An
organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business
organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are
inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation
of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and
perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the
distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even
pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal
police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for
example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a
store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the
premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as
long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.
Since
the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school
districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in
every school.”[1]
Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2]
It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including
local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be
subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have
landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3]
A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including
one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with
crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals,
bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which
[were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but
allowed in public schools.”[4]
Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their
kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular,
instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was
“smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for
fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a
student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5]
Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically
fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified
in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that
calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For
instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the
intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected
to harsh critique.
In
his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that
punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher
could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to
instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future.
Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force
among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s
(before he went mad in 1890). Kneeing a
student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme
that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were
not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point
out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away
with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no
sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as
punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of
actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with
a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning
and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence,
defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle
and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which
his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they
are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt
will arise when those actions are punished.[6]
The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies
any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is
wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school
may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,”
could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of
violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified
any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel
guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of
themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect
if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by
their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political
or judicial officers of government.
What
then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police
brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men
hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it
strengthens the power of resistance.”[7]
None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of
the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and
thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting
knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers
feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming
students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble
quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the
student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on
kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their
respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in
American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police
installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard
and protect students from external physical threats.
That
school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or
ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent
parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire
boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals
who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for
vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have
no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human
beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to
use it.
As
Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an
organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security
guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt
abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For
power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description
of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another
saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give
someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but
don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human
psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an
innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in
institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional
or personal conflict of interest.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.
