The current debate over police in America has been largely reduced to systemic racism and de-funding the police versus law-and-order thin-blue-line apologists. There are other positions, of course, but legacy media and social media seem hell-bent on fueling this false dichotomy. We have a far deeper problem to address which would likely result in better outcomes for everyone if resolved, but it requires a different approach.
I would argue the US is a de facto police state today. It has the highest prison population in the world, unless China is severely under-reporting their prisoner count. While no longer the top country per capita, that is hardly a point for pride when it still houses about 20% of the world's prison population. Imprisonment is completely disconnected from the crimes people commit, to say nothing of the myriad victimless infractions which are often punished more harshly than murder and rape.
Broadly speaking, there are two classes of crime: malum prohibitum and malum in se. Most people in prison today are charged with the former, which means "evil because it is forbidden." This is a completely arbitrary declaration that certain acts , exchanges, or possessions will be punished. There is no rational or moral basis for such laws or their enforcement, and these laws engender the most hatred for police enforcing them.
I would argue that if there is no victim, there is no crime. Only the latter category, meaning "evil in itself," describes a real criminal act because it applies to trespasses against another person. Violating the life, liberty, or property of others and denying their natural right to consent is a crime, and the remedy is restitution. Imprisonment may allow someone a place safe from retribution where they can earn restitution, but that is a very different model to the status quo. It also requires a completely different focus on policing.
As a very basic example of how broken policing is today, the San Francisco Chronicle published an exposé entitled San Francisco could be recovering hundreds of stolen cars. Instead, it’s ticketing them. The incentives reward revenue generation for the city through enforcement of malum prohibitum laws instead of helping victims of malum in se crime recover their stolen property. People are finding their cars by finding where the police cited them for improper parking, and in at least once instance, the police refused to even come when the owners found it containing other stolen property.
The police failed to serve and protect, instead compounding the suffering of theft victims by saddling them with added costs. This power dynamic and incentive structure is rooted not in systemic racism, but in the nature of any monopoly service. Government is the mother of all monopolies, and exhibits all the waste and abuse of such a structure compounded by funding itself through extortion of the populace. There is no accountability when the court system and legal code protect police from liability. There may not be an official quota system, but officers are no doubt measured against metrics like arrests and ticket issuance, because those are nice and neat numbers which can be presented as a spreadsheet to city hall.
Of course, the article linked above led to a followup order from the mayor to stop ticketing stolen cars, but a system truly dedicated to serving and protecting would not need such a policy update. Make fun of mall cops and private security all you like, but they tend to be focused on actually protecting their clients and their customers instead of extorting strangers. Their job is to prevent theft and violence, and that's it.
On a wider scale, the modern war on drugs has resulted in a violent black market while many factors including well-intentioned social programs have created impoverished inner cities where little opportunity exists outside the drug trade or other illegal activities. License requirements and other regulatory burdens for entrepreneurial startups are another malum prohibitum roadblock to those seeking to escape poverty by legitimate means. And then there is the dumpster fire of "public education" failing urban youth, but that's another topic for another day.
Suffice it to say, many of the problems leading the mainstream left to call for defunding the police and the mainstream right to call for more law and order stem from this disconnect between what people believe the police exist to do, and what they actually do. It's not systemic racism, but it is systemic authoritarianism. It's not a lack of law and order, but a lack of respect for the people who police claim to serve and protect. Sometimes it's revenue generation at the expense of recovering stolen property. Sometimes it is police theft under the guise of "civil asset forfeiture" as they enforce malum prohibitum laws. Sometimes it is excessive force against people suffering mental illness, medical crises, or honestly sometimes being a minority in public, because that does seem to happen. We see no-knock raids based on enforcing prohibition laws, sometimes at the wrong address, resulting in death when confused people fail to "follow orders."
All of these issues and more stem from the idea that police and the law hold some kind of authority we are obligated to obey. This conflation of legality and morality, combined with the perverse incentives of an extortion-funded monopoly service, all but guarantee corruption and abuse. No wonder stolen cars are getting tickets and innocent people are being awakened by flash-bang grenades from SWAT teams. The people pointing to alleged systemic racism don't want to address the real systemic authoritarianism because they want their own ideas enforced by jack-booted thugs. The folks calling for "law and order" don't want protection of person and property, they want enforcement of their own ideology. OK, maybe that's an over-generalization, but please prove me wrong. Comment below, and remember: shiny badges don't grant special rights.
At least you have police that respect the constitution. Here in Cuba for example: if someone robs you and you call the police, they can take up to 24 hours to arrive. However you go out with a sign asking for freedom or saying down with communism, they arrive instantly, beat you up, violate your constitutional rights and hold a private trial where they charge you with sedition and contempt of court. They give you from 15 to 25 years in prison.... this is the free Cuba that the dictatorship does not expose to the world. Greetings and an excellent post.
You'd think they would respect the constitution they swear to uphold, but they enforce laws which blatantly violate state and federal bills of rights and literally rob people under the guise of "civil asset forfeiture." Sure, they're less bad on speech than in some countries, but it's not unheard-of for cops to punish people for speaking out.
