Has hypocrisy ever been more conspicuously on display? Since
Attorney General John Ashcroft floated the idea of a sort of
nationwide Neighborhood Watch, Operation TIPS, the commentariat has
been hyperventilating with outrage.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Daniel Kurtzman,
writing on July 28, contributed a column called “Learning to Love
Big Brother: George W. Bush Channels George Orwell.” The column’s
subheads sound one portentous beat after another: “Permanent War,”
“Ministry of Truth,” “Infallible Leader,” “Big Brother Is
Watching,” “Thought Police.” The column delivers a great deal less.
But never mind. Let nothing stand in the way of a good
metaphor.
Liberal high priestess Mary McGrory, writing in the
Washington Post the same day, manages incoherence of a
Maureen Dowdian intensity:
“I would have liked to see how Ashcroft adjudicated in the
multiple grandmother deaths, which seem to plague some of our
no-show artisans. I would have liked his take on a tiler who was
doing his stuff on my small bathroom. He carefully placed some
carefully chosen decorative tiles in spots where they could not be
seen. I asked if he could relocate them. I was told that was
impossible because he was in North Carolina attending his
grandmother’s funeral…”
The fact is, there have been nationwide and local “tip” programs
for a long, long time. On May 14, the New York Police Department
set up its own terrorist tip hotline, at (718) 615-7040. California
long ago appropriated the word “tip” as an acronym in its “We Turn
In Pushers” program. “We Tip” now exists as a website operated by a
non-profit, with three nationwide phone numbers, 1-800-78-CRIME,
1-800-47-ARSON, and 1-800-US-FRAUD.
Then there is the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, which describes itself this way:
“NCMEC, in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and state
and local law enforcement in Internet Crimes Against Children Task
Forces, serves as the national CyberTipline and as the national
Child Pornography Tipline 1-800-843-5678. Please contact us if you
have information that will help in our fight against child sexual
exploitation. Your information will be forwarded to law enforcement
for investigation and review, and, when appropriate, to the ISP.
The U.S. Congress has funded these initiatives for reporting child
sexual exploitation.”
Oh, what else? Let’s see. Connecticut has a law on the books
allowing anonymous grudge-mongers to report neighbors who might own
“too many” guns. Connecticut law enforcement officers can obtain
search warrants based on those anonymous tips, search the homes of
law-abiding people, and confiscate legally owned guns.
As recorded by William F. Buckley in a May 24 syndicated column,
“Smoke Get In Your Eyes?” an anonymous snitch reported to the New
York City authorities that people were smoking — smoking! — in
the Manhattan offices of National Review. Never mind that
the offices were private, contained, and that no one working at
NR objected. Threatened with severe financial penalties,
NR had to forbid further smoking on its premises.
And there are “hate-crime” hotlines almost without number —
talk about Orwellian.
Of all these snitching and tipping incidents and programs, we
hear not a liberal peep.
But let John Ashcroft point out that truck-drivers and
meter-readers see a lot, and the big balloon goes up. To be fair,
we all shrink from turning into “a nation of whistle-blowers,” as
Buckley puts it. And the AG’s proposal may have been clumsy in its
details.
But the administration has to handle some serious stuff here.
People are trying to kill us and destroy our institutions.
Meanwhile, as author and former cop Joseph Wambaugh points out, our
law enforcement institutions are “balkanized.”
The problem is far worse than the FBI and the CIA not talking to
each other. Sheriffs’ departments, whose authority overlaps that of
city police within a county, don’t talk to city police forces.
Federal marshals will not work with either sheriffs or local
police. State investigative agencies guard their territories from
local police, from marshals, from sheriffs, and from national
investigative agencies. Police will not work with arson
investigators from fire departments.
Records get lost. Miscreants arrested in one jurisdiction are
never tied to crimes they have committed in another. The INS leaks
like the proverbial sieve. And what do we do? We create more police
programs and agencies, not fewer. The EPA has a police force, for
Pete’s sake.
Against that fragmented backdrop, set against those sprawling
inefficiencies, Ashcroft’s TIPS program threatens no Big
Brother-ish control. Rather, it will simply pile up more
information that nobody knows what to do with — and that almost
certainly will not even be used, let alone shared.
Meantime, you’d think our various commentators might try to help
out here, rather than simply waving their progressive freak flags.
But no. It’s more fun to bait their favorite conservative bull.
