You write: “But as recently pointed out by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his keynote speeches at TREXPO West, we actually live in the most criminally violent period in American history. The murder rate is down, not because Americans have stopped trying to kill each other but because emergency medicine has advanced ….” This is not true. If you check the FBI UCR, since 1992, violent crime rates per 100,000 population have fallen every single year except for small upticks in 2005 and 2006. (The increase those two years never brought the rate above where it was in 2003.) Absolute numbers of violent crimes committed decreased every year except for 2001, 2005, and 2006, even as population increased. The figures include not only murder and non-negligent homicide, but also attempted murder, all forms of aggravated assault, and forcible rape, so advances in ER procedures and technology would make no difference at all. Why are you repeating a claim that could have easily been proven false by spending a couple minutes checking easily-read tables on the FBI’s website?

GT 2008-06-23 (trigger warning), in which a grand jury declares that the Stark Count Ohio Sheriff’s Office did nothing wrong when a gang of several male and female deputies held Hope Steffey down in a jail cell, forcibly removed her clothes over her screams of protest while wrenching her arms behind her back, and then left her completely naked in a freezing jail cell in public view for six hours. (Cf. also GT 2008-02-05: the original story (trigger warning) and follow-ups on the case, including five more women who came forward with complaints about the use of retaliatory, humiliating, unnecessary strip-searches in the Stark County jail.) Steffey is pursuing a lawsuit in federal court.

GT 2008-06-26: State ownership of the means of reproduction (#2) in which I comment on the AMA’s recently adopted resolution calling for “model legislation” to prohibit women from choosing a midwife-assisted home birth.

Thomas,

You write: “This seems like blaming the chickens for the fox’s raid on the chicken coop.”

I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t blame rank-and-file workers for the way the NLRB functions. I blame the politicos, the “Progressive” bosses, and the conservative union bosses who pushed to create the system. (Radical unions, like the I.W.W., rightly opposed the system as an effort to promote conservative unionism and to capture and domesticate unions through a combination of government patronage and government regulation.)

You write: “Rightly administered and empowered, NLRB ought to be a counterweight to moneyed and propertied interests that have no interest in worker’s rights.”

Two things.

First, I have no confidence in anyone’s ability to craft a regulatory agency that successfully resists being substantially captured by the interests that it regulates. I can’t think of any example in the history of American regulatory bodies where this has been pulled off for any length of time, and I don’t think it should be particularly surprising that, since political entities respond to political incentives, they will tend to be administered in a way that systematically benefits the wealthiest and most politically-connected people.

Second, even if the NLRB were ideally administered, the system is designed from the ground up as a means of constraining union demands and restricting unions to the most conservative and least effectual methods. (Thus, the Taft-Hartley bans on secondary strikes, secondary boycotts, union hiring halls, wildcat strikes, etc. etc. etc.; thus the emphasis on a heavily regulated process of collective bargaining, controlled by very elaborate legal requirements that are often next to impossible for rank-and-file workers to understand, in place of extremely effective and very simple to understand tactics, like work-to-rule and other forms of direct action in the workplace.)

You write: “At least for legal representation, that — in theory — is already the case, isn’t it?”

Well, not entirely — you can choose one lawyer rather than another, as long as you can afford their fees, but you can’t choose anyone as your advocate except those who have been officially approved for membership in the government-created and government-regulated lawyer’s guild. But lawyers weren’t the “experts” I was referring to; I was referring to the fact that the government forces people to take legal disputes before specific judges (with jurisdiction fixed by the issue in dispute and by accidents of geography), and excludes other no-less qualified and impartial experts from taking up the dispute simply because the privileged judge has a particular political status and the other would-be arbitrator doesn’t. If we are really talking about a form of specialized expertise here, like that of the watchmaker or of the doctor, then anyone should be able to take the case, not just a judge deemed to have that topic and that location within his bailiwick by the government.

You write: “I don’t see how to bid out for police functions, though, without that turning into yet another part of society baldly favoring the rich and privileged over the poor and disenfranchised.”

Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that already how government policing works?

Tax funding doesn’t prevent government cops from treating poor people pretty shitty, or from acting as an instrument of class power. In fact, the fact that poor neighborhoods have no real control over who provides policing in their neighborhoods, and no way of cutting off their portion of the funding for neglectful or abusive police forces, is part and parcel of the problem.

