Recommended Reading

Click here for a thought-provoking alternative viewpoint on police brutality. It makes references to incidents in Portland that never made the national headlines, but you don't need the particulars of the events to understand the fundamental questions. The last one she asks is the most thought provoking. When did individual rights completely trump public safety?

The answer, in an academic discussion, is that public safety should always trump individual rights. Ideally, the balance point between individual rights and public safety would be the libertarian philosophy that "my rights end where another person's begin," or, as Mr. Spock said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." That's the ideal. Please email me if, being really honest with yourself, you are willing to be one of the few whose needs are outweighed. There are two types of errors that a system of jurisprudence can make: either it imprisons the innocent or lets the guilty walk. In principle, we would rather not imprison the innocent and that is how the system is set up; however, in practice, we'd rather not let the guilty go free if it gives them the opportunity to perpetrate harm against us again. It's simple human nature for self-preservation.

Fundamentally, the problem of creating balance comes down to deciding what is a genuine threat to public safety. On one hand, we don't want anyone running loose who may want to blow us up; on the other hand, we also do not relish the possibility that someone might deem us a potential terrorist if we buy fertilizer for the flower bed and fill up on diesel fuel in the truck. We want to keep our children away from pedophiles, but we shouldn't doom a person to a lifetime of notifying neighbors that he is a child sex offender because when he was 16, he had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend whose parents pressed charges of statutory rape when they found out their daughter was fooling around. We want to protect people from domestic violence by making legal protection from the abuser as easy as possible, but the system of rubber-stamping restraining orders for everyone who alleges domestic violence makes an alleged perpetrator guilty until proven innocent and has opened the floodgates for parents going through a bitter divorce to slap restraining orders on spouses, keeping the other parent away from the children--sometimes permanently--even if he or she has never, in reality, raised a voice or hand against the children or spouse.

One of our fundamental American principles is that we won't lock people up just because of what they might do. Unfortunately, this means that they have to do something, prove that they are a threat to public safety by violating that public safety, before we can legally suspend their individual rights. In short, one of us has to be harmed before we can protect everyone else from that source of harm. However, no one wants to be that one person who takes the hit to protect the rest of us. I certainly don't.