Thought Experiment

You're about to be mugged, with a likelihood of grievous bodily harm or death. You see two buttons. One will produce a city cop to prevent the mugging. The other will abolish the state in its entirety and instantaneously.

Which do you push?

Police "Reform"

Pete Quinones and I discussed so-called police reform on Pete's podcast. Listen to it here.

When "Defund the Police" Will Turn Serious

Defunding the police is only a small part of only one side of the equation. All anti-vice laws must be erased, and the people, individually and in voluntary combination, must be freed -- including freed from taxation -- to see to their own security, their own education, their own health care, their own this, their own that, and their own the other. When that stuff enters the discussion, it will have gotten serious.

Victimless-Crime Laws Breed Police Violence

As long as the police are charged with detecting and stopping consensual transactions -- concerning, for example, drugs, guns, gambling, sex, and untaxed cigarettes and CDs -- tension and violence will continue. Abolishing victimless-crime laws won't end institutional racism, but many opportunities for it will be eliminated.

The key feature of a victimless-"crime" transaction is that unlike, say, battery, it has no complaining participant -- the transaction is consensual. Because of this, police find they "need" to engage in surveillance, entrapment, cultivation of informants, stop-and-frisk, and other methods that breed distrust between the people and the system. This in turn gives rise to a view of the police as an occupying army, especially in poor minority neighborhoods, where for a variety of reasons -- occupational licensing and government schools, to name two -- the black market presents attractive alternatives to poverty.

Other measures to be taken: abolish all occupational licensing and minimum-wage laws, which impede people's efforts to prosper. (Providing goods and services without a license is a victimless crime if no deception is involved.)

Thus Dallas Chief David Brown's invitation to Black Lives Matter activists to join the police department and work for reform from within badly misses the point. This is not just about bad apples and community policing.

Another way to put it: if we didn't have cops, we wouldn't need them.

I Love Loosies and the People Who Sell Them

The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget.

As a Facebook friend of mine put it, instead they showed him in a way he will never remember.

This pretty much explains the cops’ reckless disregard for Garner’s life that day, and it is what makes the grand-jury sham especially appalling.

Read it here.

Who's the Boss?

The NYC cops did not intend to kill Eric Garner. They intended only to show him who's boss in a way he would never forget. Hence their reckless disregard for his life.

The Logic of Resisting Arrest

One cannot resist an arrest that is not being attempted. Cops and politicians should stop arresting nonviolent people for victimless "crimes." PS: Governments should NOT be construed as the victims of free exchange in black markets.

The Ferguson Distraction

Ironically, the shooting death of unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown by white Ferguson, MO, police officer Darren Wilson is a distraction from the racist police brutality that ravages America.

Whether or not Wilson shot Brown unjustifiably, and whether or not Brown provoked the shooting by grabbing for Wilson’s gun, the police — and the government officials who employ and arm them — are a big problem in this country. (The Eric Garner chokehold killing has none of the ambiguity of the Brown case.)

Unfortunately, it takes a shooting such as the one in Ferguson to spotlight the problem. And that presents its own problem. The claim that the police are routinely dangerous to innocent people — mostly blacks and Hispanics — appears to stand or fall with the headline case of the week. But that can’t be the correct way to judge the bigger issue.

Read it here.

Ferguson, continued

Any analysis of Ferguson and police brutality that falls short of anarchist is bound to be inadequate. The root of the problem is top-down centralized monopolistic (dare I say socialistic?) law making and enforcement.

Ferguson, continued

Turning the Michael Brown case into something it's not serves only to discredit the movement against police abuse and racism.

Ferguson

In shootings by police, fully independent and public adversarial inquiries should be conducted. There's no getting around the fact that in such cases, the prosecutor is also likely to be the de facto defense counsel.

Good editorial in the New York Times.

TGIF: "The Police Force Is Watching the People"

Political philosophy — the libertarian philosophy included — can take you only so far. The libertarian philosophy provide grounds for condemning aggression, that is, the initiation of force, and along with some supplemental considerations, it identifies in the abstract what constitutes aggression, victimhood, and self-defense. But the philosophy can’t identify the aggressor and victim in particular cases; relevant empirical information is required.

Read TGIF here.

An Open Message to Police & Military

The Gates Incident as a Free Speech Case

Harvey Silverglate, a founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has an excellent article in Forbes on the arrest of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates. For Silverglate -- and I agree with him -- this is entirely a free-speech matter. Gates was arrested exclusively for what he said to a policeman and for how he said it. The incident is less about race and more about a police attitude toward "civilians" that free people should not tolerate. That attitude is exemplified in the current practice of not including police personnel in the term "civilian." This is a recent change. "Civilian" used to mean everyone but the military. This is another sign of the militarization of the police, which is stimulated by the "wars" on drugs, guns, and other things that are not directly connected with crimes against person and property.

For Gates and Against the Police

Professor Henry Louis Gates was perfectly justified in being pissed at the cops who ordered him out of his own home. The police sergeant who cuffed and arrested him for disorderly conduct, after he knew who Gates was, was retaliating against him, a black man, for not showing proper deference to a representative of the State. How dare he yell at a policeman who treated him like a street thug? I side with Gates.