Crisis Within a Crisis

At the request of the NYPD on June 5, a New York City judge agreed that detainees could be held without charges. On that day in Manhattan alone, some 300 people had been in police custody longer than the 24 hours provisioned by state law. The Legal Aid Society filed a writ of habeas corpus demanding their lawful release. The ruling from NYC Criminal Court Judge James Burke was, “It is a crisis within a crisis. All writs are denied – Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan.”

In New York state, the maximum amount of time between getting arrested and being brought before a judge is 24 hours. If you’ve been held in custody without arraignment for longer than that, you are entitled to be released. The right to not be held indefinitely without charge is known as habeas corpus, and it’s not just state law – it’s protected by the constitution. Except, that is, “in cases of rebellion or invasion” where “the public safety may require it.”

At the federal level, habeas corpus has only been suspended nationwide once, during the Civil War. On a municipal level, the ruling in New York City arguably functions as a suspension of habeas corpus. The NYC judge did not rule how long detainees could be held, effectively permitting local police to hold people indefinitely. The main headline grabber in all this ended up being AOC – Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – with her tweet saying, “Civil liberties protect [us] from governments using ‘crises’ and ‘emergencies’ as justification to dismantle our rights. This is suspension of habeus corpus, it is unconstitutional, and it is deeply disturbing that both NYPD is seeking it and a judge rubber stamped it.”

The decision of the NYC judge itself presents a crisis within a crisis: the crisis of suspending perhaps the most significant safeguard a person has against abuse of power by the government. Without the guarantee of due process, there’s nothing protecting you from being seized and stuck behind bars forever, à la Guantánamo Bay. While it is merely a local ruling and not the entire country, it does not bode well. A city being backlogged during a crisis is hardly a reason to deny people their rights. And it is beyond the purview of a municipality to circumvent constitutional protections. But this one has. Here we are.

For months, the country has been under pandemic and shelter in place orders. We’re in a public health crisis. In the last few weeks, thousands of people have been in the streets protesting another crisis, that of systemic racism and police brutality that resulted most recently in the deaths of Breyonna Taylor and George Floyd, and since then Rayshard Brooks. The abuses of power that further erode our civil rights at this moment represent yet another crisis. The system is overwhelmed, and so are we. How many crises can we withstand, personally, civically? How do we face these crises at once when some of their demands – stay at home and flatten the curve, take #blacklivesmatter to the streets – are mutually exclusive?

And yet, a compounding crisis-within-a-crisis is nothing new. Every crisis sits within another. The coronavirus disproportionally affects Black and brown people, showing how our systems of power function even when the virus itself doesn’t discriminate. And there are other crises still with us – immigration and the border here, refugees and the displaced around the world. Food insecurity. The rise of authoritarianism. Biodiversity loss. The climate crisis, the crisis with the power to render all others obsolete. Working to fight a single issue hardly seems enough. And it isn’t. But the relatedness of all of them is there if you look at their roots. Abuse of power and the devaluing of certain lives over others enable atrocities great and small. Perhaps it is not so much a crisis within a crisis, but a single worldview held by the powerful, writ large.