The Libertarian Party turned 40 in 2011, and like many people that age, it underwent a mid-life crisis. Ron Paul’s “rEVOLution” and the Occupy Wall Street movement were, arguably, stimuli for the progressive left’s infiltration of the Libertarian Party and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist symposia and the large string of police brutality has galvanized it even further and it saddens me to witness it—the infiltration, not the police brutality. It troubles me to see members of a fringe movement that upholds protection of private property and safety even if one has to protect by killing, unquestioningly buy into the dishonesty that the media perpetuates, and those of an epidemic as divisive, iniquitous, and overall, serious as police brutality are of no exception.
The impetus for the latter culprit is the unrepentant and unconditional hatred for police many of my fellow anarchists espouse. Libertarians are aware that criminals are a threat to the functionality of a society, but they also consider cops to be criminals. Such a binary raises the Aristotelian question as to what separates the criminal from the common man? Where do a cop’s rights end, when he pledges to uphold statutes that are comprised of abduction for victimless crimes, or when he actually arrests someone for a victimless crime? Do they ever end? Certainly, privatization of all government services would include the police force, a squadron of workers who would be allegiant to natural law, rather than positive law. They would have the right to defend the property and safety of the person or personnel that hired them, and if necessary, shoot to kill if the assailant poses a fatal threat, which is self-defense at its most fundamental. I’m sure of this happening if the state is abolished and I’m convinced it will function if actualized; without a doubt, I wouldn’t be so sure if I hadn’t seen it enacted under state rule.
The positive law of the state overlooks one significance when defining the use of excessive force, and that is that it is excessive. It isn’t, it’s self-defense. If a man waves a gun at another, the victim is entitled to retaliate. Just as I believe that the authority of police is arbitrary and of no intrinsic value outside of intermediary agency that could otherwise be privatized, the definition of self-defense does not change when the man retaliating is wearing a badge and uniform. All that changes is my opinion of him.
Defining Some Antics With Semantics
The stream of police shootings of black people has caused nationwide hysteria of apocalyptic proportions—one would even say that the cracks that form when the earth trembles would serve as convenient symbolism for the division it has caused—but the use of the “excessive force” inhibits the public from discerning between self-defense and police brutality. This is the problem with blanket terms. We can’t tell who are the criminals and assume that all victims are martyrs and all cops who shoot them are as corrupt as the judicial system that acquits them and the bureaus that allow them paid leave.
The media also emphasizes frequently that the deceased party is “unarmed”, another form of sophistic terminology. To the layman’s ear, “unarmed” seems to translate to “defenseless”, which is untrue, as it merely translates to “weaponless”, and overall, irrelevant; an unarmed criminal—a person who has committed a crime and would be found guilty if they were to survive an arrest—is a vulnerable criminal, and will thus, be easy to reprehend. If the assailant is weakened, judicious reprehension can be carried out appropriately, rather than arbitrarily; by fighting to receive no punishment, the criminal will only exacerbate his punishment, and the conflict will escalate into a power struggle that will only end when Darwin selects the victor. Those who reprehend the criminal are in the right, so long as there is a victim, a victim, who most likely called the police in the first place.
Etymology is not always consistent with prescriptive definitions. The terms “statistics” and “statist”, for instance, have the same root word, but recognizing facts does not a bootlicker make.
Why Is The Victim Always Black?
Anarchists are no strangers to statistics. With the growing embrace of leftism by ancaps/voluntarists, has come an embrace of egalitarianism—the brand that focuses on equality of opportunity, rather than elimination of inequality—amidst a categorical political climate, which is why a considerable amount of libertarian sources disagree with #BlackLivesMatter and their grievances. Their argument is of the #AllLivesMatter persuasion, “Yes, blacks are killed by police, but more whites are killed by police,” which is factually true. According to the Washington Times, in 2015, 2,151 whites were killed by police, compared to 1,130 blacks. The typical libertarian would conclude that police brutality is an issue that concerns all races, or at least the two listed.
However, the counterargument can be made by the Black Lives Matter apologist that blacks are killed disproportionately, as they only account for >12% of the U.S. population, where whites account for >63%; why do they account for half as many deaths if they only make up a sliver of America?
To both parties, I inquire why the research ended there.
A study from January 22, 2013, that was originally an attempt to expose gun violence in America by comparing American cities to large cities in third-world nations, shot itself in the foot, as it were. It is exposed through these findings that the cities with the highest amounts of gun violence per capita, included Detroit, where the gun death rate is 39.5 per 100,000; Baltimore, where Freddie Grey was killed, which had a gun death rate of 29.7 per 100,000; and New Orleans, where the gun death rate is 67.2 per 100,000, which complements Baton Rouge, hometown of recent police victim, Alton Sterling, where 76.2% of homicides are committed by black males. All of these and a few other cities not listed, boast the highest black populations in America.
Conclusion
Police brutality is serious issue when it does happen. Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, voluntarists, and everyone else who strives for liberty must awaken themselves from the lies perpetuated and peddled by media, alternative or otherwise and as a suggestion, they should set aside their hatred for the pigs and be judicious as to who is a real criminal and discern between the corrupt cops and the cops who would list their previous work as a policeman on a résumé for private security in Ancapistan.