In an earlier weekly commentary piece, I argued that the enormous sums of black market money created by the drug war led to the proliferation of gangs — and turned local police forces into just another kind of gang fighting to control the drug money.
Anyone suspecting me of hyperbole only need read the news. One needn’t go far for examples of thuggish, ganglike police behavior.
Police lie and plant evidence to cover up their lawlessness, to manufacture “probable cause” for fishing expeditions against those they “know” are guilty, or to justify civil forfeiture of goodies they covet. Witness police attempts to plant drugs in the home of Katherine Johnson, an elderly woman murdered by a SWAT raid gone bad, in order to cover their tracks. The LAPD Ramparts Division routinely engaged in unprovoked beatings and shootings, stole narotics and dealt them themselves, and planted evidence to conceal their crimes. The Philadelphia police engaged in similar evidence planting. A simple Google search finds allegations of systematic planting of evidence in Huntington Beach, Atlanta, New York, Omaha, and St. Louis–all on the first page of the search results.
Police, like other gangs, terrorize the populations under their jurisdiction in order to secure obedience and maintain unquestioned rule over their “turf.”
A Cato Institute study on police militarization quoted urban police on deliberate shows of force in inner cities to intimidate the local population: “We send out two, two-to-four-men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump-out the second car provides periphery cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We’re sending a clear message: if the shootings don’t stop, we’ll shoot someone.”
Recently Homer, La. Police Chief Russell Mills was quoted as saying: “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names. I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.”
Police, like other gangs, use terror to intimidate “snitches.”
A Queens bar owner, Eduardo Espinosa, suffers police harassment because he implicated police for framing suspects in a fake sting operation: “Every two to three weeks, there’s cops in here, searching the bar. If there’s no violation, they’ll make it up. I lost all my clients — everybody’s scared to come in my place right now.”
Police in Pickerington, Ohio organized a public pressure campaign to intimidate a character witness, high school principal Scott Reeves, who vouched for the character of a man who shot at a SWAT team he mistook for armed robbers.
The “Rate-My-Cop” website was created as a national public database, compiling publicly available records to enable people to compare the performance of police forces and individual police officers across the country when it came to such issues as police brutality, corruption, etc. So naturally police unions across the country began screaming to have the site shut down.
During Police Week in 2007, a D.C. resident collected 48 hours of footage of police misconduct, including public drunkenness and disorder, public urination, throwing empty liquor bottles on church property, and driving segways with open containers of alcohol. Naturally, D.C. police stood by and watched it all happen, and refused to respond to complaints. And when the heroic citizen posted the footage to YouTube, naturally he received numerous anonymous death threats from people who identified themselves as police.
Police, like other gangs, prey upon those living on their “turf.” Consider, for example, the recent story of Philadelphia police cutting the lines to surveillance cameras in immigrant-owned shops, and then helping themselves to snacks, alcohol, and cigarettes — not to mention cash from the till.
Fellow C4SS commentator Thomas Knapp recently cited Aaron Russo’s litmus test for whether we live in a police state. Imagine yourself driving normally, under the speed limit, when a cop pulls in behind you and begins to tail you through several turns. Are you reassured that you’re being protected and served, and gratified to know that your city’s finest are on the job? Or do you get nervous and start wondering what you did wrong, overcome with dread that you’re about to get pulled over for some unknown offense? If your reaction is the latter, you’re living in a police state.
I would have no problems with unions in a free market, but as we all know, a free market is the last thing we have in America, particularly in the field of protection services. It's absolutely insane that the state-monopoly police should have a union. This union's main purpose isn't to scare some greedy employer into keeping wages at a reasonable level; ney, this union's purpose is to protect officers from charges of lawlessness.
It was back in 2006 that I realised how much better off we would all be if we were to get rid of the state-monopoly policing system entirely and replace it with voluntary institutions, such as competing protection agencies operating on the free market. Prior to this, I guess I always assumed that if there were no government, there would be no police, and if there were no police, criminals would run the streets as they do near the conclusion of the 1987 film RoboCop. But in 2006, I considered the matter from a praxeological point of view, and immediately realised that I had been wrong my entire life!
