A Deeper Problem With Police

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.