Gangsters in Blue

With the passing of the smoking ban, Virginia demonstrates that, when it comes to individual liberty, its ongoing urbanization renders it just another Mid-Atlantic nanny state like New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. I don’t need to rehash the libertarian arguments against smoking bans in private establishments. I will, however, note the following:

• Despite an email sent out by a minority of Republicans in the legislature, this ban passed with bipartisan support.
• Republicans are the worst advocates of libertarian policy imaginable. They’re all too eager to go along to get along. And if they do have some moderate libertarian positions, they usually shoot their consistency in the foot by being moral policemen to the max (see my thoughts on the Blackburn vs. Stoch race).
• We erroneously and self-righteously frame this issue in simplistic terms of “rights” and “freedom” and “liberty”, a language that nanny staters learned long ago to turn around on us. Nobody is against “freedom” or “liberty” or “rights”, so this approach does not capture the essence of the controversy. If this were about abstractions like “rights”, there are far more egregious government intrusions that would have been rejected long ago. No, we are against bans on peaceful behavior because they are enforced by men trained to hurt and kill us – period.

It’s time to stop pretending our self-important, philosophical civics lessons wrapped in political activism work. Our outrage at the state, heartfelt as it may be, is not nearly enough to constitute the necessary resistance, nor is the rhetoric it produces adequate to the task of appealing to our fellow man. We have to start showing people that this is not a game: passing superfluous and intrusive laws pits men trained in violence and suppression against peaceful people. Confront the nanny staters directly with the means they’ve chosen to promote their agendas and ask them why they want to threaten, hurt, and even kill us and our fellow human beings. The stakes are too high to treat this as a friendly debate about ideas.

I think that Obama’s recent statements about poor people clinging to guns and God are being blown out of proportion. Certainly there’s a sense in which oppressed people of any sort tend to fall back on tradition; firearms and religion are our traditions. But it’s not that I think Obama is, on the whole, correct; it’s just that he isn’t out of line with the elite opinion of his class: the politicians. It’s unfair to criticize him for speaking an opinion all his adversaries hold.

But it’s not unfair to criticize him for having a contemptible, elite opinion that looks down on popular sovereignty, and John Médaille does an excellent job. Though I’m not Catholic or a member of any organized religion, I think those paths to God are certainly valid - they’re not themselves good or bad (they are, however, human institutions which must be approached with the same discretion and self-knowledge that any important activity requires). And even if they weren’t, I’d still defend the freedom of people to follow them.

But he absolutely nails the gun issue:

As for guns, we cling to them for another reason, a reason that his little to do with the arguments about the second amendment, arguments which few of us really understand, least of all myself. No, we cling to them precisely because the know-it-alls tell us not to. We live in an age when “experts” give us no end of good advice on subjects that are none of their business, and when each new day brings new headlines about what we should or should not be doing. Be it cholesterol or sex, God or guns, children or politics, there are endless experts to tell us what we are doing wrong. These professional naggers really have our best interests at heart, and the more so the more removed they are from us.

…

The real reason we cling to guns is that they are ours. And even more, they were our fathers. Ownership of guns is something that distinguished the New World from the Old. In the decadent aristocracies of Europe, guns were largely for the landowners, and “poaching” was punishable by flogging or worse. In the New World, every frontiersman had a gun, and it was an essential part of feeding his family and declaring his liberty. We no longer need to feed our families by hunting, but we still need to assert our liberty, and especially our liberty from the army of experts who claim to know what is best for us.

I hope he’ll forgive the selective quote; the whole post is enlightened, but this was just such a great statement on an issue I hold dear. As for whether or not we’re “bitter”, come on: it’s not just the white rural poor.

You just disrespected yourself, your badge, and the Baltimore Police Department way more than any punk kid. Dude.

Did you catch the veiled death threat from the dude officer? And the way it ends is the best. “Is that camera on? If I find myself on - *click*”.

Hat tip to Mr. Balko.

UPDATE 1: Apparently, the cop has been suspended, but I’m sure he’ll be back on the force in no time once the review board finds that “official procedures were followed.” And listen to the police union guy:

Paul Blair, head of the police union, had not seen the video but cautioned that videos show only a slice of a story. He noted that it is impossible to know what happened before or after the camera was turned on.

I’d like to know, Mr. Blair: what could possibly have happened before the camera came on that would have excused such behavior on the part of the officer? No, really, your wildest fantasy - give me a scenario where it would have served the BPD to have that dude act like that. And this is great:

Clifford said the boy never made an official complaint to the Police Department and that Rivieri has no other citizen complaints in his file.

That’s the excuse I love from police departments. If you don’t make a complaint, it didn’t happen. You have to jump through their hoops after they physically and verbally assault you, just so they can have a chance to get their story straight before they dismiss you utterly. No, no - I think YouTube is far superior.

UPDATE 2: In the comments below, John alerts readers to another video of Rivieri out of control. Thanks, John!

I’ve had an interest in police culture and practices for a long time. I haven’t run into a huge amount of officers in my life, but I have seen some really good ones and some really bad ones. I’m just interested in what motivates them, I guess - it seems like most cops are bored most of the time.

And as I learn more, a trend towards belligerent behavior seems to emerge. It angers me for the obvious reasons, but the truly helpful and respectful cops stick out in my head and lead me to ask, “Why is this happening?” Many people have been collecting the evidence for this trend and asking the same question (Radley Balko’s blog is excellent in this area). I’ve heard a lot of answers: some blame the drug war, others blame the influx of military into law enforcement ranks, and still others blame it all on standard-issue government evilness. But I found another, more direct and provable answer in an article at PoliceLink.com entitled Street Survival Insights: Behavior Traits that get Cops Killed; Long Known, Still Ignored.

The long and short of it is that a study was done fifteen years ago and, while the conclusions were speculative and hard to prove, five traits of behavior likely to get cops killed were dreamed up arrived at. Of these five behavior traits, the very first three have directly to do with friendliness, openness, and generally acting like a human being among equals:

1. Friendly.

   This adjective was frequently used to describe the murdered officers, along with “well-liked,” “laid back,” and “easy going.” While a friendly demeanor “does much to promote a positive image for the officer and the department, overly friendly behavior at an inappropriate time” can backfire, the researchers warn…

2. Service-oriented.

   “Tends to perceive self as more public relations than law enforcement,” the researchers said of the prototypical slain officer. Of course service is part of your job. But on the street, your “customer” is not always right. To protect and serve the community, the researchers remind, “officers must realize that they need to protect themselves first” and not indulge a “misguided sense of service” that results in “placing prisoners’ comfort over their own personal safety.” In policing, your success—and your safety—often depend on your ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do.

3. Hesitant about using force.

   Victim officers tended “to use less force than other officers felt they would use in similar circumstances,” the researchers found. And they customarily “used force only as a last resort;” their peers said they themselves “would use force at an earlier point in similar circumstances.” Courts have clearly confirmed that it’s justifiable in situations you reasonably perceive as threatening to employ even pre-emptive force to stop a threat; you don’t have to wait until you are assaulted or injured. Yet some trainers are noticing that some officers today seem so hesitant about using force that it appears they are more afraid of being sued or thought overzealous than they are of being murdered!

If you’re wondering why the relationship between community and police has been eroding so consistently for so long, you need only read that article. Law enforcement professionals have been told for fifteen years that several of the core behaviors that comprise civil society are likely to get them killed. We should not be surprised that they are not friendly, respectful, genuine, or judicious. The attitudes that embolden officers to embrace militarization, treat the community like occupied territory, and abuse their privileges are the result of some vague conclusions of research conducted by the FBI - not exactly the paragons of community-level law enforcement.

But one of the sad answers to my question.

The feds are declaring war on Appalachia by designating 65 counties as constituting a “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area“. It has long been known that marijuana cultivation and sale in that area is big business, bringing in over $4 billion annually from top dollar east coast markets to one of America’s most impoverished regions. With a war on terror going on, targeting poor, rural people is a curious allocation of scarce funds.

Now, for the feds to summon this level of coordination among the alphabet soup of local, state, and federal law enforcement organizations, they must perceive a huge problem. Usually, these kinds of major drug economies revolve around violence: brutal drug cartels that paralyze communities with fear, leave a trail of bodies, and force helpless local communities to appeal for federal intervention. So is that the case?

No, the problem is that the trafficking is too peaceful:

In the official “Appalachia HIDTA FY 98 - Threat Abstract,” the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) states that Appalachia warrants a federal crackdown because “in this tri-state area financial development is limited, poverty is rampant, and jobs are few. Marijuana has become a substantial component of the local economy, surpassing even tobacco as the largest cash crop. This has contributed to a high level of community acceptance of marijuana production, distribution, and consumption. Many honest local merchants do not recognize signs of illegal drug enterprises and in effect help launder drug proceeds. In such an environment eradication and interdiction efforts are difficult, as is obtaining intelligence, indictments, or an unbiased jury.” In other words, people are poor, locals are not that concerned about residents who are doing this, and people are not informing on their friends and neighbors to the extent that the government desires.

The problem is too much community! Yet again, government targets organic human association, seeking to replace it with an occupation culture of snitches, arbitrary searches and seizures, and the impunity of bureaucratic carpetbagging. They will tear whole communities to shreds - all in the name of keeping people from getting high.

However, it sounds like these kinds of invasive enforcement programs have resulted in a citizen backlash in the past:

In Northern California, residents have turned out to oppose aggressive marijuana eradication, because of the negative community impact it has. Forming “Citizens Observation Groups,” locals have documented government helicopters violating federal laws on flying altitude; environmental regulations; endangered species protection; and kept track of illegal search and seizure operations including the number of children that have been terrified by the men with face paint and automatic guns. More importantly, by documenting police actions, they have been able to raise awareness within their own communities and present a united front to their local government. This united front eventually lead to county supervisors voting to reject funding for the program.

If there was ever a countereconomic battlefield worth fighting on, this is it. We left libertarians should keep an eye on this issue.

This is from Voltairine de Cleyre’s 1894 address, In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation. She is responding to Goldman’s maxim: “Ask for work; if they do not give you work, ask for bread; if they do not give you bread, then take bread.” What I love about her favorable yet cautious response to that phrase is the way she penetrates the illusory fervor of the mob mentality, extracting instead the need for reflection and understanding.

You are told you have the power because you have the numbers. Never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in numbers. One good, level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten excited, unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City. Do you know I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give you an illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain capitalist, and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of gold from the muscle of man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his workmen, (not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brickbats, red hot pokers, anti other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects, went up to his house for the purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly to do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone, one man, met them on the steps of his porch, and for two mortal hoers, by threats, promised, cajoleries, held those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they went away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his head. Now that was power! And you can’t help but admire it, no matter if it was your enemy who displayed it; and you must admit that so long as numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity, power does not reside in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving advice, I would not say, “take bread”, but take counsel with yourselves flow to get the power to take bread.

There is no doubt but that power is latently in you; there is little doubt it can be developed; there is no doubt the authorities know this, and fear it, and are ready to exert as much force as is necessary to repress any signs of its development. And this is the explanation of EMMA GOLMANN’S imprisonment. The authorities do not fear you as you are, they only fear what you may become. The dangerous thing was “the voice crying in the wilderness” foretelling the power which was to come after it. You should have seen how they feared it in Phila. They got out a whole platoon of police and detectives, and executed a military maneuver to catch the little woman who had been running around under their noses for three days. And when she walked up to them, why then, they surrounded and captured her, and guarded the city hall where they kept her over night, and put a detective in the next cell to make notes. Why so much fear? Did they shrink from the stab of the dressmakers needle? Or did they dread some stronger weapon?

Ah! — the accusation before the New York Pontius Pilate was: “she stirreth up the people”. And Pilate sentenced her to the full limit of the law, because, he said, “you are more than ordinarily intelligent”. Why is intelligence dealt thus hardly with? Because it is the beginning of power. Strive, then, for power.

