Cops, the CIA, and Russia versus Ukraine

Welcome friends!

Lot’s of things going on right now that really deserve some comment such as the newly ascendent Republican Party’s attempt to do away with regulations on their Wall Street patrons and those anti-Islamization marches in Germany and the funny reactions to them in the media.  However, since this is my last post for 2014 I thought I’d take a little time out and look at some current events I’ve been avoiding mentioning not because I don’t think they’re important but because they don’t seem to involve the sort of conceptual confusion I’m driven to sort out.  In other words, I’m just not sure I have much to add to the conversation.  But that’s never really stopped me before, has it?  So let’s make a clean sweep of it.

How about those recent instances of the US police using deadly force in questionable circumstances generally involving our swarthier compatriots?  Let me start with a few rather obvious observations if I may and then proceed on to what I consider a more dubious line of discussion.

First, it seems to me pretty clear to me that we may have to revisit how we train our police force.  Policing is a tricky and dangerous business at the best of times but particularly so here in the US where an alarming number of people carry guns about and where even those who can’t manage to pass our laughably inadequate background checks for buying guns can easily pick one up whenever they like by simply breaking into any house on the block and taking one.  The police response to this quasi-militarized state of affairs has been to adopt a doctrine of overwhelming force (or shock and awe lite I suppose might be a good way to think about it).  This doctrine postulates that the best way to keep things under control during any sort of potentially violent confrontation is to watch for any hint of a problem and if any such hint is forthcoming to apply sufficient force to end the situation quickly before things get out of hand.  The theory sounds reasonable on paper but I’m not so sure about the practice.  The problem of course is that when we train people to act like this we run the risk that we may get some small percentage of disproportionate responses.  Someone looks sideways at a cop and end up getting dragged to the pavement and strangled.  I appreciate of course that if one’s ethics run strictly along consequentialist lines might argue one cannot really evaluate this sort of thing without looking at the other side of the equation: how many unnecessary fatalities has this hair trigger response policy prevented?  However, I guess I don’t feel that does it for me.  I can’t help but feel there’s some question of duty involved as well.  It seems to me the police are there to protect and serve and when they arrive at a disturbance and make a bad situation much worse by killing someone unnecessarily that’s just a rather significant problem for me.  I understand they may feel they were just trying to do their job and sometimes accidents happen but that’s where I suspect we may part company because I think a big part of their job is avoiding those sorts of accidents.  Police work is not just a matter of rushing in and trying to resolve a situation any old way and letting the chips fall where they may.  I suppose the implication is that I feel we should accept the risk of things sometimes getting out of hand in order to avoid situations where cops unintentionally end up playing the role of the out of control aggressor even if that leads to some innocent people getting killed from bad guys that the police have failed to neutralize in a timely fashion.  I know, that’s a tough one but there you have it.

Second, I think we really need some accountability when police screw up, which they are liable to do no matter what sort of policies or training we may have in place.  This is a serious business.  It’s one thing to argue the police didn’t intend to kill anyone so it’s not really murder it’s just something unfortunate that happened during a violent altercation.  It’s something else entirely to say that being involved in this type of unfortunate event is professionally acceptable for a police officer.  To me a member of the police force killing an unarmed civilian is like a commercial airline pilot flying his plane into a mountain or a cruise ship captain running his ship onto a reef.  Never mind the issue of criminal charges, can we at least agree that the police officers involved in these incidents should be invited to find more suitable employment?  Something requiring a little less judgment?  People rely on the police for protection from thugs and murders.  How can one rely on them if one suspects they might accidentally kill someone themselves?

Third, of course if there are grounds for suspecting criminal negligence or even worse intentional murder we need someone like the FBI to get in there right away, investigate the hell out of it, and either bring charges or give us some confidence that no one on the police force has gotten away with anything.  Again, we all need to have confidence in our police force.  