It really makes perfect sense when one thinks about it. After all, what happens when the state-monopoly police system fails to protect citizens from criminals? The citizens all say, "This is horrible! Crime is everywhere! We need to increase the police budget!" The tax-funded police monopoly is therefore an institution whose funding is not dependent upon results, but rather on the lack of results and increase of crime. Thus, even if all the cops were good and noble people, they would still have the same lack of incentives that existed under Soviet-style central planning. (And, of course, one would have to be quite naive to assume that a great percentage of the statist police are not thoroughly corrupt.)
Let us compare this to the scenario that would unfold under a system of competing protection agencies. Let's say you and your spouse have contracted with private protection agency A, and your neighbours have contracted with private protection agency B. Now let's say that private protection agency A is doing a sloppy job, and not ensuring the return on lost goods at a very high rate. Will you say to your spouse, "Honey, let's give our protection agency more month this month"? No, you're say, "Honey, the Robinsons next door say that they get really very good service from protection agency B. How about we consider switching agencies?"
Under a free market system, those firms that do the best job at the lowest cost will outlive those firms that do not, and all firms would have the profit incentive to drive them to do an ever-better job for their customers.
But perhaps more importantly, a regime of open competition would virtually eliminate corruption. The corruption of the current regime is the direct product of the monopoly status of the state-funded police system. A police agency under the current system never have to worry about competition, and thus those police officers working for the monopoly almost never have to worry about getting layed off as a result of costing their employers a share of the market. Under the regime of open competition, each private protection agency would worry about (1) losing customers to competing firms and (2) getting sued for the crimes of its employees; thus, at the first sign that a free market law officer is abusing his power, he will be canned. How often does this happen to the state-monopoly cops? If anything, they get a mere suspension—with pay.
Yours,
Alex Peak
The reason for governmental police forces is that competing private forces tend to serve the interests of those paying them rather than the common good. We've tried this as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Pinkertons, who were union busters.
The problem is not the cops but what we ask them to do.
If their job was to extricate dangerous people into the care of competent mental health professionals, rather than to put criminals in jail – possibly into prison labor – the whole attitude would change. People who didn't bother anyone and who no one cared about would be free to use their drugs, while some would be intervened on if they could not use or drink safely. Identifying these people earlier would prevent most violent crime, since having a criminal system rather than a public health system delays intervention until someone is hurt or property is stolen or exproriated, hardly a good thing.
if cars were operated by a central computer system rather than by drivers, there would be no traffic enforcement.
As far as hiring personal protection, I'm a firm believer in neighborhood level services, from police and fire to road construction and maintenance – although the problem arises when armed forces feel they have the duty to keep "the wrong element" out of a neighborhood. As far as protecting individual property, you can hire from a variety of home protection services now.
Sounds like it's time for the people to push back, and push back hard — armed retaliation is not out of the question.
Against whom, the Cops? Only if you have a death wish, as they tend to swarm. The ballot box is the key – however to do that, one must try to restrain oneself when the topic of armed retaliation against the police comes up.
Re: PECB,
Although it is certainly not unethical to defend one’s self when attacked, I do think there is something to be said for nonviolent resistence.
I’d also like to share a quote from Brian Doherty’s 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism:
“Like socialists, [Benjamin] Tucker and Liberty [the magazine he edited] fulminated against concentrations of wealth and the rise of monopolies; like libertarians, they admired private property and competition. But Tucker held no truck with the violence of the stereotypical bomb-throwing anarchists, though all anarchists were strained by that association after the Haymarket incident of 1886, in which an anarchist labor gathering in Chicago was disrupted by explosions that killed seven and wounded dozens more. (It quickly turned into a riot of police violence after that.) Whether set off by anarchists or police provocateurs is still uncertain, though almost all now agree that the men who were hung for the crime—anarchist activists Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer—were in no way responsible. Tucker was no pacifist, but he considered bomb-throwing to be a less productive strategy than education” (p. 44).
Yours,
Alex Peak