Vin Suprynowicz wants to ask, What do police departments really do?, but writes that his e-mail
sadly, confirms my suspicion that many of our countrymen these days are all too willing to embrace the notion that police shouldn't be restrained by such archaic notions as any "right to privacy," so long as they're pursuing "lawbreakers" in good faith.I went to grade school in the 1950s, and remember our school reader including a tale of Officer Brown -- I seem to recall him as a beaming, somewhat portly figure twirling an innocuous nightstick as he strolled down the sidewalk, tipping his hat to one and all -- helping little Suzy rescue her cat from a tree.
Does anyone still believe this is what policemen actually do?
Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.
The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.
Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.
If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?
Of course not. He's hurting no one.
Wouldn't you, though? Lots of people would. "You gotta obey the law" seems to have as much currency as "Well, he's the lesser of two evils," does, when it comes to politics. I've even read Objectivists arguing that all unjust laws should be observed and enforced and prosecuted to the fullest extent, in order to convince society at large that they should be repealed.
Horsefeathers.
Goddamn good thing horsefeathers exist, too, 'cause otherwise there'd not be too many appropriate words to use in replying to such arguments. Should John Peter Zenger have been convicted? Eh? How about Dred Scott? We still feel pretty good about that one? And let me remind you that that one came all the way from Olympus, from the United States Supreme Court itself.
Suprynowicz continues in today's column:
What the academic research demonstrates is that England had a perfectly adequate set of "laws" from the 13th century right up through 1800 ... and no police. None. It was a polite and pleasant and lawful land ... without any police.After the police were created, crime rates went up. Why? Because in order to keep the lower classes in line, police cause "crime," by defining as "crimes" things that were never "crimes" before. By lurking outside in the bushes at midnight, peeking in our windows and trying to catch us "having sex and babies, smoking dope that (we've) manufactured and playing with firearms."
And his closing comment is priceless.