by Rand Paul
Two months before the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a kind of warm-up in Detroit. Though history remembers his words, which soared over the massive gathering in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the speech at Cobo Hall in Detroit electrified the crowd of 25,000. You can watch at least some of it on YouTube. It was in this speech that he first publicly used the phrase, “I have a dream…”
Part of Dr. King’s dream was equal employment opportunity. The speech in Detroit focused on this, and so too did the March on Washington. Both were about jobs: “I have a dream this afternoon that one day, right here in Detroit, Negroes will be able to buy a house or rent a house anywhere that their money will carry them, and they will be able to get a job,” Dr. King said that June day.5
Dr. King knew, like John Allison after him, that employment was essential to self-worth. That in order for black people to be lifted from the chains of discrimination they first had to be given the opportunity to work. When I read his words, I hear opportunity, not dependency. Yes, there’s a place for a safety net in our society. I won’t be part of any movement that turns its back on the truly needy. But I think what we really need to give the needy are jobs that pay well, not a life of welfare. The first step to ending the cycle of poverty is simply a job.
Detroit doesn’t need a handout, and I don’t think it wants a handout. Look at the proud history of Detroit. Look at Henry Ford, who not only produced a car built on an assembly line that people could afford but shortened the workweek and increased wages. Detroit was the industrial giant of the world. Government didn’t do that. Detroit did that. Government didn’t discover Smokey Robinson or Diana Ross. Motown did. Government didn’t turn downtown Detroit around. Detroiters did.
Economic Freedom Zones will remove government obstacles to success. We’ll empower a generation with a new bargain that promises government will get out of their way. It will treat everyone equally under the law. It will help parents guide their children’s future, it will help job creators create more jobs. It will treat you the same way it treats everyone else, regardless of the color of your skin or your beliefs.
We’ve tried the other way, the excessive bailouts, regulation, and taxation. It doesn’t work.
Let’s not rely on our government, let’s rely on ourselves—we’re much more dependable.
Escaping the poverty trap will require all of us to relearn this basic truth: we are not only our brother’s keeper, we are our own keeper. While a hand up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.
It’s time for new, fresh ideas.
It’s time to take a stand.
11
The War on Liberty
To defend minority rights, we must acknowledge that democracy must be restrained by the rule of law, or more specifically by the Bill of Rights.
I arrived in Ferguson a few months after the shooting of Michael Brown without any particular insight into what had happened that August afternoon. I came to learn what had made so many so angry.
Ferguson community leaders were very receptive and courteous to me. Not only was I the only national Republican to ask them their opinion, I was one of very few members of Congress to seek to learn more about the events and protests. In fact, one community leader, a woman in her seventies, called out during the meeting: “Where the hell is my Democrat congressman? I haven’t seen him since this whole thing started.”
I told them of the bills I had introduced in Congress to reform criminal justice. The leaders of Ferguson were intrigued, but they want something more, something more immediate.
I suggested that they try to harness the energy of the protests in voter registration drives. More than 60 percent of the population of Ferguson is black, so with any kind of voter registration effort, city government would reflect their concerns, including the lack of African Americans in the police department.
While residents of Ferguson were unhappy with the shooting death of Michael Brown, they didn’t want violence that would inevitably damage minority-owned businesses. These leaders were the elders of the community—teachers, lawyers, and doctors. They wanted peace, but they also wanted justice. It seemed to me the discontent they felt was long held and borne out by something that was larger than Ferguson.
Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson and Detroit and Atlanta and Chicago have revealed to me an undercurrent of unease.
Congressman John Lewis, who heroically marched and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, still sees the two Americas that Martin Luther King Jr. famously talked of. In a recent article in the Atlantic, he writes: “One group of people in this country can expect the institutions of government to bend in their favor, no matter that they are supposedly regulated by impartial law. In the other [group], children, fathers, mothers, uncles, grandfathers… are swept up like rubbish by the hard, unforgiving hand of the law.”
Lewis goes on, “They are offered no lenience, even for petty offenses, in a system that seems hell-bent on warehousing them by the millions… while others escape the consequences of pervasive malfeasance scot-free.”1
Like many of the protesters across America, Ferguson leaders were dismayed that, fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, these two separate Americas still existed. The legal barriers might have been removed, but social, economic, and criminal justice was still far from color-blind.
