Santa Cop Stops Are Unconstitutional Abuses of Power — And Total Bullshit

Public relations are no substitute for probable cause

by ANDREW DOBBS

In mid-December 2012, some harmless peace activists in Austin, Texas did the sort of harmless thing peace activists like to do — they wrote some peaceful, benign messages on the sidewalk in front of the state capitol building downtown.

And these weren’t just any peace activists. They were led by a figure who’d probably be known as the Prince of Peace if the nickname hadn’t already been taken — Santa Claus.

What the Santa-clad local activist James Peterson and his friends — including at least one woman with her children — didn’t know is that their preferred chalking spot outside the capitol grounds was still state property.

And despite the fact that chalk washes off in a matter of hours, and that the messages being written were literally just the words “community,” “peace,” “friendship” and “grace,” Texas State Troopers came and fucked Peterson up and took him and — no joke — an elf to jail.

The Department of Public Safety — Texas’ state police force — “has been bad on 1st Amendment issues for years,” Debbie Russell, a long-time police accountability activist in Austin, said of the incident.

“They don’t know how to handle protest activity so that writing in chalk on the sidewalk, something done all over the world, that washes off in a couple of hours,” Russell continued. “They handled it very poorly, rough-housed them, arrested them and took them to jail.”

The incident got extensive coverage in local press and even some pops in the national and international media marketplace — nothing gets clicks like some cops in riot helmets wrestling Santa to the ground for more or less nothing — or “criminal mischief” and “evading arrest,” as the charges ran.

Sure, it isn’t gunning down a 12-year-old or strangling a man to death for selling cigarettes, but it certainly didn’t help the police’s public relations problems.

Now police around the country — from Long Island to Louisiana and in numerous other communities in between — have decided that they can flip the script on their relationship with Santa Claus and use the jolly old elf to maybe shift their image as joyless abusers and murderous pricks.

Their solution? Dress cops up as Santa Claus and pull over drivers for nothing — or worse, for actually obeying the law — and then give them gifts on video. Videos they then share with the media, of course.

“They are using their police power to pull you over, scare the bejesus out of you and then try to use this giving a gift thing to buy P.R. and to counter all the bad P.R. out there on them these days,” Russell said. “I’ve never understood how they think.”

“It’s folly, not jolly.”

The whole thing sounds like a cute and harmless undertaking, but it isn’t. Pulling someone over is an extraordinary power granted to police under the law, and it means formally detaining an individual by threat of force.

Under the U.S. constitution, this can only be done if they have a reasonable suspicion that the person they are detaining has broken a specific law. Detaining someone explicitly for not breaking the law is by definition a flat violation of the limits the constitution places on police.

Note that this abuse of power is precisely why people don’t trust the police in the first place, and while the Santa gimmick might warm the hearts of folks already inclined to like the cops, for the folks detained the experience is often unpleasant.

Getting pulled over is at best obnoxious, and typically frightening.

For people with a history of police abuse — or who have seen members of their community killed by cops for little or no reason — the act can be traumatic. The scenes do usually end in relieved motorists laughing it off, but the truly unsettling thing about these incidents is the obvious anxiety they display before the “joke” is revealed.

Maybe they saw what happened when an activist dressed as Santa wrote “peace” on the sidewalk in Texas.

“They think their P.R. efforts and messaging are going to help them in the end, but they are constantly attacking police accountability activists, people filming them, constantly abusing people of color — that’s the thing they need to do to change their image, hold themselves accountable for those abuses,” Russell said.

The harm here runs deeper. This whole thing appears to be some sort of either coordinated P.R. campaign by police forces around the country or a viral P.R. trend among their agencies.

In either instance, we have police throughout the United States creating a narrative with the help of obliging, derelict-in-their-duty T.V. anti-journalists that says that abusing power and flatly, willfully violating people’s most basic constitutional rights is okay if it’s “for a good cause” or if they end up liking it — or even just saying that they like it for the camera.

Maybe this would be just slightly concerning if it weren’t for the fact that we have a president-elect who seems to have little to no understanding of what the constitution says or means, and whose nominee for attorney general — head of the most powerful federal law enforcement agencies — has expressed a greater affinity for the KKK than for the ACLU.

In that context it’s the very sort of dangerous shift in norms that must be resisted by adversaries of the regime.

It’s not hard to imagine a very near future where shitty T.V. news shows parade laughing, smiling victims of state abuses around to explain how they really wanted to be treated that way and that being good enough for the mass media and the public at large.

Step-by-step incidents like this erode what little bit of constitutional authority is left after Congress has ceded most of its most important powers to the executive, after the presidency has claimed prerogatives at odds with basic concepts of balanced and limited powers.

And it isn’t the 1984-style cold brutality that finally snaps the order, it’s a Brave New World-style vapid act of entertainment and complacency.

It isn’t being asked for your papers, it’s being handed a gift card. Either way, you are submitting to someone who has no right to even ask you to stop.

Russell said she has some ideas about how we fight back and fix this problem. For one, it looks like cops holding one another accountable. “Until they regularly start crossing the ‘thin blue line,’ calling out cops when they do wrong, nothing will change,” she said. “That’s what it will take, cops holding each other accountable.”

For another, it looks like taking matters into her own hands. This past year Russell was the Green Party candidate for sheriff in Travis County, Texas where she pushed for radical criminal justice reforms and for ending the department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities — a commitment she and other activists forced the winner of the race, a Democrat, to make.

And it looks like James Peterson and his elf and friends — veterans of the Occupy movement — who used their chalking arrest as a creative act of resistance, displaying how flimsy constitutional protections and liberal values can be when the police decide they want to fuck with you, your community, or your movement.

In the end the only real protection might be to do away not just with cops busting Santa or playing him in illegal traffic tops, but to do away with the police altogether.

Now that would be a gift that keeps on giving.

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