 |
| Heroic local police at work. |
"Whichis better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by threethousand tyrants not a mile away?" –
Attributed to Bostonphysician Mather Byles, 1770.
“Do you see this soldier in thischeckpoint?” Iraqi Wael al-Khafaji asked a Reutersreporter, pointing to a spot just a few feet from his Baghdad barbershop. “He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Isthis democracy?”
Before the U.S. invasion, thisbusinessman – like millions of other Iraqis – was ruled by a distant dictatorwho had little direct influence on his life. Today, everything he does takesplace under the shadow cast by armed men who have given themselves permissionto brutalize or kill anybody who refuses to obey them.
For Mr. al-Khafaji, it makes nomaterial difference whether the checkpoint is manned by U.S. soldiers, StateDepartment-employed mercenaries, members of Saddam’s Republican Guard, orelements of a local sectarian militia. The problem is the presence of peoplewho claim the right to use aggressive violence to force him to submit to theirwill. The problem is not one of geography or affiliation; it is a matter ofinstitutionalized immorality.
Americans who supported the Iraqwar would be scandalized by Mr. al-Khajafi’s ingratitude. They would be wise toponder his insight while examining the extent to which our own country isbecoming a garrison state. They would also do well to emulate his habit oflooking with acute suspicion – and no small measure of resentment – on theoddly dressed armed men who presume to exercise authority over us.
As sociologist David Bayleypointed out, “The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife.” The police are an implement of coercion wielded by the political class, whether they are operationally under the controlof Washington, D.C. or City Hall.
From the SYLP perspective, the police and the “criminaljustice” system they serve exist to protect life and property against criminalviolence and fraud. If this were true, it would follow that most of thosearrested and punished would be found guilty of crimes against person andproperty.
According to the most recent available statistics regardingincarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very smallminority of America’svast and growing federal prison population. As of 2009, crimes ofviolence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimescontributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates wereconvicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged forwhat are called “public order” offenses.
Libertarian activist Michael Suede points out that eighty-sixpercent of all federal inmates were punished for what are called “victimlesscrimes” – that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimesat all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state andlocal level as well.
There are instances in which police act in defense ofpersons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because rendering thatservice is not part of their formal job description: The Supreme Court hasrepeatedly ruled thatpolice have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights. This helpsexplain why, aseconomist Robert Higgs pointed out roughly a decade ago,“there are three times as many private policemen as there are public ones.”
In choosing to pay for private security assistance,Americans freely spend more than twice the amount stolen from us each year topay for the government’s armed enforcement caste. This is because thegovernment that takes our money fails to provide the promised social good –protection of life and property.
Writing nearly a century ago, when our contemporary policestate was in its infancy, theimmortal H.L. Mencken protested that the government supposedly protectinghim was actually the most rapacious and tenacious enemy of liberty and personalsecurity. While it is possible for the typical American to repel the aggressionof private criminals, “he can no more escape the tax-gatherer and thepolicemen, in all their protean and multitudinous guises, than he can escapethe ultimate mortician. They beset him constantly, day in and day out…. Theyinvade his liberty, affront his dignity, and greatly incommode his search forhappiness, and every year they demand and wrest from him a larger and largershare of his worldly goods.”
The one refinement we can make to this otherwise flawlesspolemical gem is to note that the terms “tax-gatherer” and “policeman” arefunctional synonyms. Both offices exist to extract wealth from the productiveat gunpoint on behalf of the political class. The only substantive differencebetween them is that the latter are granted slightly wider latitude ininflicting aggressive violence, and equipped to do so.
As Carl Watner pointed out in “Call the COPS – But Notthe Police,” a seminal 2004 essay published by The Voluntaryist, gathering taxes has been acore police function since the institution was first imposed on theAnglo-Saxons following the Norman Conquest. The feudal order implemented byWilliam the Conqueror was built upon the “frankpledge,”which was the institutional foundation for a a police system designed tocollect revenue for the monarch.
The Anglo-Saxon tribes had provided security throughkinship-based groups called “tithes” and “hundreds,” who defended cattle herdsand other property and acted as posses to apprehend thieves. Anglo-Saxon courtsemphasized restitution, with any punitive damages being used to compensatevolunteers who had tracked down the offenders. Under the frankpledge, however,the “justice” system diverted all revenues into the king’s treasury.
