Radley Balko: Was the police response to the Boston bombing really appropriate?
The economist and historian Robert Higgs has written prolifically over the years about what he calls the “ratchet effect.” In times of crisis, governments tend to expand, usually at the expense of civil liberties. When the crisis abates, government power does, too, but never completely back to where it was before. With each subsequent crisis, government encroaches a bit more. Higgs has documented the effect through major wars, depressions and other national emergencies. But the effect may be particularly pronounced and dangerous with respect to the war on terror, because as crises go, terrorism can never completely be defeated.
We’re now more than a year out from the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. The studies, reviews, and after-action reports have been written. Politicians and other public officials have held hearings, cast blame and pontificated on the lessons they have learned. There have been calls for more monitoring of foreign travelers; better information-sharing among federal, state and local government police agencies; and the inevitable demands for more security, more surveillance and generally more government power to prevent similar attacks in the future. There have been ponderous searches for answers that inevitably end up with public agencies simultaneously deflecting blame and jockeying to inherit the authority and funding from those agencies that inevitably do get blamed.
But there’s an important component missing from all the reports, testimony and lesson-learning: an assessment of whether the government response after the bombing was appropriate, democratic and consistent with the principles of a free society.
As the Atlantic reported last year, we haven’t seen a lockdown and an occupation of an American city on the scale of what happened in Boston after the marathon since the Watts riots — not in Oklahoma City after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995, not in Atlanta after the 1996 bombing in Centennial Olympic Park, not in D.C. during the 2002 sniper attacks, not after a series of pipe bombs went off in federal courthouse in San Diego in 2008, not during the dozens of instances in which a mass killer or serial killer was still at large. In Boston, 19,000 National Guard troops moved into an American city, not to put down a civil uprising, quell riots or dispel an insurrection, but to search for a single man. Armored vehicles motored up and down residential neighborhoods. Innocent people were confronted in their homes at gunpoint or had guns pointed at them for merely peering through the curtains of their own windows.
Much more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/22/the-police-response-to-the-boston-marathon-bombing/