Spring Weekend is supposed to be a memorable time on campus, devoted to relaxation and a healthy amount of debauchery. But there was a less savory aspect of the weekend that grabbed my attention early and continuously. All too often, the sheer magnitude of the police and security presence made Spring Weekend feel more akin to a university under siege — ruled by arbitrary dictates of control — than a fun, party environment.
The security around Brown during Spring Weekend — Department of Public Safety officers, as well as “Event Staff” with nebulous but practically limitless authority — mirrored in their actions and posturing the unfortunate trends in authoritarian control that have become the new normal across the country.
At this point, it doesn’t matter if someone is in an airport, in a school, in line for a university concert or on the streets of New York City; it has become expected that getting stopped, questioned, scrutinized, inspected, embarrassed, patted down and humiliated and having one’s bag searched are procedures that are not to be questioned, but natural in their own way. There has been nothing in the way of a mass public outcry against the standardization of such procedures. That Brown, a supposed exemplar of free intellectual activity and critical analysis, has followed in mindless lockstep with the prevailing security culture of control is troubling indeed.
Several aspects and actions of security staff this past weekend caught my attention. For one thing, the size of the security presence was startling. It was omnipresent across campus, especially on the Main Green. Officers were at every party, happy and willing to shut these parties down without question. Another distinctive feature was the physical size of some of the guards, standing head and shoulders above most students, with the obvious intent of dissuasion through intimidation.
Moreover, some actions I witnessed left my jaw hanging: a woman pleading with a DPS officer that her bag contained only books and a towel in it, a man being stopped by a large guard because he was dancing too much, an officer walking through the crowd taking particular relish in grabbing the arms of students smoking a joint, taking the joint from them and crushing it into the ground. One girl was kicked out of the concert for smoking, God forbid, a marijuana cigarette — or, as she surely called it, a reefer. For anyone who is outraged by undue exercise of authority, this entire spectacle in security theater is enough to make your blood boil.
What justification could be offered for this massive, and undoubtedly costly, security presence? What threat gives reason to the apparent senselessness of subjugating the entire student body to the yoke of a weighty force of officers and intimidating staff throughout the supposedly carefree and laidback weekend? Several explanations can be put forward, and yet all of them fall by the wayside under any critical examination.
One is to prevent drug and alcohol use at the concerts. But already a strong case can be made that responsible individuals have the right to do with their bodies what they want unless and until they start harming others, and that no governing body can make decrees invalidating that fundamental right. Furthermore, drug use should be a health issue, not a law enforcement issue, and if worse comes to worst, there are few people I’d rather trust than the highly trained and responsible workers of Emergency Medical Services.
The next arguments come straight out of the headlines of paranoid America: Perhaps a rogue shooter or bomb-wielding terrorist will infiltrate the concert. The chances of this happening are so minuscule as to be practically unthinkable, and yet we act as if these things are to be expected. To assume this is the case would be to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent, and would moreover be entirely ineffective, given the countless ways weapons could be smuggled in if someone were truly determined and thorough enough. The planes on 9/11 were hijacked by terrorists wielding box cutters, after all, not Glocks and Kalashnikovs.
Finally, while security may help keep events under control, there are far less imposing ways of maintaining order while still allowing students to have a good time. For example, groups of students — our peers and friends — can be trained to act as safety patrols, alerting EMS if something is wrong or calling the police only in real cases of emergency.
The Fourth Amendment, “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” is not a mere legal technicality that some sophist can argue applies only in certain cases and with wide and far-reaching exemptions. Rather, like freedom of speech, which Brown seems to be enamored with, the Fourth Amendment is a guide by which to govern a society, providing freedoms that are absolutely necessary for the growth and flourishing of humanity.
The right to one’s bodily and human integrity is the right to not be patted down and inspected, harassed and questioned. The right to personal property is the right to not have your bag checked wherever you go, to have to explain your most mundane articles. These rights to what is fundamentally and inalienably you and yours are as crucial as the right to freedom of speech for any democratic society.
Freedom is much like air, as one only notices it by its absence or corruption. Just as bad air — polluted and unhealthful — is harmful to the body, the pollution of the free activity of men and women by unnecessary and onerous authority — backed up by the implicit threat of force — is harmful.
To put it simply, authoritarianism kills the mood, as evidenced by the subdued nature of parties monitored by Event Staff, as well as those constantly broken up as if by clockwork, and the cautious, alert glances of students to make sure security did not see their joint or see them dancing “too hard.” If the point of Spring Weekend is to be carefree, few things do more of a disservice to that noble goal than the ceaseless scrutiny of security.
More broadly, the intensification of Brown’s security only reflects the national trend of amplifying security presence and scope. Police across the country are becoming increasingly militarized without real reason, while revelation after shocking revelation comes out about the domestic spying of the National Security Administration. All these actions are symptomatic of the insane need for total control felt by those tasked with ensuring our “safety.” Any violation of rights — of our fundamental humanity — is justified if it increases that one-in-a-billion chance of actually finding a terrorist, a “bad guy,” and stopping him.
What these “security experts” fail to comprehend is that trying to ensure total security through total control is a Sisyphean task, akin to the construction of the Tower of Babel. For every new measure of control implemented, several loopholes can be found — thus requiring a new means of control, leading to the discovery of new loopholes — all the while trampling human and civil rights.
Eventually, the entire facade becomes too complicated to maintain and inevitably comes crashing down. Furthermore, if such a goal of total security through total control were somehow achieved, one can bet it would feel much like a solitary-confinement cell at a prison: very safe, but a touch far from desirable.
The gifts of freedom are difficult to quantify, but they are surely infinitely more valuable than any extra security handed down to us by imposing instruments of authority. This sort of security is infantilizing, treating responsible adults as if we need our hands held to cross the street, thus limiting the responsibility we can and should take for ourselves. To treat us like this while in the same breath promising us, either explicitly or implicitly, that our Ivy League education will make us the “future leaders of the free world” is beyond absurd.
Onerous authority inherently limits the frame of our mental and emotional capabilities, preventing serious questioning under threat of arbitrary force, substituting conformity for critical inquiry, until we are mere technical, albeit skilled, functionaries instead of mature and developed human beings. A bird in a cage can never understand the desire to fly freely. A horse tied to a plastic chair from youth will remain stationary as an adult when tied to the same chair, even though it is more than powerful enough to break away. Likewise, an excess of authority will tie our minds and hearts to common and therefore forced ideas and values, from which many of us will struggle to ever break away.
For the sake of our education and development, as well as for the sake of having a good time on Spring Weekend, Brown needs to rethink its policy on security and create an atmosphere of critical questioning of all applications of undue authority infecting our nation.
David Katzevich ’16 is a radical believer that illegitimate authority must be questioned at every turn, with an unshakable faith in freedom and humanity. He is a member of the Brown United Revolutionary Socialists (URS) and can be reached at david_katzevich@brown.edu.
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