“We need to get around this idea that you can resist arrest,” New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said last month. Speaking to state Senate committee members, he argued that resisting arrest should be elevated from a misdemeanor to a felony in order to prevent “potential injuries to the officer, to the suspect.”
Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence.
Police are allowed more discretion than civilians, and they should be bound by a more stringent system of accountability. But the police are not accountable. And why are the police allowed more discretion than civilians? Unless a law is being broken the police answer to the civilians. Since the legality of an arrest cannot be judged until months or years afterward, civilians bear an undue burden of having to accept all invasive actions from the police as a matter of course. New standards for determining criminal behavior are necessary, and we can’t afford to leave them to the sole discretion of the police. In many states, simply questioning an arrest may qualify as criminal, and even when civilians know the law better than an arresting officer, there’s no reasonable recourse for compromise or de-escalation.
This fantasy of a future in which violence against the police is the exclusive and inevitable outcome of civil conflict is really a warped reflection of what we already know but seldom acknowledge: Violence as a response to disagreement is already a de facto police tactic. Since police are given every advantage over civilians in defending themselves, the resulting violence is grossly one-sided rather than reciprocal.
