Perhaps the clearest example of the United States’ involvement in state terrorism, as it is defined by Green and Ward is the electronic surveillance state that was revealed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. According to Green and Ward, state terrorism is illustrated in the repressive policy and laws that would normally be considered violations of human rights or unacceptable in a liberal democracy, such as the U.S., but are nevertheless implemented for counterterrorism purposes (Green & Ward, 2004). Under the U.S. Constitution, it is the right of all people to be free from “unreasonable search and seizures” by the state. Reasonable under the law is satisfied with probable cause of criminality and a warrant authorized by a neutral magistrate. Similar search and seizure prohibitions are found in a large number of nations including the Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. Accordingly, there is a strong argument that the warrantless search of a person by the state is prohibited by customary international law. However, since the mid-2000s, the NSA has not only been conducting the warrantless search of nearly every American’s phone records, as well as substantial portions of the public’s electronic communications but has also done the same to countless people, including government leaders, across the globe. The has all been done under the argument that it is necessary in order for American counterterrorism authorities to effectively satisfy their responsibilities in protecting the nation’s security and implementing the global war on terror.
Similarly, over the last several years we have witnessed example after example of police crime in the U.S. One of the more shocking cases, however, is the revelation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) of how the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) had an official policy to make arrests and target citizens, not on the basis of whether they were actually committing crimes, but rather as a means to finance the city’s activities. As the DOJ report stated FPD practices were “shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs (DOJ, 2015). Indeed, FPD had a practice of working with the city’s courts to issue arrest warrants to intimidate or blackmail people into paying officers or the court or risk going to jail. The report went on to find the FPD disproportionately targeted people of color because of a department wide and widely accepted “unlawful bias” against people of color (2015). The policies, actions and regulations of the FPD are police crimes because they illustrate a pattern of governmental organizational deviance in which state actors abuse their power to commit widespread criminal acts (robbery, theft, extortion, false imprisonment, assault) against the community they are sworn to protect. To be sure, without the DOJ and federal law enforcement authorities, there is little chance that the people of Ferguson would have every been able to expose and resolves the depth of the FPD’s criminality. In short the FPD provided the perfect example of state crime.
In both cases presented above, it is essential that they are also analyzed from a criminological perspective. Indeed, as the purpose of criminology is to research and study why people commit crimes in order to develop means to help society stop or mitigate criminal activity, it is essential that the analysis also focus on the state as the ultimate crime fighter. That is to say, no state is exempt from acting criminally. Accordingly, how can we as a society justify how the state resolves the criminal acts of the individual if the state itself is action criminally. As the old saying goes, only let he who has no sins cast the first stone.
References
Green, P. & Ward. T. (2004). State Crime: Government, Violence and Corruption. London: Pluto Press.
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). (2015, Mar. 04). Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf
