Support Your Local Police State

by William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Let a Thousand 'Rogue' Grand Juries Bloom!

"Which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?" –

~ Attributed to Boston physician Mather Byles, 1770.

"Do you see this soldier in this checkpoint?" Iraqi Wael al-Khafaji asked a Reuters reporter, pointing to a spot .... "He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Is this democracy?"

Before the U.S. invasion, this businessman – like millions of other Iraqis – was ruled by a distant dictator who had little direct influence on his life. Today, everything he does takes place under the shadow cast by armed men who have given themselves permission to brutalize or kill anybody who refuses to obey them.

For Mr. al-Khafaji, it makes no material difference whether the checkpoint is manned by U.S. soldiers, State Department-employed mercenaries, members of Saddam’s Republican Guard, or elements of a local sectarian militia. The problem is the presence of people who claim the right to use aggressive violence to force him to submit to their will. The problem is not one of geography or affiliation; it is a matter of institutionalized immorality.

Americans who supported the Iraq war would be scandalized by Mr. al-Khajafi’s ingratitude. They would be wise to ponder his insight while examining the extent to which our own country is becoming a garrison state. They would also do well to emulate his habit of looking with acute suspicion – and no small measure of resentment – on the oddly dressed armed men who presume to exercise authority over us.

Democracy is the art of inducing victims of government power to focus on the question of who controls the government, rather than what it does. The same can be said of the perspective encapsulated in the slogan "Support Your Local Police" (SYLP).

As sociologist David Bayley pointed 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 control of Washington, D.C. or City Hall.

From the SYLP perspective, the police and the "criminal justice" system they serve exist to protect life and property against criminal violence and fraud. If this were true, it would follow that most of those arrested and punished would be found guilty of crimes against person and property.

According to the most recent available statistics regarding incarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very small minority of America’s vast and growing federal prison population. As of 2009, crimes of violence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimes contributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates were convicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged for what are called "public order" offenses.

Libertarian activist Michael Suede points out that eighty-six percent of all federal inmates were punished for what ar... – that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimes at all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state and local level as well.

There are instances in which police act in defense of persons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because rendering that service is not part of their formal job description: The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights. This helps explain why, as economist 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 to pay for the government’s armed enforcement caste. This is because the government that takes our money fails to provide the promised social good – protection of life and property.

Writing nearly a century ago, when our contemporary police state was in its infancy, the immortal H.L. Mencken protested that the government supposedly protecting him was actually the most rapacious and tenacious enemy of liberty and personal security. While it is possible for the typical American to repel the aggression of private criminals, "he can no more escape the tax-gatherer and the policemen, in all their protean and multitudinous guises, than he can escape the ultimate mortician. They beset him constantly, day in and day out…. They invade his liberty, affront his dignity, and greatly incommode his search for happiness, and every year they demand and wrest from him a larger and larger share of his worldly goods."

The one refinement we can make to this otherwise flawless polemical gem is to note that the terms "tax-gatherer" and "policeman" are functional synonyms. Both offices exist to extract wealth from the productive at gunpoint on behalf of the political class. The only substantive difference between them is that the latter are granted slightly wider latitude in inflicting aggressive violence, and equipped to do so.

As Carl Watner pointed out in "Call the COPS – But Not the Police," a seminal 2004 essay published by The Voluntaryist, gathering taxes has been a core police function since the institution was first imposed on the Anglo-Saxons following the Norman Conquest. The feudal order implemented by William the Conqueror was built upon the "frankpledge," which was the institutional foundation for a a police system designed to collect revenue for the monarch. MORE>>> http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w236.html