Little known fact about me is that all throughout grad school, I read all the murder mysteries I could get my hands on, especially the women sleuths from authors like Sue Grafton, Julie Smith, Sara Paretsky, Marica Muller, and one of my favorites, Laurie R. King. After finals, I’d devour two or three novels in just a few days, as a reward for finishing up the term. Somewhere along the way, this devolved into an interest in true crime stories as well. So yes, I’m a “murderin@,” and from time to time I get caught up in a true crime story.
I have been following the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Savannah Guthrie, American broadcast journalist and attorney. She is a main co-anchor of the NBC News morning show, *The Today Show*. Yesterday, they arrested a DSL delivery driver named Carlos, after apparently breaking down the door of the house of his mother in law. The mother in law gave Brian Eaton an interview outside her home. She said that when she asked them for a warrant, they said they didn't need one. They broke down two doors and took all their electronics, then released him today after holding him overnight.
In interviews today, he said it was terrifying and that they agents or officers (whichever one it was, FBI agents or police officers) said nothing about why they were detaining him. In the meantime, the salacious media had been spinning a story about catching the perp before he could flee across the border just a few miles south from where he was detained, and I even saw one session discussing the procedure for extraditing criminals who make it across the border to Mexico -- the down low was that it was sooo many forms, and they all had to be in Spanish!
Many people online noted how the masked man shown in recovered ring camera video from Nancy Guthrie's front door looked exactly like an ICE agent, and quipped sarcastically that they should check to see if ICE took her.
Watching this unfold, I have been thinking about how unremarkable it was that they "didn't need a judicial warrant" to break down the doors of this woman's home. How unremarkable to assume that if fingered by the FBI, it must be for some very good reason, the presumption of innocence be damned.
Terrifying.
The mother in law was great though. She was calm and resolute, and after being shown photos of the man at Guthrie's door, was absolutely certain that it was not her Carlos. He's a good guy, she said. Asked if she knew where he had been on the Saturday when Guthrie was abducted, she did not hesitate to say he was there, with his children, like he is every weekend.
Here is that interview with her: Mother-in-law of man detained in Nancy Guthrie case speaks about search. I absolutely love her, and I'm nominating her for a prize.
We should talk about the normalization of this no-warrant assault on her home. Now that ICE is doing this, will the rest of the like 18,000 law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level combined in the United States. Looking at this figure, you might say, wow, 18,000 agencies? Isn't that a lot? Yes, my frens, that is a lot of law enforcement. It represent more than 1.1 million US American employees (In 2018, 17,541 state and local agencies employed 1,214,000 full-time sworn and civilian personnel, plus 90 federal agencies employed 136,815 full-time federal law enforcement officers - Bureau of Justice Statistics). At 118 Billion with a "B" in spending reported in 2018, likely more now, and this is the third-most expensive military organization in existence. By comparison, the former Empire of the UK comes it at just 25 Billion.
I have some questions:
In a liberal society, law enforcement is legitimated not by its size, but by its constraints. That is, we are still considered a free society in so far as officers act under statue law, and not according to their feelings or caprice. So long as they are bound by the laws of the land -- the constitution, warrants, due-process, trial rights, etc. -- there is no real problem. They are also supposed to be accountable through electoral politics that determine municipal budgets, police-union contracts, and oversight bodies, all accountable to the elected officials, that in theory are accountable ot the people. However, in my experiences with becoming involved with city politics in the wake of Occupy Oakland, what I learned is that often the police control the politicians, and the people are invited to waste their breath at city hall meetings. But that is too cynical. It is at these city hall meetings that you begin to learn how it really works, and this is the only knowledge that counts when trying to reign in your police and take back control of the city budget.
The only way in which it has been okay (if at all) to have this outsized law enforcement presence is if their use of force is constrained by the law and established review processes; transparency and the ability to contest actions; and if the people are able to shape their local institutions via ballot or through protest.
Nonetheless, the disproportion of coercive potential, the asymmetry of the power relations between the state and its people, is problematic. Security institutions are not only there to uphold order (and protect property), they are also there to reproduce and enforce racial-spatial hierarchies, carceral logics, and states of exception. The evidence of this is the racial-profiling, qualified and blanket immunity, and militarized policing that have always always always been a part of the US system, and which is showing up more visibly now with our current situ.
As both Agamben and Foucault understand it, policing is part of the state's apparatus for creating constitutive outsides (prisons, mental institutions) and states of exception. In this sense, policing is a condition for the possibility for free movement and contract-law enforcement, and also the instrument for selective control and detainment. Selective in the sense of race or ethnicity, as in racial profiling that was just upheld for immigration enforcement by the Supremes.
