The flashing blue light caught my eye from across the Longs parking lot, and for half a second I looked for a squad car. There wasn’t one.
The light sat up on a pole, bright and tireless, flanked by two cameras and a speaker. Every so often the speaker cleared its throat to remind me, and the myna birds, that these premises were under surveillance.
Without leaving the lot I had wandered into Oceania. This is Hawaiʻi now.
We are used to it, which is the strange part. The locked cases came first, only for the obvious things — cold medicine, cans of Spam. Then they spread. Now you summon a clerk with a key to buy honey, or laundry detergent. The plastic barrier that did not exist a few years ago is now as common as the shopping cart. The pole in the lot is the next turn of the same screw.
We have quietly traded places. The man who steals walks out with his arms full and his pulse even, having learned that little will happen to him. The man who obeys the law frets over a lapsed car registration or the fender he tapped. The thief is hard to find. But the taxpayer is right there, with an address.
Some of this we chose. In 2016 the Legislature raised the felony-theft line from $300 to $750, the first such change since 1986. Some argued that the increase was necessary to keep up with inflation, though 1986's $300 was worth $657 in 2016 — lawmakers essentially excused an extra nearly $100 worth of theft as non-felonious. But others sold it as mercy, and as thrift besides: fewer felonies, which means fewer prisoners and a smaller bill. When the tenderhearted and the tightfisted want the same thing, what they usually want is to stop paying for something. What we stopped paying for was justice, and the camera arrives when the state steps away.
The thief is not beyond love. The addict on the sidewalk is a man God made and Christ died for, and a city that forgets it turns cruel in a hurry. But there is a mercy that is only cowardice in better clothes.
To watch a man sink into what is destroying him and call your inaction compassion is to flatter yourself at his expense. Real mercy wants his good, and his good includes consequences. The civil ruler, Paul writes, “beareth not the sword in vain.” The sword is part of the office.
There is a bill for all this. Stores call their losses shrink, and shrink is folded into the price of everything you carry to the register. The guard, the wired cases, the minutes spent waiting for someone to unlock the condiments — everyone pays to cover the lawlessness of a few.
The state has one job it cannot hand to anyone else. It must protect the people who keep the law and discipline the people who break it. Order is not a luxury bought only when the budget allows. It is the first thing government is for. When the state does this work, the honey can sit on an open shelf. When it quits, a private company bolts the honey down and hoists cameras up on poles.
Justice is not mysterious. We could enforce the repeat-offender laws already on the books, and set a theft threshold a thief has some reason to fear. We could fund the courts and police well enough that a stolen cart leads to more than a shrug. We could also watch the law-abiding a good deal less than we do.
There is an old story about a pole like the one in the lot. When the Israelites in the desert were dying of snakebite, God had Moses raise a bronze serpent. Whoever looked at it lived. It was a strange mercy, and it worked. The trouble came later. Generations on, they were still burning incense to the bronze snake as though the metal had saved them. A king named Hezekiah finally broke it apart and named it Nehushtan — a thing of bronze.
We have hoisted another Nehushtan. The pole can record a theft, but it cannot reform the man committing it.
History runs in seasons, and a law that sleeps can wake again. Meanwhile, we pray for the only lifting-up that ever healed anyone. Not bronze on a pole, but the Son of Man raised on a cross, who reaches the man standing under the cameras. The blue lights will keep flashing over him. They were never going to save him.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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