Operation Legend

No amount of hammering at the tip can by itself sink the iceberg of crime, systemic suspicion, and social neglect. The angry man seems to turn his back on reason […]
Published on October 5, 2020

No amount of hammering at the tip can by itself sink the iceberg of crime, systemic suspicion, and social neglect.

The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self- indulgent, less manly in his sins. Theophrastus is right, and philosophically sound, to say that the sin committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than the one committed out of pain. The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger. The other man rushes into wrongdoing on his own, moved to action by desire.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

There is an interesting dynamic being played out across the United States, one which can serve as a lesson to others. The United States is caught in the grips of a perfect storm; depleted confidence in the legitimacy of government institutions, the worst race relations protests since the Civil Rights Movement, the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19, a dramatic downturn in the economy, and partisan politics that have fractured the country along party lines. People are disillusioned with their political leaders, who seem to have their own versions of the truth, disillusioned with decades of struggle for social justice, disillusioned with unfulfilled platform promises, with rising unemployment, and uncertainty.

The disparity is unimaginably unfair even for a capitalist society. A country where corporations like Apple have amassed trillions of dollars while millions go without access to basic health care, a republic where one cannot envisage the lines of cars awaiting food handouts without resorting to an aerial view from a helicopter. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the United States had ranked the fourth worst out of forty nations in 2019 on the poverty gap (Canada was at the middle of the pack at 21st).1

All this to say there is sufficient reasons for citizens to be frustrated; fearful for their survival, and fed up of being members of the world’s greatest democracy, the world’s richest nation, the world’s most compassionate country, the most powerful nation in history, when so many can’t see past their next meal.

Now, one can jump past all that and simply focus on the protests, the riots, the carnage of crime and disorder. It would be convenient, even appropriate, but that would be short sighted.  

Let us instead try a more winding view here. 

Protests are ultimately an expression of frustration; feelings of insecurity, anger, and anxiety resulting from the inability to fulfill expectations; in this instance the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For too many in the United States this is their reality, their frustration.

Even the marginalized understand that when government becomes obstructive of these ends, it is their right to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. 

Societies enter into a social contract with their citizens, whatever the terms, the terms must be acceptable to the majority, they must be inclusive, and they must be honoured. Failing on any of the three conditions results in grievances; grievances that must be addressed through the processes of dispute resolution which too are agreed upon and incorporated by way of structural and procedural justice. Protests which bypass the legitimate processes and structures for addressing such grievances are socially illegitimate and susceptible to state sanctions; sanctions too are part of the social contract.

However, protests resulting from grievances that remain unaddressed, or are blocked, by the structural and procedural systems are legitimate. They are then, at least in the American context, sanctioned by the same social context. In the words of the American Constitution, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Whilst suppressing protests that bypass the processes and structures for addressing grievances are susceptible to state sanctions, suppressing protests founded in legitimate grievances is in itself illegitimate. This is after all the principle by which America has judged the legitimacy of governments across the globe, including Belarus, Hong Kong, and Venezuela.

In the final analysis protests are always an indication of a failure of grievance resolution during earlier stages leading up to a protest. The suppression of protests, the authoritative response, is intended to achieve one of three things: to suppress illegitimate grievances that are unfounded and not normative, to preserve the status quo, or simply to buy time to institute a controlled renegotiation of the contract.  

The current protests across the United States are a sublimation of unaddressed grievances, a breach of a social contract, an expression of the right of the people to alter or to abolish a system that is increasingly perceived to be destructive to the aspiration of large segments of its citizens.

The suppression of the civil rights protests were attempts to maintain the status quo, to protect the practice of deliberately excluding some from the contract. Civil rights protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. worked to access and leverage the processes and structures for addressing grievances and have remained legitimate to this day. Those who supported Malcolm X had less faith in the legitimacy of the processes of dispute resolution.

So where has the winding view brought us?  

There is today a general recognition, as in many other countries, that there are systemic barriers, biases, and historical legacies that must be corrected; the Black Lives Matter movement, and Me Too amongst them.

The greater challenge for law enforcement today is not in suppressing the violence associated with the protest, it is differentiating between protests based on legitimate grievances and acts of unadulterated violent crime. 

Unfortunately, the police themselves have provided a lens into the systemic failure of the contract with the communities they serve. The police, as agents of the government, are the symbolic guardians of the system and when police officers so often, almost systematically, abuse certain segments of society, and when the criminal justice system is complicit in what are perceived to be biased outcomes, then the very structures of grievance resolution have failed for those impacted; and too many seem to be impacted. 

Here is a snapshot into the extent of the challenge. According to studies where police are faced with situations where doing what is morally the right thing would require breaking a department rule, by a ratio of 57% to 40%, officers say they would advise a fellow officer in this type of situation to do the right thing rather than follow the rule.2

In the past, the majority of cases were relegated to determination based on the credibility of officers’ testimony against those of their accusers: ‘he says vs. she says’. Society granted police certain privileges, including sanction to use force, an oath of office, and trust. A police officer’s word was worth its weight in gold under oath. No longer; today every word every testimony, every police report requires collaboration, confirmation, and verification. Transparency brought about by the media,3 and evidence from the video recordings of private citizens has proven this necessary.  

USA TODAY, in conjunction with its affiliated newsrooms across the country and the nonprofit Invisible Institute in Chicago, completed a yearlong project compiling the biggest collection of police misconduct disciplinary records for police officers across the United States. The study, Tarnished Brass, completed in 2019, found that at least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the USA had been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade; misconduct including murder, rape, robbery, planted evidence, beatings of accused, and perjury. The study also lists more than 30,000 police officers who have been banned from policing in 44 states.4 The records of their misconduct are filed away, rarely seen by anyone outside their departments. Police unions and their political allies have worked to put special protections in place ensuring records are shielded from public view, or even destroyed.   