Now let me take a quick look at what I described previously as a somewhat more dubious suggestion, which is that racism is a significant component of this issue.  I’m sure the statistics will show that most of the unarmed people being killed by police are “black” as we say here in the US.  However, I think what’s much less obvious is what that signifies.  The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for one reason or another a disproportionate share of the violent criminals in our country also fall into this category so one would naturally expect them to account for a disproportionate share of people involved in violent confrontations with police.  On the other hand, although I don’t feel we have anywhere near as much overt racism about as there was when I was young, I think one must admit we do have a historical legacy of racism that has probably survived in local pockets here and there.  Even when we don’t have actual racism we may very well have the related phenomenon that I’ve referred to in earlier posts as “culturalism,” which of course can be highly correlated with race in many places.  Obviously, whenever you have the police coming from one cultural background and the people being policed from another you run the risk of all sorts of strange things happening.  It’s not just the issue that some police officers may come to believe that people from certain cultures or backgrounds are more likely to be involved in criminal activity and thus be tempted to treat them differently consciously or otherwise.  It can also involve more mundane factors like people from different cultures interpreting behaviors differently so for example where one culture sees a dignified response to arbitrary authority another culture may see a suspicious lack of compliance with a reasonable request.  I guess the most I’d be willing to say about this particular issue right now is that someone should be looking into it and trying to ensure the police treat everyone properly.  The US is a multiracial and multicultural society and we simply cannot afford to tolerate any nonsense along those lines.

Not much of an analysis?  Well, that’s what I’m talking about.  That’s why I didn’t do a post on it.  So let’s move on.  How about the recent report about the CIA torturing people?  Another big issue but again I’m not sure I have anything useful to add to the discussion.  Actually I thought we had put this torturing people for information business behind us sometime around the start of the eighteenth century when we determined it generally results in the tortured party either making things up or telling people what they think people want to hear.  Of course if torture doesn’t get you any reliable information there’s little point to getting into the thorny ethics of the matter.  I guess one might still want to talk about torture in non-informational contexts.  For example, one could get into the issue of whether it’s morally preferable to punish people for legal transgressions with some brief torture like getting walloped a few times with a whip versus an extended time out in prison, which tends to be our cultural preference, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here.  Anyway, to get back to the issue at hand, this notion of torturing people for information, it turns out the issue was apparently not consigned to oblivion many centuries ago as I thought; no, the CIA believes right now that torturing people is an effective way to get information.  They’ve apparently said as much to the US Congress in official testimony.  Damn.  I guess we’re going to have to do this the long way.

As far as the ethics of torturing people for information goes it seems to me we’ve got all kinds of things going on. One rather well known strand is the potential conflict between consequentialist and deontological (that would be duty based) ethical thinking relating to this issue.  A consequentialist may say of course it’s unfortunate that we would ever need to torture anyone but if doing so resulted in information that allowed us to prevent two other people from being tortured or killed or whatever then we’d still be coming out ahead in some sense.  The duty based argument would run more along the lines that it’s just wrong to torture people for information and it’s better to hold onto your ethical beliefs and let the chips fall where they may, including on top of other people, if the alternative is to sell your soul to the Devil to get all allegorical about it.  I don’t know the answer to that one.  Sounds complicated.  I probably lean toward the duty based approach myself because I just can’t help but feel if one gets too consequentialist one might end up engaging in all manner of questionable behaviors.  However, I also suppose there are other things going on.

Two other potentially relevant issues to me are that not all torture is equal and not all information is equally important so we probably have a lot of room for discussion relating to those issues.  Are we talking about torturing people in the sense that they’re uncomfortable at the moment but fine again later (including being fine in the head of course)?  That might still be unacceptable but it seems somehow less bad than if we were talking about permanent injuries or psychological scars.  As far as information goes I would think the potential value of the information might have some sort of significance.  Can we get the information some other way?  Do people’s lives depend on it?

Another potentially relevant issue to me involves the characteristics of the victim.  If one really feels someone is withholding information that would help one prevent someone else being tortured or killed then that person isn’t really what anyone could reasonably call an innocent victim.  He or she would be complicit in some way in the torture or death that one is trying to get information to stop or avoid.  The implication that these people are guilty of something to some degree raises the issue of whether we’re able to maintain the conceptual distinction between torturing people for information and torturing people as punishment.  Is it more acceptable to torture someone for information if that person arguably deserves to be tortured because he or use is complicit in the torture or death of someone else?  If that’s the case then it seems to me there’s a lot riding on the degree of confidence one has that the person actually has the information in question and is holding out on one in the manner I just suggested.  So what about the case where one thinks someone might or might not have the information?  Where does one draw the line?

