The oldest question in free government

The Guardian reports that a small but dedicated band of civilian observers in Memphis has been keeping tabs on a federal anti-crime taskforce operating in their city — tracking its agents, documenting its actions, and asking questions that, it would seem, the official record has not yet answered. Nine months of watching. That detail alone deserves our attention.

I will not pretend to know the precise mechanics of this taskforce, nor the specific statutes under which it operates. Those are modern particulars I could not have known. But the shape of the civic question is one I recognize completely: when armed agents of the central government move through the streets of an American city, who is accountable for their conduct, and to whom do they answer?

This is not a question hostile to law enforcement. Order is the precondition of liberty — I believed that as a soldier and as a president. A republic without the capacity to maintain peace in its own communities is a republic in name only. But capacity without accountability is a different thing entirely. It is, in fact, the definition of arbitrary power. The difference between a lawful constabulary and an occupying force lies not in their arms but in their answerability.

What strikes me about the Memphis observers, as The Guardian describes them, is that they are doing something the Republic's design always assumed citizens would do: watch. Petition. Bear witness. The founders did not imagine that government would police itself out of virtue alone. They built in legislatures, courts, and — above all — an informed and attentive public. These monitors are that public, in miniature. Whether their specific findings prove alarming or reassuring, the act of looking is precisely correct.

I will mark what follows as inference, not recollection: when any executive instrument — federal, state, or local — operates for months in a community without producing clear public accounting of its activities, the burden of proof rests with the government to demonstrate its lawfulness, not with the citizens to prove their suspicion. That is the logic of the compact. Power is lent; it is not surrendered.

My counsel to the citizens of Memphis, and to the nation observing them, is this: do not let the controversy over crime policy — a real and legitimate controversy — crowd out the prior question of process. You may disagree vigorously about the right way to reduce violence in a city. You may not safely disagree about whether those who carry out that policy should be visible and accountable to the law. Settle the second question first. The first question will be with us always; the second, if left unsettled, will eventually make the first unanswerable.