My favorite part about last week’s Boston Bomber Manhunt was how they found him almost immediately after ending the semi-voluntary “shelter in place” lockdown. It did not surprise me at all that top-down, brute-force SWAT teams going door-to-door were no match for bottom-up organic movement by hundreds of thousands of citizens once they were no longer encouraged to stay indoors. All it took was one guy going outside and seeing blood on his boat.
This is an interesting outcome in light of the security/liberty continuum. Internet libertarians are fond of quoting “Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither” (or some variation, attributed to both Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, it seems). I always thought that was a little absolutist, because unless you’re advocating for complete anarchy, you’re basically ok with sacrificing some liberty for some security; the question is merely how far you’d like to go.
We must admit that the government can successfully buy some security by removing some liberty. I trade the liberty to spend all of my earnings the way I want to help fund both national defense and local police so I don’t have to personally defend my own property. Yet I also think we have gone too far toward security and away from liberty, especially when you look at various risks statistically instead of emotionally.
Now if last week’s lockdown had discovered the bomber, we could still have had this discussion about whether it was worth it. We moved away from liberty and got some security, but was it too far? Would he have been found anyway? Etc, etc. But what makes the discussion more interesting is that we moved away from liberty and didn’t really get anything for it. That makes the movement much harder to justify.
To be fair, once you get past the uneasy images of Black Hawk helicopters and tanks and SWAT teams in residential American streets, the lockdown doesn’t seem to have been that terrible. Apparently people easily refused searches of their homes if they didn’t want them, and no blatant rights seem to have been violated. Technically the lockdown was voluntary anyway; no one was even forced to stay inside. And since they eventually captured the suspect alive, law enforcement’s handling of the whole situation has a remarkable 91% approval rating.
Still, it’s hard for me to just get past those images. Earlier I called the lockdown “semi-voluntary.” It sounds like you could move if you wanted, but if everyone else was being strongly encouraged to stay inside, I wonder if there was much you could really do. If the grocery was closed because no one was working, the government might as well have taken away your freedom to buy groceries that day. “Shelter in place” is a brilliant Orwellian euphemism for “please lock yourself inside your house.” As Radley Balko was saying on Twitter, “Should D.C. have shut down the city during the three weeks that the snipers were killing people?”
So while I’m no paranoid conspiracist, and I commend law enforcement for what they accomplished last week, I guess I just hope we haven’t moved farther along the security/liberty continuum where we’re going to semi-voluntarily shut down entire metropolitan areas every time we really want to find somebody. Especially since it might not even work.