Ah, but when the institution has a deeply ingrained culture of protecting its own at any cost, as many do and cops perhaps the most strongly of all, one guy’s overreaction implicitly is an institutional issue.

While I tend to agree with you, the YouTube videos of this incident feature a young man who most definitely doesn’t give that impression.

Still, I think there are major hurdles to that utopian vision. In addition to lacking access, lots of people with stories to tell lack identification with the power centers of American life. There’s a reason why Laci Peterson and John Walker Lindh are big stories in the national press, while Tamika Huston and Yaser Esam Hamdi are not. So while I would like to see a world where better distribution of technology will allow anyone to stoke outrage about government abuse, I don’t think we live there yet. That’s why I tend to put more faith in building robust institutions that can bring constitutional scrutiny to bear on the executive branch. If focusing on this incident helps to achieve that end, I’m on board. If it’s about giving the park police what for because they’re jerks, I wish you and your friends luck (but there are bigger jerks to pursue at the moment).

But that’s the thing…those people are less likely to know that such police harassment is illegal and/or less likely to have the resources to publicize their mistreatment. So if people less likely to be hassled (upper middle class [probably] white people) go out of their way (to some extent) to provoke such reactions by police, since they have the resources to publicize it, by making a big stink about it they may be able to effect beneficial change. Imagine if this leads to a law ensuring the rights of all citizens at all times to record the actions of law enforcement. That would probably make the type of harassment that causes actual harm less likely to occur.

But I think this is where we get into traditional critiques of privilege. If a policeman harasses an ipod-wearing hipster who associates with widely read libertarian bloggers, he’s in for a round of public embarrassment. If he harasses me, well, no one reads my blog, but I’ve got enough money that I could probably hire a lawyer to make a stink. By contrast, if a policeman screws with a kid on the streets in South East, or a homeless man sitting on a bench in the FDR memorial, it’s likely to be largely invisible from a media standpoint.

In other words, it may be that the message you’re sending, however well-intentioned, only reinforces the policeman’s view that certain groups of people are not to be screwed with. Robust institutional safeguards, rather than ad hoc reactions, are less likely to have that kind of disparate impact.

So, if it were up to me, I’d like to see the focus directed at making sure those institutional safeguards are working properly (from the park police to the department of defense and the CIA), rather than teaching cops to avoid the media savvy as well as the politically powerful. That’s where I’m coming from . . .

The police shouldn’t feel like they have the power to arrest people for, basically, annoying them. The way to curb these sorts of abuses is to make them very costly. The way you make it costly is to embarrass the hell out of the Park Police, so that every time they contemplate throwing their weight around, there’s a voice in the back of their head going “But what if this gets on the internet?”

The thing in itself is not a sign that the dark night of fascism is descending on America, but it does bespeak an attitude towards the citizenry that should be discouraged wherever possible. And petty abuses are relatively easy to fix; no one is looking at those photos and silently thinking “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire . . . “

And there are institutional mechanisms whose purpose is to correct these isolated abuses of power (Internal Affairs Boards, prosecutorial discretion, etc.) that haven’t come into play yet. So I’m not sure it’s worth playing up the incident as a grand injustice, though I don’t deny that it was an injustice