Of course, I understand your point of view, you are right. I guess in theory that should not happen, why does that happen in a country where there is separation of powers?
What "separation of powers"? Three branches of federal government is still one federal government. The old idea of state, federal, and local governments has largely resulted in practice as power centralizing over time.
Good. From what you tell me, the separation of powers only works in theory. Here they don't even try to fool you with that. The State pays the salaries of the police and prosecutors and they are subordinate to the party... in theory and in practice they represent the interests of the State.
Authoritarianism is at least honest. Constitutional republics and democracy slap a veneer of legitimacy over the top of the brutality. Arguably, it does mean some of their own enforcers still believe in liberty to some degree, but it also makes it so much harder for the general populace to believe the government is their enemy.
One of the major problems that cause this citation is corruction. But don't think that authoritarian countries are exempt from it. You should know that communist propaganda is based on lies and deception, to achieve indoctrination. It is also real the situation that the United States has been going through for years, the rampant migration and increased crime are factors that can de-activate and fracture civil rights.
That made me chuckle.
You know I'm a dictator, right? - Aleksandr Lukashenko
West Taiwan is most certainly under-reporting, just as it does with every other problem: CoVID death tolls, flood death tolls, rates of unemployment, homelessness, etc. Besides, most facilities that we would recognise as prisons are called something else by the Chinese government. "It's not a concentration camp, it's a re-education facility," that kind of nonsense. We all know what a "re-education facility" really is, I don't need to explain the semantic word games. Hell, the phrases "concentration camp" and "internment camp" were euphemisms in and of themselves back in the 1940s, but today, they are both recognised as synonyms for "prison." BTW, that's just the tip of the sheissberg when it comes to Chinese fakery.
As a former Marxist, I know how tempting it is to believe Communist propaganda because of how shit western governments are, but you must resist that temptation. Communist regimes are the biggest frauds going. In most cases, the fraud is so obvious that the deception doesn't even work on their own subjects, therefore they rely on force alone. Westerners who believe the lies cough cough Don DeBar cough cough are what former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov referred to as "useful idiots."
I know I keep posting this quote, but it's a good one:
I was a loyal Soviet citizen until the age of twenty. What that meant was: to say what you are supposed to say, to read what you are permitted to read, to vote the way you are told to vote, and at the same time, to know it is all a lie. – Natan Sharanskii
It is not like that here. If we are even getting the service that the police is offering to you people here, it will have been better
The police seem to be quite useless here
You can ask any other Nigerian
Can the problem not be both systemic authoritarianism and systemic racism? If all people are treated badly by the police, but people of a minority are put in state prisons 5 times more than people of another race then it seems like racism is also a factor.
It would seem that way. Some say systemic racism. Some would even appeal to racism to say black people are somehow innately immoral. The latter is dumb and the former is oversimplifying a complex problem which does include historical racism, but also involves cultural factors and the unintended consequences of public policy. I'd suggest reading Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals for more nuance.
Ah, I see. I can agree with that. Systemic racism is absolutely part of the problem but even that fairly broad term is too narrow when considering all the factors at play.
I didn't appreciate how all-encompassing a term like 'systemic authoritarianism' could be. I thought you were saying that systemic racism wasn't part of the problem at all, instead of it just being part of the problem.
Discrimination, of which racism is but one variety, is a core component of authoritarianism: divide and conquer. If the authoritarians cannot use race or ethnicity to sew division, they will find something else, such as religion or economic class.
If systemic racism is involved, it's not at the top of the list of current problems and more a root problem behind a lot of old malum prohibitum laws police now enforce indiscriminately.
I think that's part of the problem though, that police are not enforcing these laws indiscriminately. If a study finds that from 100 million traffic stops that black drivers are 20% more likely to be pulled over and their vehicles 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be searched than white drivers (despite statistically being less likely to be transporting contraband) then I'd guess that its more likely than not that police in the US have a racial bias.
But I understand what you're saying... in this example above you're saying that the police shouldn't be pulling over anyone, and that's the larger problem to solve.
This: "...to say nothing of the myriad victimless infractions which are often punished more harshly than murder and rape."
And this: "It's not a lack of law and order, but a lack of respect for the people who police claim to serve and protect."
And yeah, those shiny badges don't grant special rights. Most of them didn't get the memo, though.
sigh
Excellent insights here.
It is a good thing that your police goes immediately, but here in our country there is a theft, the thief runs away and the police comes after a couple of hours because the police here are also mixed and what Theft also happens, the policemen also get a share of it. This kind of corruption is happening here, so the people here are very worried about the police and they are also very worried about inflation.
Police do not go immediately. They have no legal obligation to protect anyone or arrive in a timely manner. It's just another reason people need to be armed. When seconds count, the police are minutes (if not hours) away.
Ok
When the popo have no duty to protect, they are simply here to force those not in the gang to pay and obey.
You are smart.
Riddle me this: IF the 5th amendment precludes me from being compelled to give testimony against myself, and I like to drive 'recklessly', then doesn't being forced to have a tag on the car violate that restriction on governmental power?