Good Deeds, Bad Deeds: Who is Watching You?

Coming home late this evening, I heard a call for help from a beautiful woman: “Do you have a cell phone?” I crossed the street immediately! I saw that she and her male friend were standing over the body of a man lying on the sidewalk, apparently an unconscious drunk. These young passersby did not know him but wanted to help.


Standing around the body, we discussed whether or not to call an ambulance. The male friend poured water over the drunk man’s head a few times. The drunk gave a faint response: “Just give me ten minutes” before he passed out again.


The rest of us discussed the situation. What to do? We compared the relative safety of the neighborhood, against the fact that the man was lying in the way of a driveway. After being dowsed with water, he slid down flat on the ground and we worried that if he vomited he might die. So two of us walked to the corner bar to tell them about their customer.


The gigantic bouncer came out to say. “If it happens outside, it’s not our problem.” He was gigantic and not helpful and so I called 911 on my cell phone. I had recalled that when I worked as an EMT many years ago that a large percentage of our calls were for drunks who had fallen. I gave the location of the “man down”. The operator did not even ask my name! But then the operator said she would call the police and not an ambulance. Ooops.


Was this the right thing to do? Is this like calling the dogcatcher? Will this guy turn out to be an “illegal alien” and end up on a plane home, with his friends and family not knowing what had happened? Will a man arrested for public drunkenness have his DNA sample taken—and what will come of that?


The male friend went to warn the fallen immigrant that the police were coming. I left him and his beautiful lady friend to their good deeds. But I have some misgivings. Can we trust American Justice-- when it has become a system of control and surveillance?


As you know, many communities want to have little to do with the police and will not even report crimes or criminals. This is often true of communities of color as well as immigrants. In general, Muslim Americans seem to have mixed feelings but share a growing measure of mistrust.


Dialogues and Town Halls (such as last week’s FBI Town Hall at the very successful ICNA Convention) are useful to create communication links between police and community leaders. But these cannot really change the underlying dynamic of fear and mistrust when police powers are expanding. Some police are sure to abuse these powers, and without community pressure do not seem to be held properly accountable as the “Blue Wall of Silence” culture of secrecy is maintained. Recently Sean Bell and Michael Warren have been becoming symbols of police brutality, at least within African American communities in New York City.


What is the social context? Of course we must consider racism and oppression, and the psychological mechanisms that arise and react to the power differential. But we must also examine how managers are seduced by technology to expand police powers.


On last week’s radio show (The War on Immigrants report on 99.5 WBAI radio) I interviewed a top lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union who discussed new rules that would make it illegal for individuals to take photographs publicly without a permit.


This comes at the same time that the NYPD is launching a massive expansion of surveillance cameras in lower Manhattan. Hmmm. Secrecy for police; new powers for government; but no privacy for you and me?


The NYCLU reported last year that there are already 4,200 public and private surveillance cameras below 14th Street, a fivefold increase since 1998, with no oversight over what becomes of the recordings. And apparently this is not enough!


According to the New York Times on July 8: “The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists.” The article reports that 3,000 public and private security cameras will operate below Canal Street, perhaps linked to a congestion pricing system, with a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.


The newspaper also noted that this system failed to deter either the current doctors plot or the 7/7 subway bombings. Moreover, it would be unlikely to deter those deluded souls who do not plan to return from so-called martyrdom operations.”


But like “Total Information Awareness” and the “Star Wars” Space Shield, like our occupation of Iraq, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative is big as Texas and great for those military companies that cast their massive shadows over us all!


“This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation,” New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in an interview last week. “We want to make it less vulnerable.”


New York should pay more attention to British National Health and less to British surveillance plans. However, predictably, right wing media has begun to use the recent doctors’ plot to try to discredit socialized medicine. The New York Sun writes on July 6, “Of the 277,000 doctors in the NHS, some 128,000 — that is nearly four out of 10 — were trained abroad. It was a loophole that should have been obvious, given Al Qaeda's declared strategy of recruiting highly educated professionals.” The article also asserts that, “the violation of this inner sanctum of the British way of life threatens the whole idea of integration — which is meant to be the answer to Islamism. The line between integration and infiltration is a thin one.”


Integration? Infiltration? Allah is watching us at every moment. That is enough. Let us not put fools in His place!