Veeshoka Mudwari
ENG 101- 0768
Dr. Vasileou
Essay 3 Draft
Date- 12/03/12
Better Inspected Than Insecure
Safer place leads to a freer world. In contrast, freer place risks safer world. The society in Minority Report, emphasizes more on safety of people, overlooking unethical approach such as violating human rights and freedom by precrime officers to arrest predicted murderers. As members of a civilized society, we should also disregard little ethical misconduct on us, in order to ensure safety for a larger group and thus perform our responsibility towards society.
The need of safety of people is as committal as their basic needs like fooding and clothing. One’s safety always comes prior to one’s freedom or right. When it comes to facing with terror, we humans naturally should give preference to safety and compromise our rights for the sake of our own goodness and the benefit of our society as well. For instance, if prediction of bomb plantation is made near our house, and concerned authorization wants to scrutinize us, wouldn’t be irrational on our part to stick in trivial ideology of right and freedom in such emergencies and not let the people examine us? We would rather choose to be inspected than to be unsafe.
Nothing in the world is free. Safety also comes with the price, which might rather be as big as violation of our own freedom and right. Nevertheless, if we want to ensure our safety, we ought to compromise at some level. It turns out to be our responsibility to actually help concerned authority do their duty by providing them with whichever help we can. In the movie, Minority Report, the existing society is declared “murder free zone”. There is an advertisement scene in the movie showing gratitude by the people who could have been murdered if precrime had not come to their rescue. However, the people in the society had to give up some freedom and right to make precrime a success. The scene in GAP store, where eyes are scanned for identification of people and also the part of the movie where the spiders try retinal identification of the people can serve as an example. Nevertheless, people in the society recognized their responsibility towards precrime and thus discredited their rights for they realized that its ultimate purpose is actually to save them and not harass them by violating their personal freedom. Therefore, if dishonored right can lead to a safer place, it is better to vilify our right by supposing it as our price paid for the safety of our society.
The usage of means that might eliminate or reduce crime can be extremely beneficial not only to expel a single crime scene but also to discourage other possible similar crimes that might occur. It serves as a threat to the ill intentioned people in the society which certainly helps make life of people easier. In the article published on October 19 2012, on Wall Street Journal, “Second Suspect in Fed Plot”, Tamer El-Ghobashy and Devlin Barette have explained a recent incident about an immigrant from Bangladesh, Nafis, who was taken into custody for an attempt of bomb blast in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. He started affiliating himself with people who claimed themselves to be against American officials from Facebook and got involved into severe planning of a bomb attack in the bank, targeting President Obama as a victim. However, he had no idea that whoever he had been connected to in the criminal act were actually FBI agents conducting sting operations by tracking people who aim to be terrorists. David Raskin, a law-enforcement officer explained that his act of predetermination of criminal suspect by the FBI not only helped eliminate one of the possible terrorist of the future, but also made other such deleterious people in the society, who “aspire to terrorism” through similar mediums such as social networking sites conscious that their actions are being watched. (Ghobashy and Barette A2). Undoubtedly, there has been violation of Nafis’s right to connect and communicate with people, however, had it not been the FBI agents interrupting people’s rights, this incident could have more severe consequence. Thus, the violation of one’s right in this incident can in no circumstance be regarded as unethical or unfair. In the contrary, it proved to be beneficial for the society by ensuring safety.
With the advancement of technology, humans have come up with few tools and techniques to help foretell possible crimes and culprit, to an extent. These available techniques to help predict crime scenes have been constantly used for safety purpose and certainly, it has been yielding positive results. An article published in The New York Times, dated August 15, 2011, by Erica Goode explains how the computer programs used by police officers to predict probable crime helped arrest two women, one, who was found to have ample warrants to be arrested and the other, who was seen to have carried drugs, for the prediction of robbery. Even though, these women did not commit robbery, they certainly had the conditions outstanding enough for detention. Thus, this act must not be questioned for violating ones right or freedom. Moreover, this concept of predetermining crime will be of a great help in a degraded economic condition by saving a lot of monetary and human resource in minimizing crimes (Goode A11). Captain Malinoswki, from Los Angeles Foothill Patrol Divisions, justifies their act by explaining how the new advancement of technology has taken crime investigation to a different level and how it can serve as a key ingredient to help provide safety to the society (Goode A11). Thus, as the technology enhances, society will further get safer by eliminating people, who can be threat to the society just like the two women (considering the fact that they already were in the list of the police department as criminals), which again, not in any stand be taken as a violation of human rights.
Human right protagonists, however, might disagree to the point that even if it is risking numerous lives, one’s personal freedom ought to be followed. Difficulties that one might face, in an airport just because one looks Muslim, or troubles one might go through in a street for vandalism for the mere reason of being Hispanic or Black, might bother them. However, wouldn’t it be unfair to question the government or safety department which has been working all day and night for our own safety for suspecting us? They follow the patterns because they take past references to actually determine future incidences. If every individual tries to fight for their right by ignoring the necessecity of safety issues, and attempts to avoid the investigation of the government, the actual culprit will also get chance to escape and thus the probability of crime taking place would increase.
Safety issue is not a want, but a need. A society where people’s rights, freedom and action is observed to prevent any unsafe act will prove to be a better place to live in than a society where, culprits get channel to prove their innocence in the name of freedom and rights . Hence, it would be wiser to choose a safe world to live in with fewer rights than a chaotic world to survive in with more freedom.
Work Cited
Minority Report. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Tom Cruise. Amblin, 2002. Film
El-Ghobashy, Tamer and Barett D. “Second Suspect in Fed Plot.” Wall Street Journal 19 Oct.
2012: A2. Print
Goode, Erica. “Sending the Police Before There's Crime.” The New York Times 16 August
2011: A11. Print
No comments:
Post a Comment