The Panopticon Overrules Active Fire

The death of Renee Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026 was unnecessary. As the subsequent news stories show, we live in the Panopticon, a society of all-seeing authority. Theorized 1785-1791 by Jeremy Bentham as a design for prisons, the conceptual model was expanded by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). The "authority" need not be legalistic, but can be (and often is) social. Cameras are everywhere. Therefore, the police practices of active engagement and relentless pursuit are antiquated and largely irrelevant.

Criminologists Marcus Felson and Lawrence Cohen published their "routine activity theory" in 1979. It found common acceptance and, of course, criticism. The elements of crime are a (1) willing perpetrator (2) an available victim and (3) the absence of a capable guardian. The theories of community policing rest in part on the fact that the "capable guardian" might need only to be a grandmother in a rocking chair on the front porch as a visible deterrent, 

The known failures of eye witness testimony are now countered by the plurality of immediate independent recordings. 

In 2006, while earning an associate's degree in criminal justice, I was working the night shift as a campus security officer at Washtenaw Community College. My partner had completed his bachelor's at Eastern Michigan University and had returned to WCC for their MCOLES academy. (The standards are commonly required and are TCOLE here in Texas.) I had viewed a training video from the Los Angeles police department on relentless pursuit. You are on patrol with your partner and you pull up to a jewelry store being robbed. The criminals open fire. Your partner goes down. They jump in their car and drive off. What do you do next? LAPD said that you pursue. You call for medical attention for your partner, but you do not stay there. LAPD advocated relentless pursuit. My partner's voice was bitter. "Thanks, Mike. Now I know where you stand." But what about relentless pursuit? I asked. "Look," he replied. "In this day you cannot harm any protective service, not even a school crossing guard, and not have every law enforcement agency after you. Where are you going to go?" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good

That underscores another fact about punishment as a deterrent to crime. Punishment has three aspects: swift, certain, and severe. All that counts is "certain." If a perpetrator is conscious of the fact that they will be punished, if certainty is assured, the crime does not happen. Yes, there are exceptions, especially when emotions are high in the heat of the moment. But premeditated crime is prevented by the certainty of punishment: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Severity is not just unimportant: it is counter-productive because publicity of severe punishment (public hangings, for example) only cause more violence later as the witnesses are affected by the violent event.

That fact explains so-called copycat crimes and the repetition and expansion of violent acts that are widely publicized, such as shootings at schools, or spontaneous protests. Violence becomes normal. 

The normalization of violence was also factor in the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who as of this date was identified as the officer who killed Renee Good. Ross began his career as a soldier in Iraq, just as very many other police officers have served in the armed forces before wearing a badge. The problem is that the civilian police perceive themselves and then become an occupying army surrounded by a hostile populace.    

Community policing and community courts are common remedies offered by academic criminologists and sociologists. As with Granny in the rocker, there is empirical truth underlying the theories. One problem with community policing is that it makes everyone an informant for the State. This is the underlying power of the totalitarian regime which rules because the populace practices habitual self-enforcement. Things are quiet because there is no liberty.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Eye Witness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project 

Alternatives to Prison Part 3 of 3 

Integrating Criminologies 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

Counter-Insurgency

No shit, this stuff really works. You just gotta apply it well. Let it soak in. Then polish it.  It works for the lawful constitutional authority, the occupying army, and the neighborhood police. Law enforcement on patrol, in particular, would benefit from a coating of this on top of time-honored community policing.

Counter-Insurgency Warfare:
Theory and Practice
by David Galula
(Frederick A. Praeger, 1964)

I learned about this book while reading about the challenges in Iraq that were faced by Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. John Abizaid, Gen. Peter Charelli, and Gen. George Casey in The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe (reviewed here).  That book led me to Eating Soup with a Knife by Lt. Col. John Nagl which referenced this one heavily.

