Who's In Charge Here--Protesters or Police?

When a swelling grass roots movement of protest--like Occupy Wall Street--bursts out, we can know something is awry and needs addressed. The numbers of people engaging in the OWS protests is a measure of the degree to which the people (en masse) feel our government has let us down. It only remains for the emotion to gain focus.

Meanwhile, conflict at the point of friction is inevitable. By job definition those in governing positions must keep order. The role of the "people" is to evaluate the enforcement techniques of officialdom. In the end, the people rule, but their "evaluation" of enforcement techniques must be as clear headed as should be the professionalism of the police forces. Who can be the striped shirt referees to make the calls about the appropriateness of behavior on both side? You and I have that privileged position. We have our choice of news networks to watch, we view the video clips on TV and the interviews of mayors and injured protesters. And without wearing a uniform or carrying a cardboard sign, we wait for the police to sideline their maverick officers and the protesters to hone their argument and weed out the nuts and drifters.

In a democracy, the "people" can't be wrong, for the people are sovereign. The only question to resolve is who speaks for the people. Supposedly the elected officials speak for the people, and the law enforcers carry out their orders for the good of the community. When the protesters and the police meet in the streets though, the police say they are carrying out the will of the people as translated for them by elected officials; and the protesters say they have a fresher, more direct translation of the "people's" will. The protesters seem to have the better argument when the elected officials prove incapable of doing what the people expect of them in a time of economic crisis.

Police commissioners and the street officers are not spokespersons for anyone. They just carry out orders. But when the protesters conduct their demonstrations non-violently and the police officers resort to bully tactics, democracy takes the bruising. The responsibility to discover who "the people" are and what they want lies with both sides in the street confrontations. The protesters need to hold to solidarity for non-violence--which they have notably done even when provoked by maverick policemen. At the same time, the police should discipline themselves to not respond viscerally when the protesters do not say "yes, sir"--their record is spotty on this.

Since the OWS movement is not showing signs of fading away, hopefully they will hold to their non-violence, find focus, and discover some articulate leaders. And hopefully responsible police chiefs will see to it that their officers act professionally and respectfully toward the frank and earnest "people" in the street. And let's hope against hope that the politicians in this season of election campaigning will grow up, be honest, and face the reality that the real people seem to have a better grasp of reality than the pols are showing so far. Or else we the people may have to resort to the precedents set for us in the colonial times before we went to war for a democratic system of our own composition--such examples as Nathaniel Bacon's disgruntled western followers, who in 1675, burned down the town of Jamestown housing Virginia's government, or the back country Regulators in North Carolina, who in 1766 organized vigilante bands to find justice, or New Yorker farmers, who in 1766 battled a sheriff's posse and released their arrested friends from jail. We shouldn't need to go this far now that we have our democratic system in place--but we'll see.

The capitalist elites crow about how the market is capable of correcting itself in times of economic distress. That doesn't seem to work. Let's see if the political marketplace can perform this trick of self-correction short of outright colonial style rebellion. If not, maybe our founding fathers weren't smart enough in what they handed us.

Doug Good