Spooks off the leash...

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Our relationship with the national-security and public-safety bureaucracies has changed. It used to be that you called the fireman to get your cat out of a tree; now the policeman shoots your dog. We have police rolling through the streets of such combat zones as Lubbock, Texas, in armored vehicles, wearing camouflage uniforms to help them blend into the honeysuckle bushes and crepe myrtle. (Most common inquiry from the Lubbock tactical-britches supply sergeant: “Does this come in dust?”) Radley Balko’s excellent Rise of the Warrior Cop is a terrifying compendium of everything that goes wrong when you blur the line between law enforcement and the military.

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As for whether we can trust their moral judgment, the fact that we now have a national policy of carrying out extrajudicial executions of U.S. citizens without anything so plebeian as a vote in Congress on the matter means that the judgment of everybody from the president on down is in question. We have been assured that nobody ends up on the federal hit list unless he’s a really bad guy, but we’re also told that police aren’t supposed to shoot confused elderly people in the course of raiding the wrong house, or to continue ransacking a home after discovering — oops! — that they’d hit the wrong address. They aren’t supposed to anally probe you eight times because they don’t like the cut of your jib when you are pulling out of a Walmart. We’re told that the IRS isn’t suppose to target you because of your political views and that the NSA isn’t supposed to engage in sexual blackmail because it doesn’t like your Facebook posts.

But the facts are otherwise.

Today the police, military, and intelligence worlds are closely interconnected. And they are, collectively, a menace.

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Conservatives are by inclination well-disposed toward the police and the military, but it is worth keeping this in mind: When the order comes down to put the outlaw confectioners in prison, the only questions the police are likely to ask are whether they get to break out the armored vehicles, and which pattern of camouflage will best protect them among the sprinkles and fondant.

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