Nagl was the go-to guy for the generals. They and he made it seem as though this was a newly invented wheel.  At work, I asked the oldest colonel if he knew counter-insurgency from his time in Viet Nam.  He replied, “When I taught it at Fort …”  My colonel spoke of identity papers and ration coupons, both tactics recommended by Galula based on the actual histories of counter-insurgency work in Algeria (1954-1962) and Malaya (1948-1960).  Galula also draws on the experiences of both sides of the Chinese civil war. Written in 1963, the book’s allusions to Viet Nam are from the viewpoint of the Viet Minh. 

Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice begins by examining the insurgency. Again, because of the time in which the author lived, the examples come from the communists. Reading the book today, considering Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, you have to take a broader view.  We considered communism to have been a “foreign ideology” (wrongly, I believe), but Islam surely was not recently imported into the Middle East by a small intelligensia.  That being as it may, the truths that do apply from that time to ours seem absolute. 

Moreover, the broad truths found here apply to civic law enforcement. If the local police perceived organized criminals as an insurgency, and applied the theory and practice of counter-insurgency, law and order would be easier to obtain. 

Conversely, as I read through this highly commendable little book, I understood its limitations in not perceiving insurgency as a set of social problems that are expressed as “crime.”  Criminology has theories of differential association, routine activities, the crime triangle, structural functionalism, social conflict, and rational choice, among about 50 others, that can be applied to the suppression of armed political revolt.

Ironically, for all of the Mao and Che that we read in the 1960s, this book would have been the capstone had we known about it.  Our theory that protests would bring repression that would cause the people to rise up angry against the Man was as simplistic as the scene in Lord of the Flies where the six-year olds want to solve their problem by building a new airplane and flying off the island. 

Galula’s lesson on leniency is the intersection of community policing and counter-insurgency. The Chinese communists treated their nationalist prisoners well, fed them, gave them medical care if possible, and then released them. Yes, some would take up arms again, but most would not. In fact, upon their return, they were imprisoned by their own leaders who feared that they had been contaminated.  Indeed, they had been. Their enemies treated them well; their own leaders were unjust to them. It was pretty easy to know which side you really were on.

As is typical of the times, this book has few citations, no bibliography and no index.  I had intended to draw a parallel between events in the Chinese civil war and the Sunni insurgency. I still believe that such a parallel exists. However, Galula's narrative (pp 15-16) cannot be supported by the histories we accept today. In this case, the theory is strong but the facts are weak. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Peace is More Powerful 

Armies without Weapons  

How to Start Your Own Country  

Monsters from the Id  

Ahmed Mohamed Doesn't Live Here Any More

A good news story polarizes friends. Ahmed Mohamed and his family are moving to Qatar after his meeting the President of the United States following his arrest for bringing a clock to school. Apparently, the clock was old Radio Shack from the 70s. He took it from its housing and put it in a "pencil box" (metal art supply box). The third teacher who saw it called it a bomb and the principal called the police. It was easy for me to see Ahmed's point of view. My conservative comrades disagreed.

We did agree that no news story provided all of the same significant facts. Read Huffington Post, Breitbart, and Wikipedia to piece the story together -- and consider the sources.

Huffington Post 9/21: "The clock, which he invented, and built in 20 minutes using basic materials, led to his arrest ..."  
​Still on 10./22: "... arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school,..."​

​But putting "ahmed mohamed did not build clock" into Bing and Google returned a slew of articles from right wing sources.  Among those, though, was Mark Zuckerberg's interview in which he conceded that the kid spoke intelligently about electronics, but that he could hear Ahmed's sister in the background coaching him on the politics of the incident.

From Wikipedia:  "Some of Mohamed's teachers at Sam Houston middle school were surprised to learn that staff at the high school called police, as they have known Mohamed to bring more elaborate gizmos to their school."[7] [7]  Selk, Avi (September 26, 2015).Before Ahmed's fame: fantastic inventions and a fight with authority". The Dallas Morning News. Archived from the original on September 27, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2015.

An "elaborate gizmo" is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. Last winter when Laurel wanted to build a security system for the house, I took out the Radio Shack project kit that she bought me one Christmas long ago. In a couple of weeks, we had integrated circuits on breadboards, and she was programming the controller.It is pretty easy to do.  But by comparison, I went to a computer security conference a couple of weeks ago, and one of the vendors had two motorized animals built from Leggos. I thought that was impressive.