In other words, a "free" society is a policed society, that is the tension built into the modern, post-colonial state. Our freedoms are guaranteed, premised on, and bought at the expense of those who are produced as the others, both within and without. The question, for some, is not if, but who will bear the price for our freedom. Free in the liberal state is not only compatible with, but depends on, the subjugation of some part. Or some majority by a minority, where it comes to class wealth. This is on the liberal model.
We are "formally" free and materially unfree. More and more of us are living this reality.
If we believe that their plan is to criminalize homelessness in order to appropriate our labor as we are pushed out of traditional employment, then lets cut them off at the pass. We work to make it impossible to be unintentionally houseless. There is enough housing, it is a myth that there isn't enough housing.
Imagine a movie in which a community rises to protect their vulnerable from being rounded up into labor camps by a rogue paramilitary group that calls themselves FrozenWater. If communities can organize to counter FrozenWater in their communities, I do wonder if they couldn’t organize to requisition to occupy empty investment properties, for the use of all who need housing, in this dystopian disaster movie. I mean, I hear the fictional city has less than 1k rather busy peace officers, tehy could absolutely use the help. My favorite character’s request would be for a place with a pool because water is life and she likes to swim. Perfect Hollywood ending right there, looking over a rooftop infinity pool at sunset...
... and «End Scene».
Finally heard someone ask after the no-need-for-a-warrant-issue (apparently they claimed to have a “court approved search,” which is not a thing), and more details about Carlos’ detainment and subsequent release. On her Youtube channel, Ashleigh Banfield interviews Matt Murphy, a former prosecutor. The conversation gives us some insight on how law enforcement seems to be adapting to our new reality.
In the search for Nancy Guthrie, we are witnessing law enforcement using extended powers by conducting "court authorized" searches that bypass standard warrant procedures; breaking down doors, entering homes, and detaining individuals for hours without interrogation or reading rights under claims of exigent circumstances; and deploying unidentified agents in unmarked vehicles to confiscate evidence and mail from private property. The internet immediately reacted and people assumed the FBI had their guy because they are the FBI, only to find the guy was released without charges a couple hours later.
Ashleigh Banfield: Matt, there’s been so much that went on today but I want to ask you about something really big last night. There was this flurry of activity, the bomb squad went out, the SWAT teams went out and suddenly a door to a home in Rio Rico was battered in and a guy was put in cuffs and called detained. And the sheriff put out an interesting statement. He said there’s a “court authorized search.” He didn’t say there was a warrant and the woman in the home said she asked for a warrant and was told “we don’t need one.” I sense there were reasons for that and I wanted to get an expert to weigh in on it and that’s you.
Matt Murphy: Well, I’ve been in law enforcement... well I’ve been practicing law for 33 years, I was a DA for 26. I’ve never heard anything called a “court approved search.” Never heard that term before. So I don’t know where he’s getting that. That can be... that’s either a search warrant, which doesn’t sound like it, or it could be what’s called a Ramey warrant potentially for the guy. That’s what we call it in California. But I think he was driving south for the border if I’m not mistaken if I read that correctly.
Banfield: No, the guy was actually... he was actually delivering food for a food delivery service. And the way his mother-in-law described it, his wife and children were in the car doing a food delivery. And the way the man who was detained described it, his name is Carlos, he said “I saw them following me I just pulled over... They approached the car and they threw me down put me in cuffs and threw me in the back of the car.” Weirdly... he also said “they didn’t speak to me at all. Didn’t ask me any questions.” What is that?
Murphy: Yeah, you know, look... I want to be fair to the sheriff. But working in a vertical unit it means you’ve got a lawyer... When we would do murder cases, Ashleigh, when I was involved in investigation... you have a prosecutor who’s assigned... to each city in the county. And so you’re working with legal advice with every step of the way. And when you have the person who’s going to make the filing decisions that’s involved in something like that... really good detectives are loath to ever put handcuffs on anybody unless either a flight risk... or you don’t want to do that because if that person is related to the case you want a green light that they’re going to stay in custody and you’re going to file against them. And if you’re not going to file against them... it’s just unnecessarily aggressive.
...Like a lot of things, Ashleigh, that’s come from this sheriff, that was a head scratcher to me. A “court authorized authority” or whatever he said, I don’t know what that means. I mean if a judge reviews it and they have a right to enter a home that’s what we call a search warrant. Or an arrest warrant.