The rise of an authoritarian police state in America

Stephen M. Klugewicz writes fondly and in much detail about the hit 1960s televison show The Andy Griffith Show. Klugewicz does so to remind us of how far we have come from the law enforcement practices of Sheriff Taylor.

Today, Sheriff Taylor feels like a character from a bygone era. As American society responds to its cultural, moral, and social meltdown by heavily arming its police forces and by training them to be aggressive in their enforcement tactics, it has abandoned the creed of the Sheriff of Mayberry and chosen what might be called “the Fife option.” As evidence, all one need do is consider the many recent examples of police brutality and overreach, from the shooting to death of a boy armed only with a toy gun, to the tasering and resultant maiming of a handcuffed young woman, to the humiliating body cavity searches that now seem common during routine traffic stops.

The danger in America is that our modern Fifes are not comic characters with single bullets and hearts of gold but deadly serious, heavily armed agents of the state bent on enforcing the letter of the law without regard to common sense or a sense of justice and mercy. Mayberry, the American Shire, is a symbol of our vanished past. Today the dark shadow of authoritarianism has crept into every corner of the land. We have sent away the Sheriff Taylors and replaced them with police officers whose hearts are too often like those of Tolkien’s Black Riders—once good but now deformed by their slavish obedience to the all-seeing eye. In the unenviable choice between unlawful chaos and authoritarian order, Americans have chosen the latter, and we are suffering the consequences.