Men in uniform

Three stories for you:

• Two air marshals panic on a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, brandishing guns at terrified passengers and arresting a blameless former Army major (of Indian descent, natch) for "observing too closely" what was going on, according to the newly-formed Transportation Safety Administration.
• During the IMF meetings in Washington, DC, this weekend, there's a medium-sized anti-war demonstration outside my hotel. As it's coming to an end, one group of protestors decides to walk (or march) in the same general direction as I'm headed, towards the IMF. They're punk kids like I see hanging out in the East Village the whole time, maybe 19 years old, wearing torn jeans and bandanas covering their faces. If asked, they'd probably describe themselves as anarchists. As they start walking and chanting down Connecticut Avenue, they're followed by a group of policemen. There are maybe 20 kids in all; the total number of police can't have been below 40. Half of the officers were on white bicycles with the words "Smith & Wesson" on their sides; the other half were on motorcycles. All of them were a lot bigger, and a lot more threatening, than any of the demonstrators.They ride up alongside the kids, gunning their engines, glaring at them from underneath their helmets, and generally acting as aggressively as I've seen police act in this country. When the kids reach an intersection, they're immediately surrounded by police, all with their truncheons out, who get right up next to them and start shouting at them to disperse.
• When I get back to New York, there's a lot of laundry to be done, and I persuade the security guard in my building to let me in to the laundry room despite the fact that it's past 10pm and the room is meant to be locked at that hour. While I'm in there folding t-shirts, a couple of English guys from one of the ground-floor apartments come through to have a cigarette in the courtyard. A minute or so later, the security guard comes barrelling through the laundry room and orders them out of the courtyard, telling them they're not allowed there after hours. A conversation then proceeds along the following lines:
English Guy 1: (inaudible)
Security Guard (aggressively): –I wouldn't advise that if I were you.
English Guy 2: –Excuse me?
Security Guard: –I'd advise you not to fuck with me, because I can break your face.
English Guy 2: –He was only saying that he wouldn't want your job.
The security guard then watches the English guys leave, tells me to get a move on with my laundry-folding, and also volunteers that people ought to be careful what they say in such situations, because a misunderstanding such as this one could easily have resulted in his fucking them up. "I'm good at that," he says.

What all of these stories have in common is the shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude of the officials entrusted with ensuring our safety. In each of the cases, the officers strutted their stuff, while the people they were ostensibly protecting got intimidated, scared, and mistrustful of their protectors' goodwill and intentions.

It's clear that in all of these cases, a less antagonistic approach would have been more fruitful. Rather than whipping out a gun and screaming at the passengers (many of whom thought they were being hijacked: the air marshals were, after all, in plain clothes), a flight attendant could simply have been asked to make an announcement over the intercom. If a policeman were to have simply approached the kid at the front of the protestors and asked him where they were headed, a relatively civilised conversation would probably have ensued. And if the security guard in my building had approached a couple of residents smoking in the courtyard with less aggression, the chances of a "misunderstanding" would have been greatly diminished.

The worst clashes at G7/IMF/WTO meetings have been in ill-prepared cities where the police overreacted: Seattle, Turin. When Davos was in New York, or the World Bank meets in Washington, the protestors invariably get heard without significantly disrupting either the city or the meetings. That was the case this year, too, despite the behaviour I witnessed: I have a feeling that if the number of protestors had been greater, the situation would have been escalated to someone with a cooler head.

In general, though, there are obvious dangers to leaving the job of protecting airline passengers to "highly trained law enforcement professionals" who have had maybe two weeks' training and who, on one occasion, managed to discharge their weapon by mistake in the middle of a flight from Washington to Las Vegas. For although even poorly-trained air marshals can help protect passengers against hijackers, hijacking an airplane is probably the last thing any potential terrorist would be planning right now.

In the meantime, overzealous marshals, policemen and security guards only serve to make us ever more conscious of the terrorist threat. The purpose of terrorism is to create widespread fear and nervousness; it seems that those who would prevent it are having much the same effect.

Posted by Felix at 10:56 EST