经济学人下载:公民自由 机械战警

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机械战警

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarisation of America's Police Forces. By Radley Balko.
《战警的崛起：美国警力军事化》

RADLEY BALKO'S writing has long been read by people who care about civil liberties.
Radley Balko长期以来撰写公民自由类的文章，对这方面感兴趣的读者一定有所耳闻。

First for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, then for his own blog, “The Agitator”, now part of the Huffington Post, he has written about criminal-justice policy, with a focus on police abuses: not corruption so much as the excesses that have become inherent in ordinary policing.
他先供职于有美国自由者智囊团称号的卡托研究所，然后专心撰写自己的博客“煽动者”。现在，他是赫芬顿邮报的一名记者，撰写罪犯公正政策类的文章，主要切入点为警察的虐待问题，相对于腐败来说，这个问题是一般执法中固有的问题，而且十分普遍。

Mr Balko manages to avoid the clichés of both right and left, and provokes genuine outrage at the misuse of state power in its most brutal and unaccountable form.
Balko成功地绕过了左派或右派的陈词滥调，激起民众对公共权力滥用的深刻愤慨。这种渎职行为是极为残酷且无法量化的。

Heavily armed police raiding the homes of unarmed, non-violent suspects on the flimsiest of pretexts, and behaving more like an occupying army in hostile territory than guardians of public safety.
全副武装的警察闯进手嫌疑犯的家里，这些人无缚鸡之力，仅仅是因为警方臆想的罪责就被当做凶残的恐怖分子一样。这些警察全然没有公共卫士的形象。

“Rise of the Warrior Cop”, Mr Balko's interesting first book, explains what policies led to the militarisation of America's police.
Balko第一本有意思的书名为“战警的崛起”，书中介绍了什么样的政策导致了美国警察的军事化。

To his credit, he focuses his outrage not on the police themselves, but on politicians and the phoney, wasteful drug war they created.
他在书中表示，他并不对警察本身感到愤怒，而是对政治家和制造了无用的毒品战的骗子们感到愤怒。

After the obligatory backward glances to the colonial era—in which the sort of social shaming possible only in small, homogeneous communities obviated the need for standing police forces—and the American civil war, Mr Balko's story really begins with the Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Ker v California, which allowed the police to enter someone's home without a warrant and without knocking or announcing themselves.
作者必要地回顾了一下殖民地时期，在当时，战警的现象还只是存在于小而均匀的社区中，为的是消除常规警力的必要。同时，书中还回顾了美国的内战时期。而Balko真正要记叙的则是从1963年最高法院的建立开始的。当时的最高法院坐落于加州，法院允许警察不经批准进入居民家中，他们甚至不需要敲门或提前通知。

That was the first in a long series of rulings that gutted the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
这是漫长统治时期中第一个破坏第四修正案中保护无正当理由搜查和逮捕条款的做法。

The social upheaval of the 1960s caught the attention of ambitious politicians and led them to focus on crime.
1960年的社会动荡使得雄心勃勃的政治家们开始关心并关注犯罪。

Daryl Gates, then a rising star in the Los Angeles Police Department, created America's first SWAT team in 1965.
达瑞尔盖兹，当时为洛杉矶警察局轰动一时的新星，他于1965年首创了美国第一支特警队。

Richard Nixon ran successfully for president on a law-and-order ticket in 1968, bolstered by a “Silent Majority” which, in Mr Balko's view, “began to see a link between drugs, crime, the counter-culture and race”.
理查德?尼克松因宣扬严肃法纪，在“沉默的大多数”的支持下，于1968年成功当选总统，在Balko看来，也正是那时，当权者看到了“毒品、犯罪、反文化、种族和犯罪的联系”。

Ronald Reagan made Nixon's drug policies tougher.
罗纳德?里根上台后，继续强化尼克松的毒品政策。

He dramatically increased both federal involvement in combating drugs and asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize goods and property believed to be used in crime or, more controversially, purchased with the proceeds of crime.
他在抗击毒品和财产没收中大大增加了联邦的干涉权，这就允许执法能够掌握牵涉到犯罪的商品和财产，更乃至犯罪过程中获得的财物。

This gave the police an incentive to find connections between property and drug activity, often at the expense of more serious crimes.
这更加激励警察们去寻找财产和毒品活动之间的联系，而这样的寻找往往伴随着更多的恶性犯罪。

As Mr Balko notes, “Closing a rape or murder case didn't come with a potential kickback to the police department. Knocking off a mid- or low-level drug dealer did.”
正如Balko 说的，对警局来说，结束一宗强奸案或谋杀案并没有潜在利益可图，打击一起中低等的毒品交易商才是利益之源。

Financial incentives also came through drug-war grants and, after the attacks of September 11th 2001, homeland-security grants that allowed police departments to buy surplus military hardware of dubious utility.
资金激励的来源也正是这些毒品案，2001年9月11日的毒品案告破后，警局用获得的本土安全的奖金购买了一大堆不知道什么用的军事硬件。

Fargo, North Dakota, has received $8m in grants to buy goodies such as an armoured truck with a rotating turret—used “mostly for show, including at the annual city picnic, where police parked it near the children's bouncy castle”.
法戈，北达科他州获得了800万美元的奖励，购买了设有旋转炮的装甲车等物品。多数被用来显摆，无论是一年一度的城市野餐还是其他地方，他们一定会停在孩子的充气城堡边。

Mr Balko is adept, in “Rise of the Warrior Cop”, at finding outrageous examples of SWAT-team misuse, such as deploying heavily armed police to break up small-stakes poker games, raid fraternity parties suspected of serving alcohol to underage patrons and arrest barbers for operating without licences.
Balko是个内行，在“战警的崛起”一书中找到了大量特警队滥用职权的案例。例如，他们调用全副武装的警察来取缔小赌注的扑克赛，因为怀疑慈善晚会向未成年人提供酒类而突袭晚会，以无照经营的名义逮捕理发店员。

But he is too dismissive of arguments that stricter policing may have helped produce the remarkable drop in America's crime rate.
但是他严重忽视了一点，就是在这样严苛的政策下，美国的犯罪率确实有了显著下降。

Thanks to his book, Americans will be more aware of the costs of those methods.
也正是因为他的这本书，美国人更加注意到了这些方法带来的副作用。

But they—and he—should also consider possible benefits.
但是他和这些人都应该考虑到这些政策也是有所裨益的。