Policing (Re: spooky shit, a paradox & numbers)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Michael Perelman wrote:
>Despite all the scary high tech stuff, why does the law enforcement
>establishment do such a bad job in finding people.  The Unibomber's brother
>turned him in; McVeigh got caught in a traffic stop.  They can't find Eric
>Rudolph.
>
>Instead, they merely get people to testify against others rather than doing
>what we might think of as police work.
>
>Am I off base here?

Could it be that what we think of as 'police work' has little to do with
what policing is all about?

Policing as it exists now in core capitalist countries (especially the USA)
seems to me to be about the production of: (1) spectacles of criminality;
(2) selective repression and disenfranchisement of workers on the margins
of the labor market; and (3) social control of the entire working class by
'consent' to the 'law & order' ideology. Apprehending all the people who
break laws and regulations can't be the objective, for the number of
offenders would be astronomical.

Yoshie