Two policemen executed for Brown/Garner

[Dirkadirkastan]

This is all an unfortunate but natural consequence of the superstition that protection services must be provided by government.

The superstition essentially goes like this: "People are dangerous and I do not trust them, therefore we need some kind of authority to keep such dangerous people in check." The obvious flaw in this sentiment is that this supposed "authority" is nothing more than other mere people, and so does not address the core issue. I refer to it as a superstition because of the emphasis on badges: when someone puts on a badge, suddenly they have extra rights no one else has and are deserving of reverence and praise, and once they take the badge off again, they're just ordinary, dangerous, unwashed mere people once again. (The only thing that makes this superstition hard to see is that it manifests itself in both the liberal and conservative ideologies in different ways.)

The key to understanding social issues is to stop viewing "government" or any "authority" as operating on a separate moral plane or having a different human nature than anyone else, and instead to simply look at the incentive structure of the proposed system. As government institutions consist of mere people, one should expect they are in fact as self-interested as anyone else.

It should be no surprise then that government courts have ruled that police officers have no legal obligation to protect anyone from anyone else, regardless of whatever hallowing mythology people like to conjure up about the nobility of police. Oh, but you do have the legal obligation to fund them. So there's that.

We've known for decades what the effect of authority has on people; the Stanford Prison Experiment was carried out in 1971. I'm not going to repeat the details here; suffice it to say that the results of an authoritarian paradigm are unproductive at best.

And why should one expect anything else? There's nothing about the aura of "authority" that prevents any crime. Gun advocates are aware of the argument: only good people will follow gun restrictions and bad people will disregard them. But that's true in any sphere. The fact that theft is "illegal" is only going to matter to people that don't have the inclination to steal in the first place, same with murder, fraud, etc. You're not exactly enhancing anyone's moral character this way.

Once you free yourself from the myth of authority, you can begin to analyze these police confrontations on an equal playing field; that is, you judge both the officer and the civilian according to the same standard. For example, it is my opinion that Michael Brown was likely the aggressor but Eric Garner was definitely a victim. Liu and Ramos were certainly victims, but I will not concede that the story is somehow more sad or the crime more serious simply because they were wearing badges. That idea is just propaganda perpetuated by a self-interested government. To quote Murray Rothbard:

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely — those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre.

Someone who attacks random cops is certainly not working toward a solution, and I condemn all acts of aggression. Members of a group are not responsible for the actions of others in the same group, and that applies to cops as well as anyone else. Yet it would still be imprudent to dismiss the problems endemic to the current system as merely a case of bad apples, or of people blaspheming the police for no good reason.

[MavzMan]

Originally Posted by Dirkadirkastan

To quote Murray Rothbard:
We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely — those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, ...

First off, I like the post and it's very well worded. Sorry, I'm not nearly as elloquent as you are, but ....

I'm not sure that I agree with the point being made by your quote of Rothbard. The analogy that comes to mind is airline instructions before the plane takes off. "In case of emergency, before helping the person next to you, put your own mask on."

I would argue that the most serious crime would actually be government corruption. With government corruption, it would be an anything goes scenario and then the whole purpose of protecting the people flies out the window or event worse, the people are actually terrorized by their own government. Thoughts?

Originally Posted by Dirkadirkastan

The superstition essentially goes like this: "People are dangerous and I do not trust them, therefore we need some kind of authority to keep such dangerous people in check." The obvious flaw in this sentiment is that this supposed "authority" is nothing more than other mere people, and so does not address the core issue. I refer to it as a superstition because of the emphasis on badges: when someone puts on a badge, suddenly they have extra rights no one else has and are deserving of reverence and praise, and once they take the badge off again, they're just ordinary, dangerous, unwashed mere people once again.

Again, I disagree with this mostly ... I don't neccessarily "praise" officers, but I do hold a certain amount of reverence for them and most definitely respect. Your equating them as ordinary, unwashed people like me doesn't really work. They go through a significant amount of training in order to put on that badge. If I walk into a police station and put on a badge, I don't instantly become their equal. Are they still human and make mistakes? Yes. But I think you are extremely minimizing what it takes not just in training, but also mentally to be prepared for daily confrontations that COULD result in people trying to kill you. I sit at a desk and am only in danger of either a paper cut or more likely a heart attack because I don't get enough excersize.