My Letter to the Editor in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser
My letter to the editor was published in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser of Monday, May 15, 2023, page A10, year 142, no. 104. It is about how laws are ultimately underpinned by the threat of physical coercion — violence — from police. First I will provide the version I sent to the newspaper. Then I will show what the newspaper printed. Then I will provide further explanation of what I meant by the letter.
What I Sent
This is what I sent to the newspaper.
I’m grateful to UH scholars for studying police uses of force (May 10, 2023) and for the country’s wider conversation on it. There is great inequity in such force being applied disproportionately against socially marginalized people, which reforms must address. But even with reforms, the ability of police to escalate their application of force against stubbornly non-compliant citizens will remain.Even if the initial penalty is a small civil fine, never-ending refusal to pay it will land someone “in criminal contempt of court” and require police action. Inherently, laws are ultimately enforced by the threat of violence by police. Otherwise, laws could not be enforced.
Therefore, when people demand a new statute to punish or compel certain actions, especially nonviolent ones like drag shows, we should ask ourselves if enforcing the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.
This is what the newspaper published.
Letter: Too Much Enforcement Can Be Dangerous
I’m grateful to the University of Hawaii scholars for studying police uses of force and for the country’s wider conversation on it (“Focusing on police use of force on Oahu,” Star-Advertiser, May 10). There is great inequity in such force being applied disproportionately against socially marginalized people, which reforms must address.But even with reforms, the ability of police to escalate their application of force against stubbornly non-compliant citizens will remain.
Even if the initial penalty is a small civil fine, never-ending refusal to pay it will land someone in criminal contempt of court and require police action. Inherently, laws are ultimately enforced by the threat of violence by police. Otherwise, laws could not be enforced.
Therefore, when people demand a new statute to punish or compel certain actions, especially nonviolent ones like drag shows, we should ask ourselves if enforcing the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.
Stuart K. Hayashi
Mililani Town
My letter was in response to this article and this op-ed, respectively.
Since the letter had to be fewer than 150 words, I could not elaborate further.
If I could say more, I would add that when private citizens engage in murder, battery, rape, or poisoning, or show carelessness in transmitting life-threatening pathogens to others, that is the private citizens starting the physical coercion. I also consider it dangerous force when private citizens partake in theft, property damage, intellectual property infringement, fraud, and contract breach. Hence, when police intervene against those actions, the police are merely using violence in retaliation in order to neutralize the parties that started the violence.
But when the law is to punish nonviolent actions, such as people putting on drag shows, it is the law itself that is starting the violence. The same applies if you are minding your own business peaceably and then the law compels particular actions, such as the law forcing you to enlist in the military. When the law punishes nonviolent people or coerces them into particular actions, it is very morally troubling.
Evert time I point this out, Democrats and Republicans go through the same routine. These people indignantly shout at me no, there is no coercion or imposition. They declare that we live in a representative democracy, and there is a Social Contract. According to this Social Contract, by being born and interacting with anyone else, I implicitly commit myself to a Social Contract in which I consent to every single statute and ordinance that exists. I have refuted that rhetoric over here. In reality, for me to be held to any real contract, I would have had to have had the option of rejecting the deal before I had, in any sense, committed myself to it.
None of the rhetoric about representative democracy and social contracts directly addresses that the law is enforced at gunpoint. Hence, the rhetoric is what I call the “Social Contract” Song-and-Dance.
In the end, I want people to understand that when they say there ought to be a law to address some social issue, in practice this means condoning the potentially lethal use of force against those who stubbornly disobey that law.
I see that the title that the newspaper gave my letter was “Too Much Enforcement Can Be Dangerous.” That makes me worry that my letter put too much emphasis on the word “enforcement.” I do not want to create the impression that I believe that it is OK if we have many statutes and just do not enforce them. The point is that when a statute punishes nonviolent people or compels action from them, the statute’s very existence is the problem. What is dangerous is that there are too many laws themselves — in particular, those that penalize nonviolent people or compel actions from them. I should have ended the letter with “we should ask ourselves if the proposed statute is worth the risk of creating more situations that can escalate into violent confrontations with police.”
