China's Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee recently announced an end to "reeducation through labor." This infamous procedure, which allows local authorities to imprison citizens for up to 18 months with little legal oversight, has been criticized for years. Its abolition is an important step toward the creation of the rule of law.

While China is moving toward police reform, the US seems to be headed in the opposite direction.

The fight for oversight of the police in the US was a long and hard one. It was the Supreme Court of the 1960s, under the leadership of Earl Warren, that established many of the liberties taken for granted today, such as "Miranda rights."

Before then legal protections were weak, especially for African-Americans. In the American South, as Douglas Blackmon has demonstrated, petty charges were used for decades after the Civil War to effectively re-enslave millions of black men in penal labor.

Today, racial injustice continues to permeate the US legal system, while the prison-industrial complex, which provides prison labor to many US companies while paying literally cents per hour, remains strong.

The US police are also increasingly militarized, as journalist Radley Balko demonstrated in a recent book. Homeland Security money has flooded the market so that towns of a few thousand people now have urban assault vehicles armed with machine guns.

SWAT teams, supposedly elite and heavily armed police, are now common even in small town police departments with no conceivable need for them. The accidental killing of innocent civilians by police after being given the wrong address for a raid has become a monthly affair.

Another new and worrying trend, especially after the September 11 attacks, is the use of trumped-up charges by police to intimidate critics. This has combined with the expansion of the security state and a police culture increasingly fixated on an "us-versus-them" attitude.

The most recent instance was the charges leveled against Carlos Miller, who runs the blog "Photography Is Not A Crime."

Miller documents cases of citizens being threatened for recording police activities. He began the site after having misdemeanor charges, eventually thrown out in court, brought against him for photographing officers at a crime scene in Miami.

This time, Miller put up a blog post encouraging readers to call the Boston Police Department's (BPD) Contact Affairs Department to protest an assault on a photographer by police, and published their publicly available contact details.

For this effrontery, he was charged with "witness intimidation" by the BPD.

The BPD then threatened to charge anybody else who contacted departmental spokesperson Angelene Robinson to protest either Miller's case or the first assault. 

It seems odd, to say the least, to level a serious charge against someone for encouraging people to call a public number specifically intended to receive public calls and complaints.

This attempt to use police authority to intimidate critics has, thankfully, entirely backfired on the hapless bullies of the BPD, who scrambled to drop the charges after lawyers, activists, and the press took an interest.

Miller has been exonerated, and may well successfully sue. But although the BPD took on the wrong target in Miller, such attempts at police bullying, as documented by lawyer Ken White and other critics online, are increasingly common.

Police bullying and the bringing of false charges benefit from the inclination of other authorities to believe them. Even in cases where police are exposed as liars in court, local departments often stand behind them. Police fired in one area are frequently rehired by another.

The Chinese central authorities are trying to reign in some out-of-control, corrupt, bullying local police departments. Can the US do the same?

The author is an editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn