Originally published at: https://freekeene.com/2020/05/20/manchester-families-flout-lockdown-restrictions-cops-act-decent/
I went to the park in Manchester today. This is illegal both due to the lockdown and the signs on the park stating that it is closed pursuant to the lockdown. At least 20 other people were at the park, with children playing on equipment and adults having conversations. With the exception of the signs, it looked like any other day at the park. People went about their lives as people, instead of characters with Stockholm Syndrome in some dystopian book. I very much doubt that all or even most of these people were anarchists, and I did not recognize any of them. No one was doing anything attention seeking or obnoxious. As far as I could tell no one was there to make a political or philosophical statement (including me). It was, oddly, non compliance in a way that would be completely acceptable to the average person.
Two Manchester PD cars were parked prominently in the parking lot for most of the time that I was there, which was about four hours. At no point did they approach anyone, yell orders, or turn on their lights, which is consistent with my experience during the lockdown in general. It is my position that the presence of cops is inherently threatening, but outside of that they committed no other aggressions that I am aware of. It is possible that their intent was to be intimidating or monitor how many people violate the lockdown.
To be fair to cops and to be fair to just logic in general, intimidation tends to become denatured after hours of you sitting there just staring at people committing crimes. It approaches zero. The reason why the cops did not take it any further than looking at people is not because public support for the State has waned. It is because politicians care about the welfare of cops less than I do.
Christopher Sununu has absolutely no intention of enforcing the shutdown of an entire society. That would be dangerous. He didn’t sign up for dangerous; he signed up for a desk job. And there is nothing wrong with a desk job, most people in them just don’t pretend that their employment involves shutting down societies by force or other such delusions of grandeur. Sometimes politicians get carried away and pass laws that are so lacking in public support that they either have to be enforced in secret or not at all. Politicians aren’t thinking about officer safety when they write laws and they do not care if cops die. They care about their own popularity. The job of a police officer is relatively safe. This is even more true in a low crime state like New Hampshire. And since cops are people (much to the chagrin of my philosophical peers, but also the reason they are responsible for their actions) they take jobs for the same reason that most people take jobs. They want the money. Some will even admit that they do not agree with a particular law and will arrest people for it anyway. They are not self-sacrificial defenders of a misguided view on justice and order. This would be almost physically impossible as it would require individual cops to change their moral principles every election, and there aren’t anywhere near as many self-sacrificial ideologues as there are cops. And they usually work under conditions where they grossly outnumber and outgun their direct victims. The continued existence of the State depends more on popular support than it does its firepower. Resisting the State is life threateningly dangerous when done alone or with the support of a few. When the majority of people ignore the State, not only is it unable to enforce its dictates, its enforcers have no interest in doing so. Because at the end of the day, they aren’t devotees of Christopher Sununu’s every word who start fights for the honor of the cause; they start fights for $1200 a paycheck.