The Chapel Hill Police Department Loses Its Cool

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—Weekly Hubris)—11/28/11—Heavily armed with assault weapons and decked out in military gear, a cadre of 25 officers from the Chapel Hill Police Department recently moved against occupiers (dubbed trespassers, and rightfully so, for they had intentionally broken the law) of a vacant building on the city’s main drag, Franklin Street. To the cries of college students yelling, “Shame, Shame, Shame!” the police arrested a few protesters and took into temporary custody a reporter covering the event for the Raleigh News and Observer.

I’m not writing about a group of hotheads from a town farther down in Dixie, but Chapel Hill, for God’s sake, a town likening to view itself as the “Southern Part of Heaven.” But, for a few moments, it looked like a besieged hamlet in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Ordinarily, Chapel Hillians prefer agreeing on talking points or writing reasoned, well-expressed letters to the editors of the Chapel Hill News. The town has experienced protests before and, for the current group of protesters, the local supporters of Occupy Wall Street, it designated an area for protesters to gather and give unimpeded expression to their talking points.

A small faction of the Occupy Wall Street group decided that talk was not enough, that occupation of a deserted building might better make the point about the unequal distribution of wealth in the nation.

The thought was not cool, and bound to stir the police and mayor to action.

There was action, all right, plenty of action, in the form of a paramilitary unit response. In a circumstance that found the police confronting a small group of unarmed protestors, a couple of cops in Chapel Hill uniforms brandishing nothing more threatening than Saturday-night specials would have served to hold the protesters in check until they were handcuffed and their rights read to them. What college student wants a hole in him or her drilled by a Saturday-night special? Some forceful tact and a wee bit of threat surely would have worked.

But, so we’re told, there were anarchists (remember the term “Outside Agitators”?) amongst them with literature about how to overturn a police car. I know that words can be powerful, but how much muscle power is present in a handful of protesters? Enough to rock and rock a police cruiser until it flips over? I doubt it. Unless there was a Clark Kent among them. And the police account of those arrested gave no such name. Surely, a 25-member tactical team could hold a car down in a flip-over move.

The news account of the raid explained that policies in the police handbook had been breached in the removal of protesters. The amount of force clearly was uncalled for.

All this brings me back to a concern I voiced in my piece posted in this space on 11/21/11. There, I worried about the spread and use of paramilitary units in the nation. SWAT teams, search and rescue units, and units engaged in humanitarian efforts play vital roles in American society. But teams sent out to bring to jail a religious zealot, hyperactive practitioners of free speech, or noisy advocates of the right of peaceful assembly violate our constitutional rights.

The practice of democracy is sometimes a tumultuous thing.

Who should oversee the use of paramilitary units? Mayors? Governors? Other elected officials, including the President? Who decides who becomes the commander of these units? What oaths must they swear and uphold? What provisions are in place to regain control of a unit that has gone rogue? Rebellious? Bent on overthrow? Loyal to and supportive of a political party?

Call me Nervous Nelly (now there’s a term that dates this writer!) if you will, but I wonder if we are not drifting towards a time when a military coup might appear to some to be the quickest and most final solution to our paralyzed federal government. Already, a great number of voters have acted to put a halt to open discussion of our problems. They are disruptive, discourteous, certain of their own solutions, disrespectful of views contrary to theirs.

I don’t have to put a name to them and, besides, they have strong allies among the evangelical Right. Combining these two groups with impatient military leaders—and the military mind more often than not tilts heavily to the Right—could topple our government. A battle cry among the Tea Party crowd is, “Let’s take back our government!”

It can’t happen here, you say, and I hope you’re right. But silence and forbearance have time and again waged losing battles against military might. And might now rests solidly in the arms of paramilitary groups and our standing armed forces. They may need only to be pissed off a bit further with state and federal governments and rallied behind a charismatic leader to roll out an American form of Nazism.

Others before me have given warnings of the inherent fascism in the American character. I’m recalling now Thomas Wolfe’s novella, I Have a Thing to Tell You, and his letter about General Franco published in The Nation (5/21/1938). The first clearly warned American readers about Adolf Hitler’s growing power, and the second satirically comments on General Franco’s beneficial acts on behalf of Spain.

Yet, more to my point about the troublous rise of paramilitary units in our land, is Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and its portrait of Berzilius “Buzz” Windrip as a leader of militia forces successful in their seizure of the American government. Here, a character with traits of both Hitler and Huey Long, takes advantage of a nation split into factions before being ousted by underground forces loyal to American ideas and ideals.

I think we’d be wise to reread Wolfe and Lewis. And I think we’d all be happier if cooler heads had prevailed in Chapel Hill.