In this era of ever expanding access to information, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the people down by force. This problem has been solved largely by inventing myriad means of distraction. Not only does this quell substantially the corrective dynamics that moderate outward inequality and subjugation, it also prevents the understanding of the self that is so crucial to unlocking the seat of true power.

I don’t really care whether you believe in God or not. What I care about is the human spirit, for that is the only gateway to our best nature. And that, my friends, is the only divinity we’ll ever be able to count on in any measure, regardless of the exact character of its source (which we insult one another by arguing over, as if we have the words to express the subtlety of these immensely personal experiences).

The more I study the task of liberation, the more clearly and urgently I perceive it as a struggle of self against the authoritarian within far more than against the authoritarian without. The latter’s position is far less precarious if they have set the terms by which you judge your own potential - if they have trained you, in other words, to oppress yourself. And similarly, I believe that the overthrow of the former will ultimately be more rewarding to the individual and, by extension, society.

As an end note, let me remind the reader that I wrote extensively about the crossover of spirituality and individualism in my essay, History as the Evolution of Identity.

Recently I have discovered a renewed interest in left libertarian and anarchist concepts of community solidarity. My interests lie in finding ways to build community relationships and institutions that devolve important decisions to the interpersonal, neighborly level - rather than counting on government bureaucrats and politicians to fix all our problems. I believe that this reliance on an outside force to manage us - a top-down, progressive-era holdover - has damaged what was once a bottom-up, dynamic consensus. This breakdown in neighborliness is partially responsible for many of our present social ills, and reflects the dark side of the centralized, managerial State that so many Americans seem to want.

Inviting cops into our neighborhoods should be a last resort, because law enforcement professionals view everybody - not just the elements you find undesirable - as a potential criminal. They write traffic tickets; they harass citizens; they conduct reckless raids against innocent citizens; the list just goes on. Residents should be very careful when inviting outsiders - such as police officers - to make decisions on how the neighborhood’s business should be conducted. Ideally, cops should be called only as an alternative to a neighborhood resident employing force himself in self-defense, and only in reaction to a particular threat.

Maybe there was once a time when police officers lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, knew everybody by name and whose kid was whose, and exercised a form of reasonable discretion (even if that discretion was poisoned by racism, classism, etc.). Maybe they policed on the basis of what was best for the community rather than maximizing their arrest statistics to secure federal funding. Those times, however, are no more: police are intervening in neighborhoods more and more, with less and less of a sense of statutory limitation, and a growing sense of entitlement to dictate to people the most mundane details of their lives. This dependence on such authoritarian elements is surely brought about by the increasing atomization and isolation of residents, who cannot look to the community to realize their values. When neighbors are strangers, there isn’t even the opportunity to establish an authentic sense of shared interests or common concerns, let alone the true security situation.

It occurs to me while reviewing the endless electronic reflection on the VT incident that the gun control crowd and their sympathizers don’t offer any rational, realistic arguments against allowing students to carry on campus. I have yet to see one person actually volunteer a concrete reason why it should be disallowed. What we get instead are appeals to emotion based on perceived feelings of vulnerability.

From an otherwise decent article by Lila Rajiva:

However much we may support the second amendment, do we really want students packing heat in their book bags, as filled with alcohol, drugs and partying as most campuses are today?

From a VT administrator:

The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again.

From a journalist:

Moreover, guns on campuses could turn smaller confrontations into major incidents. As drinking is a large part of university social life, a common drunken brawl could escalate into a deadly duel if firearms were present.

Many students don’t get to hand-pick their roommates in residence; imagine the discomfort of sharing a small room with a stranger who keeps a gun under his or her pillow.

If there are guns in residence and around campus, violence could spread beyond the university confines and into bars and other nearby places.

What do all of these opinions have in common? Simple: they are examples of disarming people on the grounds of vague fears. We just don’t like the idea of students carrying firearms. Students are unpredictable and potentially irresponsible, and that scares us, so let’s take that idea off the table. Let’s ignore the fact that guns are just as deadly to the bad guys as the good guys, and that shooting a bad guy is one very straightforward and undeniable approach to solving the problem.