Then, consider that this is about politicizing the behaviors of children. And the response of the police to an ignoramus.  The teacher who sounded the alarm teaches English.  Ahmed's technical teachers had no problem with what to them was obviously a clock.  

All of My Friends Got in Trouble in School

Texas law, it is said in an article, makes it illegal to possess a fake bomb. Well, OK, that's like robbing a bank with a fake gun, so I get that, but in order to fake a bomb (or fake a gun), it has to resemble the intended object.  In Iraq, they set off IEDs with cell phones.  So, are cell phones fake bombs?  The kid had a clock.  A clock is a clock -- unless you are an English teacher.

As for his having built a clicker to take control of the classroom projector, so what?  It's a prank for a moment.  Laurel had an uncle. When he was in high school, he brought a brown paper bag to class and told the girl next to him that it was candy for later....  knowing full well that the girl in front of him would put her hand in the bag... and find a snake. 

At our Model United Nations meeting in 1966, one of the delegations came with a "bomb" in a briefcase: a tape recorder that played tick-tock tick-tock .... and then boom!  

Of course that was before Columbine., 9/11, Homeland Security, and the militarization of the police. Those new conditions are real. For an insightful analysis of the sociology of mass violence, see "Thresholds of Violence" in a recent The New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell.

Also on Necessary Facts
World Peace Through Massive Retaliation: Educating the Gifted and Talented in Cleveland, Ohio
Nerd Nation
Teaching Science Through Science Fiction
The CSI Effect

Wolf DeVoon

"Inside each book is a man," said Montag.  That line from Fahrenheit 451 sums all literature, fiction and non-fiction, poetry no less than articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.  Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy must be reflections of Jane Austen, even if she had only recorded them as passengers on a stagecoach she shared: they were in and of her. These books are self-consciously Wolf DeVoon.

He is not special; but he is representative because we live in a renaissance. Never before have so many people given so much of themselves to the collective wisdom.  Independent movie producers eclipse Hollywood.  Downloads leave Random House (Bertelsmann) in the dust for sheer volume.  MySpace was intended as a Facebook but was taken over by music creators, artists, and producers.  In that context, Wolf DeVoon stands out as a creator of legal theory.

The Good Walk Alone is a novella, set in a post-apocalyptic Costa Rica.  The cops are women.  Wolf DeVoon's personal experiences working in prisons and working for prisoners showed him reasons to assert that women should not be subject to criminal law and that law enforcement should be entrusted to them exclusively.  It is a radical theory.  But I found it empirically supported.  As I was earning a baccalaureate (Summa cum Laude) in criminology administration in 2008, I was shown statistics proving that women write more citations than men, and with fewer complaints from the public.  Tangentially, college-educated police (2-year or 4-year degrees) also conduct more stops and write more citations with fewer complaints from citizens than do police officers with only a high school education.  If you want the best police force, get college educated women.  The story has all the usual elements: love, jealousy, some suspense, and gunfire, with a conclusion that is not quite resolved.

The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch is not really any kind of a specific proposal until the very end. First, you spend a lot of time with Wolf DeVoon, drinking coffee and drinking Dewars, listening to him explain how he came to these ideas. That is important and necessary and consequential because inside each book is a man. Jefferson is within the Declaration of Independence.  Washington is within his Farewell Address.  Lincoln is within the Gettysburg Address.  Wilson is within his Fourteen Points; Roosevelt his Four Freedoms.  Denounce or endorse them each as you choose.   DeVoon is deep or shallow to the extent that you find him.  In the famous words of the Higley Tokens: "I am Good Copper: Value Me as You Choose." 
DeVoon on LuLu here
DeVoon on Tripod here
DeVoon on Book Country here

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Laissez Faire Criminology
Inspecting the Objectivist Theory of Government
A Culture of Reality, Reason and Freedom
Stand Up and Be Counted

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

Recent stories touted by Glenn Beck and flashing across the patriotic blogosphere tell of egregious transgressions by city police officers.  Put your search engine to work on "police violence" or "police corruption" and like the paradox of the marching Chinese, the stories will continue to appear faster than you can read them all.  But the fact is that typically a police officer candidate submits about 40 pages of background in an application. After that investigation, after passing an accredited academy, and after probationary periods and required reviews, some sheep stray from the fold.  Is it the individuals, or the system, or something deeper?