Although just a few years earlier we had elected a black president, racial tensions seemed to be worsening. Polls showed that while the public perceived an improvement in race relations for a year or so in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s election, more people than ever felt race relations were souring.
I do not question President Obama’s desire to help the poor, or to help people of color. Yet, under his administration, the poor have gotten poorer, and the rich have gotten richer. Income inequality is worse under President Obama than it was under President Bush. Black unemployment is still twice white unemployment. Households headed by a black parent have lost an average of $3,500 in median household income.
I spoke with the president a few months before the 2014 elections about these issues. I reminded him that I had joined forces with Senator Cory Booker on a bill to expunge the records of nonviolent felons to help them find employment. I refreshed his memory about the bill I brought to the floor of the Senate that would make some minor nonviolent drug felonies misdemeanors in order to avoid the employment problems associated with a felony record. I even mentioned the bill I have written with Harry Reid to restore voting rights to people convicted of nonviolent crimes who have served their time. The president offered little in the way of help. Even after the election, the president invited a bipartisan group of representatives and me to the White House to discuss criminal justice reform. Again I was disappointed. Even with bipartisan support, nothing gets done.
The uneasy coexistence of the two Americas was brought to the forefront by the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island. We need to notice and be aware of the injustices imbedded in our criminal justice system, though we shouldn’t be misled to believe that excessive force is the norm, not the exception. The vast majority of police are conscientious. Most do their difficult jobs in a just and helpful way, serving and protecting their communities.
Just before Christmas 2014, Helen Johnson was desperate to feed her two daughters and their small children, who had gone two days without food. When she got to the store she discovered that the $1.25 she had was not enough to buy eggs. She was fifty cents short, so she stuffed the eggs in her pocket.
Helen didn’t even make it out of the store.
When police officer William Stacy arrived, something special happened. Instead of handcuffing Helen and taking her to jail or writing her a summons, he used discretion and compassion t
o mete out justice.
He warned Helen not to steal again, and he bought her the eggs himself.
No doubt there are bad cops just as there are bad factory workers and bad taxi drivers and bad politicians, but it’s not the people who enforce our criminal justice system who are the main problem. The problem lies in the system itself, a system that fosters the unease felt in poor neighborhoods across the country.
I think peace will come when those of us who have enjoyed the American Dream become aware of those who are missing out on the American Dream. The future of our country will be secure when we break down the wall that separates us from “the other America.” I want to be a part of a united America in which every child, rich or poor, black or white, truly believes that they have a chance at the American Dream. We need to address the undercurrent of unease that seeps through our land. The first step in changing this culture is to acknowledge the problem.
Cops in Tanks
For decades, big government policies have kept the poor poor and our jails filled with minorities, while draining any vestige of hope from a class of people government tries to sweep under some tidy rug.
The reaction to protests in Ferguson has two sides. On the one side, protesters burned businesses, burned cars, and terrorized the town. There is no excuse for such violence. On the other side, thousands of peaceful protesters were met with rubber bullets, tear gas, and a police department that showed up at the protest in gear more fitting for Fallujah or Kandahar. While the show of force was impressive, it did little to stop the damage that was done to the town.
In his column, Walter Olson of the Cato Institute asked a question that was on the mind of many:
Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo., so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards?2
A photograph that ran on front pages of newspapers and websites around the world showed a SWAT team member sitting on top of a BearCat, an armor-protected vehicle that can withstand bullets from a .50 caliber rifle, and holding a military M4 weapon. That gun has a scope accurate up to 500 meters. The rest of his team also had M4s, and side arms with thirty rounds, and body armor, and camouflage battle-dress uniforms (BDUs).
There’s nothing wrong with that kind weaponry if it’s used where it’s supposed to be used and not carried by cops on Main Street. The “surplus” military equipment is to be used in the event of a terrorist attack—in fact, the federal government prohibits its use for riot control. Obviously, someone forgot to tell the Ferguson PD.
As I wrote in an op-ed for Time magazine soon after the event, there is a systemic problem with today’s law enforcement. Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies. The system allows for a culture in which police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as appropriate for law enforcement.
When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process of law that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, preconviction forfeiture, and broad general warrants—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands. It becomes almost impossible for many Americans not to feel that their government is targeting them.