Royal courts worked tirelessly to expand the king’sjurisdiction, which was enforced by royal appointees called shire-reeves (fromwhich the term “sheriff” is derived). Eventually, royal enactments criminalizedefforts by victims to seek private restitution; since such arrangementsdeprived the treasury of revenue, they were seen as a form of theft. Thisconcept of the “King’s Peace” could be considered the distant but recognizableancestor of the modern notion that the disembodied abstraction called “society”is a victim of criminal offenses – even those in which no individual has beeninjured.
A heavy residue of Anglo-Saxon tradition endured into the 18thCentury. A French visitor to London in the mid-1700s was astounded when none ofthe local residents could direct him to the police – or even recognize theterm. “Good Lord! How can one expect order among these people, who have no sucha word as police in their language?” he exclaimed.
In fact, the term was familiar to educated 18thCentury Britons, who – as historian Leon Radzinowicz points out – considered itto be “suggestive of terror and oppression.” A 1785 Police Bill proposed byWilliam Pitt the Younger shattered against an iron wall of opposition to whatwas regarded as a “dangerous innovation.” Until the second decade of the 19thcentury, the British government’s ambition to create a standing police forcewas confined to its Irish colony, where its heavily armed Royal Constabularyfield-tested methods that would later be imported to the homeland.
 |
| The First Modern Police Chief: Fouche. |
During the same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, the armedevangelist of the Jacobin revolution, created the first modern police force.Bonaparte’s ascent to power began with a brutal police action: The massacre of13 Vendemiaire (October 5, 1795), during which the young Corsican general used artilleryto slaughter Royalist protesters on the streets of Paris.
By 1812, writes David A. Bell in his book The First Total War, large areas ofEurope under Bonaparte’s rule were afflicted with “pervasive bureaucracy,particularly new agencies for tax collection and conscription…. To implementthe new order, there came new police forces, often staffed largely byFrenchmen.”
Presiding over this apparatus of regimentation, extraction, andcoercion was secret police Chief Joseph Fouche, the Jacobin fanatic whoprefigured Felix Dzherzhinsky.
Bonaparte’s star was in eclipse by 1814. However, as British historian Paul Johnsonobserved in his book TheBirth of the Modern, “the golden age of the political police” had justbegun. The Congress of Vienna gave birth to what one contemporary critic called“All sorts of wild schemes of establishing a general police all over Europe.”
At the same time, Robert Peel, the military governor ofIreland, introduced the so-called Peace Preservation Police, a centrallycontrolled paramilitary auxiliary to the 20,000-man military force garrisonedon the island. Peel explained that the force “was not meant to meet anytemporary emergency” but rather intended to become a permanent institution. In1829, Peel was England’s Home Secretary. With Parliament’s resistance at lowebb, Peel proposed the creation of the Metropolitan Police.
“The new police institution had many supporters ingovernment, but opposition was to be found in the wider society,” wrote Watnerin The Voluntaryist. “The fundamentalprinciples behind the force were seen as … anathema to Whig politicalprinciples, which emphasized `liberty over authority, the rights of the peopleagainst the prerogatives of the Crown, local accountability in place ofcentralization, and governance by the “natural”rulers of society instead of salaried, government-appointed bureaucrats.’”
Populistparliamentarian William Cobbett, an outspoken foe of “tax-eaters,” wasamong the fiercest critics of the Metropolitan Police, which he saw as thevanguard of a country-wide army of occupation.
“Tyranny always comes by slow degrees,” Cobbett declared inan 1833 speech in Parliament, “and nothing could tend to illustrate that fact[better] than the history of police in this country.” Less than a generationago, Cobbett pointed out, the very term “police” was “completely new among us.”Now, owing to Peel’s innovations, London was now overrun with “Blue Locusts” –“a police with numbered collars and embroidered cuffs, a body of men as regularas the King’s service, as fit for domestic war as the redcoats were for foreignwar.”
In 1783, the last of King George’s occupation troops wereevicted from New York. In 1844, New York City’s municipal government became thefirst in America to embrace Robert Peel’s system of paramilitary police. Thisamounted to exchanging Redcoats for “Blue Locusts.” Other major cities – New Orleansand Cincinnati in 1852, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in 1855 -- soonfollowed. State police agencies began to appear in the last decade of the 19thcentury, and first decades of the 20th.