My first class in criminology in 2005 was "Ethics for Criminal Justice" at Washtenaw Community College.  Initially, the syllabus said that we were going to look at police corruption in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina hit, and our instructor wanted to give the city time to recover.  The irony is inescapable.

In 2008, completing a bachelor of science in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a required senior class in police organization.  For both that first and last class my research into police corruption found that it is known everywhere, and some places have more of it than others. That opens a sociological or anthropological investigation: why do cultures differ? Physical environment and population can be similar, but outcomes can be pleasantly or horribly disparate.  While police corruption is known in Minneapolis their police force seems to suffer less from moral failures. 

We know at the individual level that female officers write more traffic tickets than do male officers.  Females also have statistically fewer complaints lodged against them by the public.  Education also makes a difference: officers with college education (2-year or 4-year) write more tickets than those with just high school diplomas.  Also, educated officers have fewer complaints lodged against them.  It would seem that the ideal police force would be comprised largely of women with college degrees. 



ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
The Fallibility of Fingerprinting
Junk Criminology in the Courtroom
Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project
Systemic Injustice
Employee Theft
Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?
A Forensics Bibliography

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 2.

“Handguns are instruments for killing people - they are not carried for hunting animals - and you have no right to kill people.” Ayn Rand at Ford Hall Forum, October 21, 1973.

It is not so much that legislation solves problems, but rather that the formal expression of social norms elevates them above being mere folkways. Homicide was not against the law in archaic Athens until the reforms of Drakon (c. 650 BCE). Even today, blood feud is the time-honored method of rebalancing injustice; and it continues in traditional societies. (See Vengeance is Mine: Justice Albanian Style by Fatos Tarifa; Chapel Hill: Globic Press, 2008.) In “Politics as a Profession” (1918) Max Weber enunciated the principle we accept today that the state has a monopoly on physical force.  That monopoly includes the right to assign proxy to others.  Thus, even in a state that forbids capital punishment, the police on the street can take a life. We give to the patrol officer the power of prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. I question that.

The Baker Batshield has your back

            Faced with the unequivocal weaponry of the state, criminals also arm themselves. For 150 years, the London Metropolitan Police were unarmed, as were the criminals. The conflict with the IRA and the rise of foreign gangs unsocialized to British folkways changed that. Now, when they knock to enter before bashing down the door, the bobbies announce themselves “Armed police!”  That only begs the question.  It is also true that those who would commit violence need no special excuse. Murder will not go away if the police are disarmed.

Moreover, the unarmed police will face armed perpetrators. As violence only begets violence, better solutions must be found to minimizing, ameliorating, and negating armed conflict.

            We organize our police as military.  Far deeper and far beyond the uniforms – though there is that – is the institutional structure, which reinforces the perception among the police themselves that they are an occupying army. 

A deployable net

            Waiting for a former instructor at my community college alma mater, I sat in on a class in “Police and the Community.” It was being taught by a police sergeant.  She said that there are good people and perpetrators; and the job of the police is to protect the community from the bad guys. . It was not my class, so I did not point out that the so-called perpetrators are in and of the community. As Newt Gingrich once reminded a Republican dinner, most Americans see the posted speed limit as a benchmark of opportunity. In that context, we segregate people in special clothing to commit acts, which if carried out by others, would be crimes. So, when a police officer accidentally kills the wrong fleeing felon, there is no restoration. The officer does not apologize; and the state which empowered the homicide admits no harm and pays no compensation.

A deployable net

           
The denial of responsibility is the first of five “Techniques of Neutralization” by which criminals excuse and justify their acts. (See “Techniques of Neutralization: a theory of delinquency,” Sykes, Gresham M. and David Matza, American Sociological Review, 22, 664-673.) These statements also apply to the state, and therefore to the police. (And, they also were heard from the civil rights movement and the anti-war protesters of the 50s and 60s, just as they come from the Occupiers today, all of whom engage in civil disobedience.)

1. Denial of responsibility (The state responds to crime caused by perpetrators. You brought this on yourself.)
2. Denial of injury (You deserve the consequences. Prison will be good for you.)
3. Denial of the victim (Perps are not good people. If he was not guilty, he would not have fled.)
4. Condemnation of the condemners (Do-gooders are soft on crime. Courts are too lenient.)
5. Appeal to higher loyalties (Thin blue line and new centurions. In God we trust. E pluribus unum.)

Ayn Rand famously said that no political change can come without a shift in the dominant philosophical foundations of our culture and society. Gun control laws can be no more effect than drug control laws, and for the same reasons. The deeper needs for guns and drugs are found within individuals with unworkable, irrational personal philosophies – and often a complete lack of any formally defined credo.

            It is not necessary that everyone change. The golden age of Greece, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Renaissance, the Three Kingdoms and later the Southern Sung of China, in each case, most people changed nothing of themselves, though they accepted the new social contexts around them.

           In our time, perhaps the greatest potential for a better future comes not from any single philosophy, but from the plethora of them. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was a plea for tolerance based on the admission of ignorance. No one has a monopoly on truth. Ironically, the large number of competing owners of absolute truth has created for us a complex matrix of beliefs, assertions, claims, philosophies, and religions. As long as none can dominate, all can flourish.

Bulletproof fashions from Miguel Caballero

Survival of the Fitted

The rise of bulletproof couture.

by David Owen The New Yorker, September 26, 2011

Fashionable bullet-proof wear finds growth abroad

by Jim Wyss The Miami Herald

Q: What is your opinion of gun control laws?

A: I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it is not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them; nor is it a great threat to the private, non-criminal citizen if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It is not an important issue, unless you're ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn't very practical. [Ford Hall Forum, 1971]

Q: What's your attitude toward gun control?
A: It is a complex, technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people -- they are not carried for hunting animals -- and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don't know how the issue is going to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at whim. [Ford Hall Forum, 1973]

From Ayn Rand Answers: the Best of Her Q&A, edited by Robert Mayhew © 2005 by The Estate of Ayn Rand.

“FBI agents alerted police about their interest in late October, shortly after the Travis County medical examiner's office released a report saying that 20-year-old Byron Carter Jr. had been shot four times, including once in the head.

            A teenager who drove a car toward two police officers on East Eighth Street.in late May, leading to the fatal shooting of his passenger by one of the officers, will not face criminal charges, the Travis County District Attorney's office said Thursday.  A grand jury completed its review of the incident and declined to indict the teen, officials said. The teen was not named in court documents because he is a juvenile. Police have said he is 16 years old.”

Holding back tears, San Angelo police Sgt. Matt Baldwin recounted stories about the kind of police officer his friend Jaime Padron was. 

The time Padron ran into a burning house with his partner to save two children trapped inside. The time Padron entered a business when a gunman was inside. The time he and Padron were outnumbered in a fight with several suspects, but persevered and made the arrest. 

"That was Jaime the cop," Baldwin said Friday at Padron's funeral Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church — a service bursting at the seams with Padron's fellow officers from Austin and San Angelo and with family, friends and well-wishers. "He loved being a cop. He was good at it." ... much has been written and said about "Jaime the cop" in the week since he was fatally shot at a North Austin Wal-Mart ... Padron was shot after confronting a shoplifting suspect about 2:30 a.m. April 6. The suspect in the shooting, Brandon Montgomery Daniel, remains jailed on a charge of capital murder.”
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 1.
Redshirts
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Private Security in the 21st Century
Physical Security for Data Centers (Slideshare View and Download)