Tag Archives: Shawn Burke

Those “Agitators” Are Democracy’s Best Hope, Sir (Updated)

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This is a big, complicated subject, and there’s no way I’m going to do justice to all its facets — or even mention them all — in a single blogpost. But let’s start with Burlington police chief Shawn Burke blaming “agitators” for triggering conflict at the infamous March 11 ICE action in South Burlington.

Yeah, well. First, the real “agitators” at the scene were the goon squads from ICE, conducting a wrong-headed, overly aggressive action designed more for intimidation than law enforcement. If not for them, there would have been no protest at all. (Scorecard: The ICE agent who started it all has officially acknowledged he was mistaken, and the three people taken into custody have all been released. So what exactly did it accomplish, eh?)

Second, I’ve been hearing officials blame “agitators” for causing all the trouble since my teenage years at the height of the Vietnam War, and it goes back even farther than that. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., outside agitator extraordinaire.

Third, well, effective agitation seems to be our best tactic in the face of galloping authoritarianism, so Chief Burke can spare me the pearl-clutching. The official processes of our putative democracy have proven to be largely ineffectual. Is it any wonder that some are choosing to take it to the streets?

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Welcome To Another Performance of Retail Theft Kabuki Theater

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Last Friday’s meeting of the House Judiciary Committee was, to the casual observer, devoted to beating the drum for a crackdown on retail theft, the crime formerly known as shoplifting. (Does “retail theft” sound less, I don’t know, recreational than shoplifting? Probably.)

Anyway. There’s precious little evidence to support claims that retail theft is on the rise. The main propagator of this assertion is the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for the industry that’s been making it easier and easier to steal stuff by cutting staff and instituting self-checkout. The NRF spent years flogging a bogus study that allegedly showed a tsunami of “organized retail crime,” only to retract it last month. Actual crime statistics indicate that “organized” theft accounts for a small fraction of shoplifting. And outside of a handful of major cities, there’s no evidence that retail theft is on the rise at all.

So now the tactics have shifted. We hear much less talk about rampant crime in our malls and downtowns, and more about the “perception” of a problem. People “feel” as though shoplifting is a crisis. Therefore, the argument goes, we must treat it like a crisis.

As a result, House Judiciary is considering an array of crime bills, and it began a scheduled series of hearings on Friday. But if you watched closely, you could detect a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on. The hearing seemed designed to meet the perception of disorder with the counter-perception of a crackdown than with an actual “tough on crime” offensive.

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