Having It Both Ways On The JTTF
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011With the first public forum set for this Thursday, it’s time once again for people to start staking out their positions on whether or not Portland should rejoin the Joint Terrorism Task Force, from which it withdrew in 2005.
I’ve already looked back at that vote, and showed how some supporters of rejoining revise the history of the original debate to suit themselves. Now, let’s take a look at how some other supporters are trying to have it both ways when making their case.
Anna Griffin joins Oregon’s interim U.S. attorney and the FBI’s special agent in charge here in Portland in making one central argument.
Holton and Balizan’s argument for putting Portland cops back on the team is much simpler: This is not your grandfather’s FBI. Nor J. Edgar Hoover’s. Nor George W. Bush’s.
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How much has really changed in the intervening five years? There’s a Democrat in the White House today and Democrat appointees running the U.S. Justice Department. A new mayor has appointed his own new police chief.
What’s curious about this is that Griffin, in the same piece, argues that here in Portland debates such as these are only “about our communal mistrust of authority, past misdeeds by local and national cops, and the politics of the moment”. This is curious because by taking the “we have different leadership” tack, in fact it’s Dwight Holton, Arthur Balizan, and Anna Griffin saying “the politics of the moment” should be the deciding factor.
Opponents of Portland’s standing participation in the JTTF (it’s still allowed to cooperate on a case-by-case, as-needed basis) make the opposite, and entirely consistent argument: that we are meant to be a nation, and by extension a city, of laws instead of one of men.
Griffin makes the decision to glibly dismiss these concerns.
They did not trust federal agents to balance the need to protect us from terrorists with the need to guard our civil rights. They also did not trust their own employees, Portland officers, to obey state statute or balk if asked to violate it in the course of a federal investigation.
As to the first, the civil rights at issue are covered by state, not federal law, and as such those agents have neither the responsibility, the obligation, nor in fact the authority to monitor the compliance of state and local law enforcement with Oregon law. As to the second, it’s naive to suggest that government functions solely on trust absent any sort of oversight. Griffin’s statements are not only more revisionist history regarding the original JTTF debate, they’re woefully inadequate as a theory of civic governance.
It’s as true today as it was in 2005 that state and city police in Oregon are subject to certain state laws that Federal officials don’t have to consider, and under the JTTF’s rules Portland’s police commissioner would not be allowed to ensure compliance with those laws on the part of the officers he oversees.
That’s a legal reality that exists regardless of whether J. Edgar Hoover or Robert Mueller runs the FBI, regardless of whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama is in the White House.
There are arguments to be made in favor of Portland rejoining the JTTF, even if I find none of them persuasive, but what they cannot be allowed to do is distort the debate the city had in 2005.
Nor can they have it both ways. If they truly believe (rather than just find it rhetorically convenient to claim) that such decisions are too often made in Portland based on the politics of the moment, they need to stop arguing that who’s in charge — the height of “the politics of the moment” — is what matters.