Local police departments have lost the trust of communities across the United States. The erosion has been so dramatic and pervasive that communities have become tolerant of illegal actions, even sympathetic to the criminal element who now infiltrate legitimate protests. This is a dangerous deterioration of social cohesion, of civil society, and general law and order.  

Thrown into this mix is Operation Legend, the deployment of federal law enforcement resources to quell the violence and crimes associated with the protest movement across several cities. The uncomplicated view of this act is either in the context of a political assessment or a purely enforcement perspective, but both would be incomplete and superficial.

Whatever the motivation, Operation Legend has several important consequences. The obvious is it implies a zero-tolerance message. As of January 19, there had been nearly 1,500 arrests across eight U.S. cities, including 217 defendants charged with federal crimes, most of which are drug and gun-related. Federal investigators have also assisted state and local authorities in bringing homicide charges against more than 90 defendants.5 The results are incontrovertible when it comes to the arrest of violent offenders, seizure of illegal firearms, and dismantling of crimes. In this sense, Operation Legend may even be assessed as being overdue.

The other perspective of this, however, is that the majority of arrests are of accused who are not the consequence of present protests. The gangs, the drug networks, and most of the hardened criminals arrested during Operation Legend did not present themselves over the past few months; they are the product of preexisting conditions, conditions, which local police services and authorities failed to mitigate. In this sense, the success of Operation Legend is an indictment of local authorities. It is a confirmation by the central authorities of the failure of local authorities, and of the legitimacy of protesters’ loss of faith in their local police services.

Project Legend cannot provide the type of enforcement that will suppress grievances indefinitely. Project Legend can only provide a temporary cessation of hostilities; any enforcement can only be a stopgap measure to the deeper issues that threaten to tear the fabric of American society. Project Legend, despite its implied indictment of local authorities, provides an opportunity for local authorities to engage systemic reform, to begin a process of separating legitimate protests from crime, for envisioning renewed social cohesion and civil society.

Operation Legend can either be a boon to local authorities, or just another authoritarian act of suppression, marginalization, and manipulation. Operation Legend can provide the reassurance marginalized communities and communities afflicted by violence have needed, and it is the support local authorities should welcome if it can be depoliticized.

Project Legend could have been delivered as a service, as an expression of national outreach to affected cities, as an expression of a systemic undertaking to uphold laws, to protect legitimate protest, to demonstrate a national denunciation of police misconduct; instead it has been delivered as an expression of dominance, a heavy-handed, political tool for the expression of tough on crime policies, and an attempt to delegitimize all protests. This messaging will once again diminish the positive outcomes, the hundreds of arrests of violent offenders, gang members, seizure of illegal firearms, and drugs. It is too bad, it’s a lost opportunity, and it was the wrong message for something that could have been positive in more ways than it has.

The mayors who resisted Operation Legend must recognize that their houses are ablaze and there doesn’t seem to be any sufficient fire extinguishers or firemen to keep up with the blazes; blazes being set by firemen themselves. This is of course being a metaphor for the damage being done by police misconduct against the very communities officers have sworn to protect.    

If there is a justification in mayoral resistance to Operation Legend, it is this: that Operation Legend, messaged politically, undermines mayoral attempts at local police reform by implying that the ‘system’ supports local policing practices, including a culture that prioritizes doing what is “morally right” even if it requires breaking department rules.6

The impact and pervasiveness of systemic bias in America cannot be diminished, and once again the symptoms of deep-seated social problems are being framed largely as issues for law enforcement. And once again America’s inability, or unwillingness, to respond to the types of crisis flowing from high unemployment, social neglect, homelessness, racism, and marginalization will be diverted as a failure of the police and criminal justice system. 

The suppression of protests, the authoritative response, is intended to achieve one of three things: to suppress illegitimate grievances that are unfounded and not normative, to preserve the status quo, or simply to buy time to institute a controlled renegotiation of the contract. America is unsure of its response, its values, and its end game. Protests are the tip of the iceberg; no matter how hard Operation Legend hammers at the tip, it cannot sink the iceberg.  

 

Anil Anand is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

 

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  1. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Poverty Gap https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-gap.htm#indicator-chartAccessed: August 21, 2020. The poverty gap is the ratio by which the mean income of the poor falls below the poverty line. The poverty line is defined as half the median household income of the total population. The poverty gap helps refine the poverty rate by providing an indication of the poverty level in a country. This indicator is measured for the total population, as well as for people aged 18-65 years and people over 65.
  1. Morin, Rich, Parker, Kim, Stepler, Renee, and Mercer, Andrew.  “Behind the Badge”, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-culture/ Accessed; August 24.
  2. Videos of alleged police misconduct compiled by Reuters media outlets across the United States provide a snapshot into the types of police actions that have eroded confidence in the police and fueled protests.  See: Reuters Graphics, “Videos of alleged police misconduct went viral.  Then what happened?”, http://graphics.reuters.com/MINNEAPOLIS-POLICE/PROTESTS-VIDEOS/oakveazawvr/.
  3. Kelly, John and Nicholas, Mark. “Tarnished Brass” USA, June 11, 2020,  https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/04/24/usa-today-revealing-misconduct-records-police-cops/3223984002/ Accessed: August 22, 2020.
  1. Mallin, Alexander. “Attorney General William Barr announces nearly 1,500 arrests so far under ‘Operation Legend’” ABC News, 19 August 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ag-barr-announces-1500-arrests-operation-legend/story?id=72470971.   Accessed: August 23, 2020.
  2. Morin, Rich, Parker, Kim, Stepler, Renee, and Mercer, Andrew.  “Behind the Badge”, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-culture/.  Accessed; August 24, 2020.

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Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash

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