My freshmen year of college, I got tear gassed because the police didn’t like where I was standing. It was Halloween weekend in Madison Wisconsin, a city fortunate to have State Street, an awesome pedestrian street with lots of cool shops, restaurants, and bars on it. Every Halloween, it became the place to go to walk around and see everybody else’s constumes. The group of people standing on the street that night weren’t doing anything special, they needed no special permission to walk up and down that street: it was a pedestrian street. But then we heard electronically amplified voices telling us we had been declared an illegal gathering, and then the tear gas came.

Officially, the police were trying to prevent a riot. Supposedly, there had been riots for the past several years. At the time, I bought that explanation. But the older I get, the more I realize how shitty what happened that night was.

It’s something I think about every time I read an article like this, about police arresting people on bogus grounds, shooting or threatening to shoot people, just to flaunt their power, just because they can. Ed Brayton does a really good job of blogging these cases, catching things like the police union backing up the cop in this case, or various cases where police have told outrageous lies and only gotten caught because the truth was on videotape. What the hell is going on here?

I have two theories: first, if all your time is spent on a job that boils down to “stop bad guys,” and involves the premise that a “bad guy” could be anyone, you start thinking the bad guys are everyone, including college students who happen to be standing in the wrong place. But a simpler, more sinister reason is what power does to human beings. Give any one of us a little bit of power, and we want to make the most of it. And his doesn’t just mean using it directly to get ahead. So much of what it is to be powerful is to be perceived as powerful. Thus, the powerful will always try to work hard to keep up apparences, whether by shooting an elephant or bragging about their ability to shoot other humans in cold blood and get away with it. It is not so much about doing things because you can, but doing things so that other people know you can.

Of course, our society is designed to rely on the police to keep it from descending into anarchy. The question then is this: is there some third option that avoids both anarchy and the predictable production of petty-tyrant policemen?