The weight of a government's hand

NPR reports that Jonah Neal, a twenty-five-year-old man in Memphis, was shot by an agent of Homeland Security Investigations in May of this year while he was experiencing a mental health crisis. The report further notes at least four deadly shootings connected to this same task force. I was not present; I have only the lead before me. But the civic question it raises is one I understand very well, and it deserves a plain answer.

The first principle I would have any citizen remember is this: the power to use lethal force is the most serious power a government possesses. It is not a power to be distributed carelessly, deployed reflexively, or exercised without rigorous accountability afterward. When I commanded an army, I understood that undisciplined force — force without clear rules, clear command, and clear consequence for misconduct — was as dangerous to the Republic as any enemy in the field. That principle does not diminish when the armed men in question wear federal badges rather than Continental blue.

There is a particular gravity to the claim, as NPR presents it, that the man in question was not a combatant, not a fugitive from violence, but a person in the grip of a medical crisis. The Republic has a different obligation to such a person than it does to an armed adversary. A government that cannot distinguish between the two — or that trains its agents to respond to both with the same instrument — has confused its purpose. Protecting the vulnerable is among the first duties of ordered society. Sending armed task forces into a mental health emergency and calling the outcome inevitable is not governance; it is abdication.

I am also struck — as inference, not recollection — by the structure of the agency involved. Homeland Security Investigations is a body created well after my time, and I will not pretend to know its internal mandates. What I do know, from long experience, is that when a government entity accumulates authority across many jurisdictions, without proportionate transparency and civilian oversight, the conditions for unchecked conduct are established. Four deadly shootings connected to a single task force is not a pattern any free citizenry should regard as routine. It is a signal that the machinery requires examination.

The rule of law is not merely a constraint on the accused. It is equally a constraint on those who carry the state's authority. An agent who fires upon a citizen must be able to account for that decision — to a supervisor, to a prosecutor, to a jury if warranted, and ultimately to the public. If the systems of accountability are too weak, too slow, or too deferential to the agency itself, then the law has become unequal. And a Republic that applies the law unequally to the powerful and the powerless is departing, step by step, from the compact on which it was founded.

My counsel is straightforward: let the Congress and the relevant oversight bodies demand a full accounting — not a departmental summary, but a transparent accounting — of every deadly incident connected to this task force. Let civilian authority assert itself over the conduct of these operations. And let the question of how we send our government's force into encounters with people in mental health crisis be answered by policymakers who answer to the people, before more names are added to this list.