Listening to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s views on the matter really brought these issues home to me.  He was in the media recently spouting off about how he was more concerned about guilty detainees getting released to fight again than about detaining (and implicitly torturing) “a few that in fact were innocent.”  That pretty much turns on its head the so-called Blackstone’s Formulation, which proposes we should prefer ten guilty people to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.  Never heard of the principle?  Well, neither did I.  However, apparently it’s a principle that people who know about such things consider a bedrock of Western jurisprudence and that has been cited a number of times by the US Supreme Court.  And we’re not talking about an academic dispute here.  Innocent people are definitely involved.  The CIA torture report estimated that up to the twenty-five percent of the people we’re talking about may have been captured as a result of mistaken identity and one such fellow, Gul Rahman, actually died under torture.  One can’t help but wonder whether Mr. Cheney’s cavalier attitude toward apparently innocent victims like Mr. Rahman has to do with the fact that they are foreigners from the Middle East.  One suspects Mr. Cheney might revise his moral views if the innocent person being detained, tortured, and possibly accidentally killed were someone more like Mr. Cheney himself.

Well, I certainly can’t resolve anything right now.  My point is simply that this is a hugely complicated issue that needs some serious social debate.  Too bad we mostly tend to get sensationalism and political grandstanding.  We all know torture is wrong in some vague general sense but during an emergency when lives are at stake we somehow all contrive to be looking the other way although we sure raise a ruckus later on, don’t we?

Enough of that.  It’s giving me the creeps.  How about Ukraine?  Hey, I have no idea!  Sorry.  Obviously I feel countries should respect one another’s borders but on the other hand as a historically and geographically challenged American I have no confidence at all that I understand any of the considerations that play into this conflict.  I must admit I always thought Ukraine was a region of Russia but I suppose that’s because when I was growing up we tended to equate the entire USSR with Russia.  But still; Kiev isn’t Russian?  It’s in a different country where they speak their own language?  Seems strange.  Are we talking about real countries with real borders that have some sort of historical or intrinsic significance or did someone just make them up a few years ago?  As you can see I’m still struggling with the basic facts of the matter so you can forget about me thinking through any thorny territorial disputes.

Nevertheless, let me just review what I’ve gleaned from my rather casual attempt to keep abreast of the issue thus far.  We went from the USSR to Russia and Ukraine (and lots of other countries) but we somehow ended up with a bunch of ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and some important Russian military installations being located in Ukraine, then we had some political turmoil resulting in the hasty and possibly legally questionable departure of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader, then we may or may not have had ultranationalist Ukrainians telling the ethnic Russians to get the hell out, then we had the Russian Ukrainians (?) deciding they wanted to carve out their own little country or territory or whatever it is, then we had the Russian military trying to help them out but not wanting to admit as much of course, then someone shot down a commercial airplane, then ... OK, I have to stop; I’m getting one of my headaches again.  Look, I like Ukraine well enough given that I don’t know anything about the place and I’m trying to like Russia as well although they sure don’t make it easy, do they?  (And not just on this issue.)  I wonder, is to much to ask that they get together and come up with some solution that doesn’t involve embroiling the world once again in some ridiculous decades long territorial dispute?  It’s just too damned far away for America to sort it out and one shudders to think of the Europeans trying to sort out anything at all.  How about this?  Russia: remove your military, stop arming the separatists, and respect Ukraine’s borders.  Ukraine: create some effective protections or political institutions for your ethnic Russian population and make a deal with Russia so it can keep its naval installation or oil deal or whatever the hell it is they’re so agitated about.  We’re past that already?  Fine.  Just do it the old fashioned way and shoot one another.

Time for one more?  How about ISIS?   They sound like a bunch of murderous thugs to me but of course they’re not the first group of murderous thugs to come out of that part of the world.  I suppose if people in the region want some help fighting them we probably have a moral responsibility to help them out.  But we can’t sort out everyone on our own, can we?  I wish we could but there’s just not enough money and time in the world to do that.

Well, that’s my annual end of the year rubbage sale of unhelpful commentary on random news of the day.  Hmm, maybe I should end on a positive note.  How about the Nobel Peace Price going to Mala Yousafzai of Pakistan for her work getting local women some access to education and to Kailash Satyarthi of India for his work relating to child labor.  So gratifying to hear about someone trying to do something positive in that part of the world.  I salute you both!

That’s it for me for this year.  See you in the next.

References

Anthony Zurcher.  Cheney: ‘No problem’ with detaining innocents.  BBC.  December 15, 2014.  http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-30485999.

Greg Botelho.  Malala, Satyarthi accept Nobel Peace Prize, press children's rights fight.  CNN.  December 10, 2014.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/world/asia/nobel-peace-prize-awarded/index.html?hpt=hp_t2.