Pussy Riot, Jamel Mims Hooliganism and Freedom

Reading about the arrest of the Russian women band members of Pussy Riot, as they sang a satirical protest song in a Russian Orthodox church, denouncing the support of the Russian clergy for Vladimir Putin, who has become increasingly powerful and autocratic, Mad Dog said to himself, "The Tea Party may give us headaches, and the Party of No may frustrate us and make us despair of whether or not a democracy can survive their obstruction, but at least we have the freedom to say what we think, even if what we hear is manifestly inane. "

But then, the Mad Dog thought of the case of Jamel Mims and that warm, fuzzy feeling of superiority began to stiffen and chafe.

Last October, Jamel Mims was arrested at the 103 Precinct station house in Queens, New York for protesting the Stop and Frisk policy of the New York City police department, which was undertaken to detect concealed weapons on the persons of citizens walking down the street in New York, in hopes of preventing gun and knife violence.

Problems soon emerged, both philosophical and practical with Stop and Frisk. The philosophical problem is how does one reconcile an offensive action by police, throwing a man up against a wall, demanding he spread his legs, feeling his body, emptying his pocket with a free society?  The presumption of innocence, the right against unreasonable search, all of this thrown out the window.  The police may say, the search of any one on a city street in a high crime area is reasonable. The only "probable cause" needed in a high crime area is your physical presence in that area.  The practical problem is this tactic was aimed not against every passing citizen, as, for example stopping every car on a road for a sobriety check, but selectively: Somehow 85% of citizens selected for this search turned out to be Hispanic or Black.

The police responded, essentially, that 85% of the violent crime is committed by members of that group, so the police had right to search the most likely offenders.

Jamel Mims took exception, marched to the gates of the station house, and found his way blocked by shut doors, until the doors were opened by the police,  and Jamel passed through to register his opinion a the station house doors and was promptly arrested and threatened with two years in prison. After much protest, letters to Mayor Bloomberg, and general tumult in Quees, Mims got 5 days in jail. For seeking a redress of grievance, a right promised explicitly in the Constitution, along with the right to free speech and the right to assemble. How many Constitutional rights did Jamel Mims find violated in this single, simple episode of non violent protest? 

How different were the New York City police from those Southern police during the Civil Rights protests of the 1960's? It is true, there were no dogs, no fire hoses, no blows to the head with police batons. New York City is not Little Rock, Birmingham, Memphis or Montgomery or Moscow, for that matter.  

But we have the same instinct operating:  Rather than tolerance of protest and disagreeable speech, rather than a bunch of bored police, lounging around, chewing gum and watching with detached amusement, you have a strong man, whether he is Putin or Bloomberg, who is not amused. And as the strong man, he has the power to throw the objects of his displeasure into an unpleasant cell and keep them there.

 Jamel Mims  grew up in a dangerous, poor part of Washington, DC, Anacostia, but he attended the very swank and privileged Sidwell Friends School--where President Obama's children are, where Chelsea Clinton and where the children of innumerable members of the Washington power structure were schooled.  Mims was on the Sidwell wrestling team,  and after a tournament ended, some white father would load a half dozen kids into his minivan and drive kids home, usually around midnight.  The father felt obligated to drop off each wrestler, and to watch him get into his house, before driving away, but Mims would have none of that.  He would not allow the father  to get any closer to his neighborhood than the Eastern Market Metro stop. He refused to be driven home, deep in the black ghetto.  "I'm fine," he would say, "But my white friends in the back seat, not so much. Not here."  And  he would slip away into the night, down into the subway. Mims--even as a teenager--sought to protect people from the dangers in the shadows. 

Compare that instinct to the instinct of a Putin, who would send the mother of a four year old boy to Siberia, separating mother from child, because the mother had the effrontery to sign a satiric song in a church.

When Mims was still at Sidwell, a group of seniors rose to read a parody of "The Night Before Christmas," at a Christmas assembly. Mims was not among this group, but he was at the assembly, where younger students and teachers listened, first with smiles, only to be scandalized  by the mildly racy lyrics recited by the cheeky seniors. The eleven seniors who took part in the reading were accused of "blasphemy" by the head of school, and threatened with expulsion, their dreams of matriculating at Harvard, Yale and Princeton threatened. Blasphemy, now that's quite a charge at a Quaker school, among the Society of Friends.  Even in this setting, a school which held weekly "meetings" where members of the community were encouraged to speak their mind, freedom of speech had its limits. 

The moral of this story is likely that the will of the powerful, whether his name is Mayor Bloomberg, or Vladimir Putin is a force found in most societies. In America, we like to think that inclination to crush the subversive under the authoritarian thumb is resisted and there are institutional, Constitutional mechanisms to resist it.
 In Russia, the only force comes down from above, and there are fewer countervailing forces.
In America, we think we have more protection from the authoritarian impulse--but our own Supreme Court failed to protect the young from that same abhorrence of insolence by the authority figure in the Bong Hits for Jesus case.  Our enjoyment of the freedom of speech is only as strong as our will to defend it.