Watching Les Watchmen

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, December 03, 2020

 

The best science fiction — and some of the most terrifying science fiction — has a short literary shelf life, because it does not stay fiction for long. In the much-admired HBO series Watchmen, which is set not in a dystopian future but in a reimagined present, the police have begun wearing masks in order to conceal their identities in response to a coordinated massacre of law-enforcement officers carried out by a white-supremacist group. In the real world, the French parliament has just proposed — and withdrawn — a bill that would have criminalized sharing photographs or video of police on the job in certain vaguely defined cases: those in which there is an “obvious intention to do harm,” either physical or psychological.

 

This is a French story today, but it could well be an American story tomorrow. It is, in part, an American story already.

 

The proposal put French president Emmanuel Macron, formerly of the Socialist Party and now heading the centrist-liberal-technocratic La République En Marche!, in an awkward position: On the one hand, Macron has been positioning himself, with an eye toward his competitors on the populist French right, as a law-and-order man since denouncing the “hateful mob” behind the 2018 anti-government protests, and he has redoubled this effort in the wake of the recent Islamist terrorist attacks in France; on the other hand, those same terrorist attacks — including the beheading of a teacher who had shown students the famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons — have put the issue of free speech front and center in French politics. The police-filming bill would have elevated the former at the expense of the latter.

 

Like many of our Democrats, members of Macron’s party often take the path of least resistance by giving unionized public-sector workers what they want. In this case, the police unions were demanding protection from social-media campaigns of intimidation and retribution aimed at them and their families. The timing could not have been worse: On Monday, four French police officers were charged with assault (more specifically, the crime of “intentional violence by a person in public authority”) for beating a black man in an episode that was captured on video.

 

Filming police at work can be a powerful tool for accountability, even when the video is in itself less than dispositive. Video is a reasonably straightforward solution to a well-documented problem: Police officers lie regularly, frequently, and predictably. Those lies are deployed both to protect individual police wrongdoers, including officers who are habitual criminals, and to protect the corporate interests, political and financial, of police departments. Video not only is useful for establishing the facts of any particular situation but also creates an environment in which police officers know that their account of the facts will not go unchallenged. As the photographer Alan Lodge put it, simply photographing police at work had immediate effects: “Suddenly, the police realized that they too could be seen.”

 

In the United States, conservatives tend to reflexively defend the police, but the fact is that police officers and police departments display more or less the same institutional pathologies that conservatives readily identify in agencies ranging from public schools to the Environmental Protection Agency. (Conservatives are more inclined to take note of police dysfunction when there are tribal appetites that can be thus satisfied, for instance in the case of the ATF.) Ask any public-sector union what it most desires and the answer will be more money and less accountability. This is, of course, not strictly limited to the public sector: The agent-principal problem is an eternal difficulty in corporate management, because shareholders and executives do not have identical interests and sometimes have rivalrous interests. But the case of police is of particular importance because we deputize them to engage in violence on our behalf. OSHA inspectors do not shoot very many people.

 

American police agencies have used activists’ videos, shared on social media, to make arrests for acts of vandalism and arson connected with protests. In some cases, they have used facial-recognition software to connect online videos to social-media accounts or other sources that can be used to identify suspects. At the same time, police routinely arrest activists and bystanders for filming them at work, even when there is no legal basis for such an arrest.

 

Several U.S. states have laws making it a crime to disclose personal information about police officers or to post such information on the Internet. California, for example, prohibits posting the home addresses or telephone numbers of elected officials and public officials, including certain police officials; Colorado forbids posting addresses or telephone numbers of police officers or their immediate family members; Texas law covers “peace officers” ranging from game wardens to retired correctional officers. In 2010, a Florida man was arrested after posting information about a police officer on a website that catalogues complaints about police; that case eventually was thrown out on First Amendment grounds, and the man arrested was awarded $60,000 in damages and legal fees — but only after years of litigation.

 

It is worth bearing in mind that it is not only the police who have access to facial-recognition software. Activists and others wishing to target police can use it, too.

 

And so while there is good reason to believe that American police agencies have more power than they can be trusted with, there is good reason to believe the same about the American public at large.

 

In the United States, the debate about protecting police privacy is taking place against an increasingly vicious and totalitarian model of mob-rule politics amplified by social media. We have seen members of police officers’ families fired from their jobs when the officers were accused of wrongdoing, but this is hardly limited to police and their families: Recall that in the case of the Covington Catholic schoolchildren, there was a serious effort made to pressure the employers of parents of children at the edges of the photographs to fire those parents on suspicion — unfounded, as it turns out — that their minor children had behaved themselves poorly on a school field trip. Mobs have been dispatched to the homes of media figures such as Tucker Carlson, judges, and elected officials, while Democrats and progressives have made a point of physically chasing people with different political views out of restaurants, bars, and other public spaces. This is not limited to, say, members of Donald Trump’s cabinet; people such as my former National Review colleague Kat Timpf have also been targeted. Democrats are currently proposing blacklists for people who served in the current administration, lawyers who have represented Trump and other Republicans, media figures who have been friendly to them, academics who were not sufficiently eager to denounce them, etc. As attorney general in California, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris abused the fearsome powers of her office in an attempt to bully conservative policy groups. Lawyers are routinely targeted for retaliation for representing unpopular clients.

 

It is not difficult to imagine where this is going.

 

There is a world of difference between videotaping Los Angeles police beating Rodney King and mob retaliation against private citizens for the crime of being related to a police officer. In some cases, simply being a police officer is treated as an offense in and of itself: Eater reported in June that, “Some restaurant employees are speaking out against serving police officers, whose presence increasingly makes them feel unsafe.” The issue of “safety” is the favorite ploy of wokeworld, a strategy that allows our cultural hostage-takers to present themselves as the hostages. It is dishonest, preposterous, and cowardly, but it is accepted as legitimate at institutions ranging from Yale to The Atlantic.

 

Macron’s allies have withdrawn the French police-filming bill, but they intend to reintroduce an amended version of it at some point in the future. They are not done with this issue — and neither are we.