A twist too far?

Consider:

Thus an individual not only becomes captive to the legal system through the cop’s noticing and profiling but, in being constrained to absolute obedience, can be criminalized and subjected to arrest in fact for defense of his/her dignity, self-respect, or sense of justice. Defense of one’s humanity or self-respect can also be construed as an actual assault on the law if the officer decides to assault that self-respect violently. This goes beyond the mere criminalization of behavior that it relies on; it constitutes the ability to criminalize a person’s personhood and sense of justice itself.

Thus, profiling and its attendant aggressiveness imply that the police have arrogated to themselves the power to determine who will be human, whose self-respect will be respected, whose autonomy and independence will go unpunished, and whose not. While the overt nature of this self-arrogation of power is a demand for obedience, its overall political import is a demand for obeisence. Obeisence differs from obedience in the same way profiling differs from law enforcement. In obedience, one stands as a person in relation to that which one obeys; in obeisence, one abandons one’s standing as a person to the transcendent meaning of an icon or concept to which one must abject oneself. In disobedience, one only criminalizes oneself; non-obeisence becomes a criminalized status imposed gratuitously by the institution that demands obeisence.

This returns us to the question of impunity. “Impunity” is not simply a result of police departments offering internal solidarity to those officers who act with brutality or criminalize people. It names the hyper-political context in which the police not only stands above both police regulations and legal prohibitions against torture or murder, but become a law unto themselves, to which they can demand obeisence.

This passage is from a sobering discussion of the kind of power the police have to arbitrarily target individuals. Yet, I can't help but feel that it goes off the rails a little bit in these paragraphs. The point being made, that a cop can for all practical purposes manipulate a person into being in a position to be legally labeled criminal, despite having done nothing illegal before the cop decided to target them, is extremely powerful in its own right. The writer here, however, tries to develop that into "the ability to criminalize a person’s personhood and sense of justice itself." What is ostensibly a means for the cop to manufacture cause to arrest whoever they choose--namely to put the "suspect" into a position in which any reasonable person would resist--becomes an end, or perhaps at least a strategy to criminalize the having-of-human-qualities that leads individuals to "criminally" resist the cops. This strikes me as wrapping up in far too complicated verbiage something that is quite comprehensible without it.

But perhaps what seems to me to be a more straightforwardly comprehensible formulation fails to capture the full depth of the issue as actually experienced by its victims.