In the wake of the tragedy in Ferguson, President Obama promised to overhaul the system and stop the flood of surplus military equipment to police departments. The government giving police military weapons has been going on for so long it will take a generation for attrition to deplete the supply that’s already out there. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the equipment “flowed to local police forces because they were increasingly being asked to assist in counterterrorism.”3 Let me know when the terrorists get to Fargo, or Franklin, Indiana, or Ferguson, or any number of the small towns that receive this equipment. Recently, the Homeland Security Committee had a hearing on the overmilitarization of domestic police forces. I asked a Defense Department official what possible use local police had for the 12,000 bayonets they handed out last year. Were they planning some type of charge?
The constitutional protection against cops acting like soldiers resides mostly in the Third and Fourth Amendments. Often overlooked as archaic, the Third specifically prevents the quartering of military in private homes without the owner’s consent. It reads in full: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” It was written into the Bill of Rights in response to the British Quartering Act, which allowed British troops to commandeer colonists’ homes during the Revolution.
The broader interpretation of the amendment is that the military’s purpose is to protect the United States from foreign threats and not to enforce domestic laws.
Sound familiar? The NSA is supposed to operate under the same restrictions. Supposed to.
Radley Balko is the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, perhaps the seminal book on the militarization of America’s police. In one of that book’s many illuminating passages, Balko poses the question that has bothered me since before the shooting in Ferguson. “How did we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed, standing government forces—a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary—to a country where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night—not to apprehend violent fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activities?”
Though you can chart the history of police militarization from Colonial times and the writs of assistance (yes, them again), and Balko does, I’ll cut to the more recent chase. The antecedent to the Ferguson military response resided in Los Angeles in the 1960s, where a young, ambitious police commander who had seen sections of his city burned to the ground during the Watts riots came up with an idea of a heavily armed, specially trained police response team. When he approached his superiors with the idea he called the proposed unit a “special weapons attack team.” The police chief of Los Angeles at the time, Thomas Reddin, liked the concept but didn’t particularly care for the word “attack” in the unit’s title. The young commander, whose name was Daryl Gates, was disappointed. He was fond of the name he’d bestowed on his team, particularly because of its snappy abbreviation. Gates suggested “special weapons and tactics” and Reddin gave him the go-ahead.
Gates knew a good acronym when he saw one.
Partly by early successes, or at least the involvement in high-profile cases like the raid on the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panthers and a shoot-out with the Symbionese Liberation Army of Patty Hearst fame, Gates’s SWAT team captured America’s imagination.
There are legitimate reasons for local police to employ SWAT teams, but the proliferation of the paramilitary unit is indicative of a fundamental problem in our country. One of the ways big government supports this encroachment on our rights and oversteps its constitutional power is with no-knock warrants.
Essentially, there are three basic reasons a police officer in his or her official capacity is allowed to enter a residence: if permission is granted by the occupant, if the police have a warrant issued by a judge, or if the police officer is in “hot pursuit” or deems that an emergency inside the home necessitates his or her immediate entry.
A no-knock warrant is a kind of hybrid of the second and third reasons. The emergency in the case of a no-knock is usually the belief that occupan
ts are destroying evidence, for instance, the sound of a toilet flushing or a window opening.
If this justification seems vague, it is.
No-knock warrants came into use during the Nixon administration. Though included prominently in President Nixon’s anticrime initiatives and overwhelmingly passed into law by Congress, the no-knock aspect of the crime bill was controversial. It gained support because of a pervading fear of drugs and crime at that time. Like most laws passed in the heat of the moment, the bill had more than its share of flaws, not the least of which was that it was unconstitutional.
Senator Sam Ervin, the Democrat from North Carolina who described himself as an “old country lawyer,” was one of the early warriors against no-knock warrants. In July 1970, Ervin took to the Senate floor to express his displeasure over the bill, which is a nice way of describing the James Otis–like explosion that happened that day on the Hill. He even evoked Otis’s defense of the Castle Doctrine: “I stand on the proposition that every man’s home is his castle, and that the Congress should not go on record as allowing Department of Justice officials to break into a home like burglars.” For four and a half hours, Ervin railed against the crime bill, and specifically the no-knock provisions. They “ought to be removed from this bill and transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, to manifest some of the greatest legal curiosities that ever have been evolved by the mind of man on the North American Continent,” he said.4