While those police agencies were locally controlled, theywere not servants of the public; they were instruments of the political classthat created them. On the western frontier, where political power was eitherradically decentralized or entirely theoretical, security for person andproperty was “protected by private policemen who were paid by – and, so,responsible to – the community where they served,” notes libertarian writer Wendy McElroy.
Unlike the European gendarmes and royal British “shire-reeves,” McElroy pointsout, “Western sheriffs did protectpeople and property; they did rescueschoolmarms and punish cattle rustlers. Their mission was to keep the peace bypreventing violence.”
Most importantly, in the Old West, sheriffs and marshalsdidn’t claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Thus when corruptsheriffs like Montana’s Henry Plummer or Idaho’s David Updike used their officeas cover to operate as “road agents” (horse thieves and highwaymen), theywere arrested, tried, and punished by private “committees of vigilance.”
The only legitimate role for apeace officer is to interpose himself on behalf of individuals threatened byaggressive violence. That is a role that can (and should) be carried out by anylaw-abiding individual – including instanceswhen the purveyor of aggressive violence is a police officer or other stateofficial.
In therecent nationally coordinated police crack-downs on “Occupy” protesters wehave seen the following scenario play out numeroustimes: Peaceful demonstrators confront riot police; individual riotpoliceman commits physical aggression against protester, then immediatelyescalates the conflict by using potentially lethal force; when the crowdreacts, the other police officers – rather than coming to the aid of the victim– form a protective barricade (I call it a “thugscrum”) around the assailant.
It is all but impossible to findan example of a police officer who interposed himself on behalf of the victimof criminal violence inflicted by a fellow officer. This isn’t surprising: Apoliceman can refuse to render aid to a crime victim without legal liability,and abuse innocent people without alienating his professional peers – but “going rogue” by interveningto prevent a criminal assault by another member of the punitive priesthoodis a career-killer. Former AustinPolice Officer Ramon Perez can supplythe details.
"The local police are not your enemy. Your committee is not here to attack them, blame them for violating the Constitution or your civil liberties because they are enforcing a measure of the Patriot Act or conducting a joint Federal and State anti-terror drill. Those are federal issues, which the local police in some cases may have already have little to no say if they are to continue receiving their additional Homeland Security funds, new equipment and weaponry.... We urge all responsible citizens in this community to work with us to ...[s]upport our local police in the performance of their duties [and] oppose all harassment or interference with law enforcement personnel as they carry out their assigned tasks.... [We must accept] our responsibilities to our local police, to defend them against unjust attacks, make them proud and secure in their vital profession, and to offer them our support in word and deed wherever possible." (Emphasis added.)
 |
| Their "assigned task": Local Police grab guns in New Orleans. |
It apparently didn't occur to the author of that passage that claiming citizens have "responsibilities to our local police" is to assume that the people exist to serve the government, rather than the reverse. Furthermore, it's pretty clear that from this perspective, the police have no reciprocal "responsibilities" to the citizenry.
Does that "responsibility" to defend the police and "make them proud" extend to supporting local police when they carry out lethal paramilitary raids, like the one that resulted in the murder of Jose Guerena? Would it include support for firearms confiscation of the sort carried out by local police (as well as National Guard personnel) in post-Katrina New Orleans?
At the very least it would mean refusing to interfere when an armored bully carries out his "assigned task" of brutally assaulting a helpless, unarmed citizen, rather than carrying out the moral duty to do whatever is feasible to prevent the crime or end the attack.
"When law and morality are in contradiction to each other," observed Frederic Bastiat, "the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing respect for the law -- two evils of equal magnitude...." The "Support Your Local Police" perspective undermines morality by enshrining unconditional support for the police -- who are, as SYLP admits, simply local affiliates of a nationalized Homeland Security system -- as a supposed civic duty.
No individual or institution has the moral right to use aggressive force. That principle applies not only to the Federal Leviathan, but to the loathsome little replicas of that vile beast found in every city, county, and state. Rather than helping to consolidate the existing police state, supporters of the rule of law should work to end their local government's monopoly on the police power -- with the ultimate objective of abolishing it outright.
Your donations to help keep Pro Libertate on-line are indispensable -- and greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!
Dum spiro, pugno!
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar