working with children in the inner city of St. Louis) that police abuse their powers in much more serious ways. What happened to the boys at Duke is just a high profile example of the kind of injustices being done to powerless people every day.
9:25 am on May 7, 2007
