'War on Crime' Can have its Overkill

    The war on crime. We should ask ourselves if the very term prompts us to take measures harmful to our society. Don't get me wrong; fighting crime is good. But, the "war on crime" decree can be wrongly interpreted.

   By both sides.

   The police? They see the need to arm up. They use terms borrowed from the military, such as tactical unit, special forces and strike forces. They show up in the middle of the night, often in large trucks that are the next thing down from tanks.

   If you live in the community, and know your neighbors, and like them.  Everybody in the community soon is emphathizing with their friends who are being hauled off. Sometimes, twenty armed officers show up in a mass raid just to haul away a person for not reporting to his probation officer. The neighbors hear of such injustices. They see the militarization of the police. And they become fearful of the police and start to regard of the police as the enemy, an entity that is just there to rub their noses in the ground.

   Overkill. And it becomes the face of the police in the communities. 

   The officers get heady. Their job is to wage war on these people, and, in war, the rules are  reduced. They begin in think they are like James Bond -- licensed to kill. Don't laugh, they do. The police violence in America is witness to that. 

   No, we don't want to be soft on crime, if the definition of that is to let criminals lose. But, in our anger of not wanting to be soft on crime, we should be able to realize treating a probation violator the same as a murderer is not just, nor does it help things. Nor should we come to believe that not being soft on crime means putting a choke hold on a suspect when he is already subdued.

   'War on crime' seem innoculous enough. No, I am not suggesting it we ban it. You cannot ban an innoculous term. Still, consider the subtle, deceiving way the term works against us. Yes, some officers take the term as their license to commit police violence. War is violence, and they are not only willing, but proud to administer it. It is almost a patriotic thing. Not all police, but some.

   We can do better than this. If we let the terminology, "war on crime" mean the police can treat people with impunity, it will be to our shame. It would not be wrong to have a campaign helping the police understand what things 'war on crime' should not be carried to mean.