Rotational Authority

The dangerous situation developing between Mayor de Blasio & the NYPD provides an opportunity to explain why authority should be rotational to improve accountability. The behavior of the police turning their backs to the mayor in a hierarchical system is flagrantly insubordinate. I’ve thought quite a bit as a former Marine officer, how I would have handled such a situation if it had occurred under my watch. I’d have reacted the first time the NYPD turned their back on Mayor de Blasio in the hallway going to the slain officers’ bodies. My initial reaction was that I would never have walked through that hall with individuals who were behaving that way. I would have called the individual commanding the unit & demanded he/she clear the room of all those disrespectful & insubordinate individuals. I would have also demanded the names of each of the individuals & ordered them into my office the next day for an individual interview, where after having their time to air their grievances implied by that behavior, I would have dressed them down. The individuals were not only disrespecting Mr. de Blasio & the office of the mayor, but more to the point, the citizens of the city of New York. I would have made that clear to each individual & to the public. It would be important to punish any of the members of the unit who didn’t recognize their error. That is how a hierarchical leader would have to approach such a situation. In order to maintain the authority, the hierarch must punish insubordination without impunity. In a hierarchical system, without the position of authority respected, the authority loses its power to control, creating a vacuum that will be filled by someone who will maintain the authority. This is one inherent problem with hierarchical forms of authority.

Let’s establish what a police force actually does: provide security for the community. Security from external & internal threats. Threats aimed at the citizen & the citizen’s property. In a hierarchical system the leader of the community (i.e. the mayor) maintains & directs the actions of the police to provide that security. The mayor has been chosen by a process that the community accepts or concedes. The mayor determines in conjunction with his police chief the needs of the police force to provide that security & budgets to implement that security system. The hierarchical system requires that those at the bottom of the hierarchy pay allegiance to those above. The opportunity for abuse becomes readily available, especially as the top of the hierarchy also establishes the parameters of what is considered ‘threats’. Because most laws that a hierarchical system establishes are to prevent or deter threats to ‘person & property’, they are open to misuse. As we have seen post 9-11, ‘threats’ are established by the hierarchical elite to protect their position & authority, not to protect the citizens & the citizen’s property, even if this is what is claimed. The failed drug wars (drugs are the threat) provides another example of how the hierarchical elite protects itself against the citizens it claims to protect. Taxes or the ‘threat’ of citizens not paying taxes created the situation that authorized the police to strangle Eric Garner. This is while ‘threats’ to the rights of citizens are downplayed & denied in order to protect the same citizens from ‘threats’ perceived or created (tax evasion as a justification for deadly force). The hierarchical system of authority doesn’t provide a protection to those at the bottom of the hierarchy from abuse by the top echelon. That is the difference between a hierarchical system & a cooperative system. One way that the cooperative organization differs would be the use of rotation.

The goals & basic structure of a cooperative system to provide security would not be significantly different. Patrols of the area would be necessary, tools to provide the security would have to be provided, & a hierarchy of leadership would have to be established. The difference would be in how that hierarchy was established & how the upper echelons were filled rather than chosen or taken.

Most proposed cooperative systems use the term ‘horizontal organization’. By this anarchists attempt to prevent a vertical (hierarchical) power structure from being established. If a system is horizontal, then there is no higher authority that wields power over the rest. A cooperative society would be based on such a system. So how can that work for a community to provide security? Obviously, a hierarchy must be established for a security force to provide the protection the community needs. An horizontal organizational structure doesn’t eliminate hierarchical positions of authority completely, but it changes the method by which those positions are assigned and held by making the assignment temporary & rotational. Temporary authority would limit the possibility of usurpation & corruption of a position of authority as important as security, but it can’t do it alone. I’ll discuss temporary in future posts. The other necessary ingredient is rotation. The importance of the rotation cannot be negated. By rotating, the cooperative not only prevents an usurping of the power of the authority established in a security collective action, but it improves the quality of each member of the cooperative to provide that security. As each member must hold the role at some time or other, it behooves  everyone in the collective to ensure that each individual is properly trained & prepared to successfully fulfill the responsibility of security for the collective. My personal experience in the Marines demonstrated that even the weakest link in a collective chain can be held to standards acceptable to the collective’s needs. Further, the collective can then hold the individual accountable when they don’t fulfill their responsibility or duties. So in a cooperative, the security details would be established on a rotating basis of guards, patrols, & officer of the day. Each would have specific tasks to accomplish during their tour of duty (authority). The tour of duty could be on a 24 hour basis. With this in mind, the position of even mayor could be rotated on a regular basis, daily, weekly, whatever the cooperative membership decided. The rotation of this authority would put some weak individuals into the position & some corrupt individuals as well. Both could be held accountable to improve or change. At worst an individual who decides to usurp the power to a dangerous level would have to be confronted immediately by the cooperative community as a whole. This would be easier to do in a rotational basis, since the usurping individual would have less time or opportunity to develop subordinates who would aid in his usurpation. A mixture of leadership skills throughout the organization's structure would help to prevent this. The basic guideline of responsibility would have to be that no unlawful order should be ever followed by those in subordinate roles. Knowing that they won’t be in that role permanently or that any move up the hierarchy is not dependent on following the orders of those above without question would give most individuals the strength to challenge unlawful orders.

There are many strengths to the rotational organization that I want to discuss in future posts, but the most important is that rotation provides a barrier to usurpation. Without self-reliant individuals comprising at least a potent minority within the community, it would be a difficult barrier to maintain, especially after the first failure of the system to provide adequate security offering the opportunist a chance to sway minds that the opportunist could do a better job than the cooperative/rotational method. However, as we’ve seen with the rising movement around the police state, attempts to usurp the leadership role of the movement have generally failed because there are enough individuals within the movement who speak loudly and forcefully against individual leadership roles (note the backlash to Oprah's comments about the need for leadership). I hope that the skeptical attitude toward individual leadership will continue because that will only strengthen each member of the movement to be self-reliant and cognizant of their own power to promote and propel the movement through cooperative not hierarchical organization.