Tuesday, July 17, 2007 Malilong: ‘Police power’ By Frank Malilong The Other Side
THE concept of the “police power,” says a paper published by the Oxford University Press, resists a clear definition.
“Indeed, it seems that the leading characteristic of the police power is that its definition changes with shifting social economic realities and with changing political conceptions of the legitimate reach of governmental authority.”
“An attempt to define its reach or trace its outer limits is fruitless,” according to Justice William O. Douglas in a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, “for each case must turn on its own facts.”
Justice Isagani Cruz in his book on Constitutional Law describes police power as dynamic, not static and “must move with the moving society it is supposed to regulate. Conditions change, circumstances vary; and to every such alteration the police power must conform.”
The Human Security Act, the government asserts, is a response to prevailing political and social realities. “This new law enhances the safety and domestic security of our country by giving us more legal power to prosecute those who commit any acts of terror on our people,” claims Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita.
But the law places us at the mercy of the military and the police, militant groups protest. They have long memories. They remember the days of martial rule when the police and the military picked up anyone they took a fancy on and detain him indefinitely without having to account to anyone for what they did.
There is no quarrel about the threat posed by demented groups who delight in committing mayhem against innocent and defenseless civilians and the need to adequately address that threat. It would be wrong, however, to view the protests as something akin to what Justice Cruz describes as the “inordinate assertion of individual liberty.”
Security is multifaceted, wrote Bruce Scheneier in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2004. “There are many threats from many different directions. It includes the security of the people against terrorism, and also the security of people against tyrannical government.
Surely, none of us wants to live under a government with the right to arrest anyone to any time for any reason, and to hold them indefinitely without trial.
“Unchecked police and military power is a security threat — just as a important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter; and there are very good reasons not to.”