Anyway, I’m not sure what you mean by “bid out for police functions.” If you mean the government outsourcing policing to private security corporations (Wackenhut, Blackwater, whatever), I’m not for that, and I don’t consider it an example of free market self-defense. I think that all government involvement in policing (whether in-sourced or out-sourced) should be abolished.

If you mean individual people choosing to cover the costs of policing, and having a choice about who, if anyone, they get police services from, then I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the result will be (even more) plutocratic policing. It’s true that, if all policing were based on free association and not on government monopoly, there might well be some policing that is done by private goon squads for hire, and those might have an incentive to favor the rich over the poor. But (1) again, I’m not convinced that they’d have more of an incentive to do so than government cops already have; and (2) there are lots of other ways of using free association to get self-defense and neighborhood defense done. For example, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords organized historically oppressed people to arm themselves, and to patrol and defend their own neighborhoods (including defending them from the predation of abusive white cops). In any case, where there are many, competing and countervailing associations that serve defensive functions, if one association becomes especially neglectful, or, worse, predatory, against marginalized people, other associations can move in to compete, or new associations can be formed, to check the first. But when policing is monopolized by a single institution, there is no real reason for them to try to please anybody outside of their firmest base of support (in the case of political monopolies, that means the ruling class–as is confirmed by how police departments already operate today). If they don’t please marginalized people, why would they care? They stay paid anyway, and there’s no countervailing force to hold them to account for their abusiveness.

My own view is that the need for any form of professional policing at all would be dramatically less in a free society than it is in the present day. (For example, in a free society there would be no drug laws, vice laws, or border laws, and thus no narcs, no vice cops, and no La Migra. There would also be much less entrenched urban poverty, because — for reasons I discuss in the Freeman article — ghettoized urban poverty as we know it is largely a function of interlocking government interventions against poor people’s survival strategies and attemtps to flourish through creative hustling; hence much less economically motivated crime, and also much less of certain kinds of antisocial behavior. So, again, this is, to a great extent, a problem that vanishes along with the needless government laws and endless government “wars” on consensual behavior, which I already favor abolishing. But, even if the demand for specialized policing were to remain just as high as it is today, I still think that it is far, far better to have a situation in which people are free to withdraw their support from abusive agencies, and where there are many acknowledged experts to keep each other in check, than a situation in which people are forced to pay for their own abuse, and in which cops are never held to account for wrongdoing by any means other than “handling it internally” and issuing the occasional “Oops, our bad”.

Micha:

I have never heard it claimed that the terms “hard-working” and “law-abiding” are Southern strategy code words,

They are. They’re especially closely associated with Nixon- and Reagan-era efforts to pull in working-class, often unionized white men (“hardhats,” “Reagan Democrats,” et al.) for the Southern Strategists’ racially-charged anti-welfare and Law-n-Order kicks.

Try thinking about it in reverse, if that helps. “Hard-working” and “law-abiding” are deliberate contrast terms for “lazy,” “shiftless,” and “criminal.” These terms were all deployed with pretty clear racial dimensions during the political debates in question.

(Personally, I’m all for an anti-welfare kick; but the Law-n-Order kick has been one of the single most politically toxic positions in mainstream American politics for the past several decades. And in either case the deliberate use of racial resentments for political ends is a nasty business.)

Norm,

I’m sure that there are some drug cartels paying off cops somewhere; that’s what underground business operations tend to do. But as far as the topic of discussion goes — that is, the increasing aggressiveness and militarization of local police forces — the really payoffs here are coming from none other than the United States federal government, which has spent the past few decades as the prime sponsor, trainer, and supplier for paramilitary SWAT squads, “elite” task forces, and local patrol cops, through the mechanism of tax-funded federal grants, special training seminars and collaboration initiatives with federal law enforcement agencies, surplus equipment sales, etc. And while counter-terrorism and other so-called “Homeland Security” projects are now a driving factor in this process, the chief driving factor, over the past 30-40 years, has been the War on Drugs itself. If you want an explanation of why small-town police are increasingly trained to be belligerent, have the equipment and the desire to conduct paramilitary SWAT raids at the drop of a hat, are taking on larger and more powerful assault weapons just for ordinary patrols, and generally act like a case study of collective roid rage, it’s precisely because the Federalis have been juicing them for the past 30-40 years in order to use them as foot soldiers in the enforcement of federal drug policy.

GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in Uniform #3: Six women have come forward in the past four months about being subjected to unnecessary and humiliating strip searches at the hands of the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department. The most recent, Elizabeth was coerced into removing her clothes even though she never said she was suicidal, and left locked in her cell, naked, for eight hours. She’s now afraid to give her last name or show her face in press interviews, because she’s afraid of retaliation against herself or her family for speaking out.

Sheriff Tim Swanson says it was all done By The Book, which is apparently supposed to mean that it was O.K. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Stark County sheriff’s deputies are repeatedly using strip searches as a form of retaliation, to control and punish women they find uppity, unruly, or otherwise troublesome, under color of the law, and then, to crown all, to insult their victims by saying they did it all For Her Own Good.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that part of the reason Mumia Abu Jamal personally got so much attention has to do with simple organizational dynamics.

Mumia was a Black Panther and then a well-known activist and radical journalist in Philadelphia. He was a member of a number of groups, and in contact with a number of other groups, which (out of necessity) already had well-developed mutual aid and support networks for imprisoned members. That gave him a number of pre-existing and pre-organized advocates, and, not coincidentally, he also got a good lawyer (Leonard Weinglass) with a history of making hay out of politically-charged court cases. All that, combined with his own gifts as a writer and a speaker, and his ongoing stream of writing and speaking from death row, kept his case on the radar long enough for it to be picked up and talked up at length by high-profile supporters like Rage Against the Machine. (Mumia’s history as a Black Panther also helped him out a lot here, since the anarchist revival in the late 1990s brought a lot of sympathetic attention to the Panthers and other radical New Left groups.)

As far as I know, Cory Maye had no real pre-existing support network other than his family, until Balko started writing about the case. Given the situation, frankly, the amount that Radley Balko has been able to accomplish single-handedly on this case, without any significant pre-existing network behind Cory Maye, is inspiring and nothing short of heroic.

This may not entirely explain why Mumia in particular got so much more attention than even other Leftist “political prisoners” in similar circumstances (e.g. Jamil Al-Amin, or Leonard Peltier). I expect that part of it is just that these cases come and go in popularity, and Mumia’s came in at a time when the radical and anarchist Left had (for other reasons) was making a momentary and unusual flash appearance in pop culture. Before Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, Leonard Peltier’s case had been The Big Thing, but the people supporting him didn’t have much media presence. After Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, other cases became The Big Thing in leftist activist circles, but by then the post-9/11 regimentation of popular culture was going on, and things in the media were settling back down to the old permanent war-footing pattern, which required erasing the radical Left.

As far as the “murkiness” of the case goes, personally, I’ve never made any serious attempt to find out whether or not Mumia Abu Jamal shot that cop. Reason being that I don’t care. I’m not Mumia’s priest and I’m not his lawyer either, so my only concerns in this case are (1) that the State shouldn’t murder him in retaliation, no matter what he may or may not have done; and (2) that if he did shoot a cop in an attempt to defend his brother from getting arrested, he was probably justified in doing so. Of course, that’s an argument that you can’t make in court these days, so understandably, but unfortunately, most of the people lined up behind him exhaust a lot of time and energy on arguments that are really, morally and politically speaking, irrelevant.

Radfem,

I think the sad fact is that it’s never going to come up in the Presidential campaign, or in any other electoral campaign, because there’s no real disagreement within the ruling class over the issue of police brutality; both of them believe that the hirelings of the (white, male) State should be given every possible benefit of the doubt, and some impossible benefits of the doubt besides, in their use of violence to “control the situation” in dealing with people who are “suspect” in the eyes of the (white, male) State. Meanwhile their victims, especially people of color, “belligerent” women, etc., should be automatically presumed to be either liars or crazy if they complain about their treatment at the hands of police. Nearly all of the leadership in both of the major parties believe in this because it’s in their interest to believe it; they both want control of the State apparatus, and when they have that apparatus in their hands, they want it to be an effective weapon, which requires a brutal and unchecked police force. Besides which, anyone who exhibited enough humanity to see through the politics, and dared to suggest anything different would be promptly crucified by the Fraternal Order of Police and the howling sado-fascist bully brigade that gets their back in every major media outlet. The only real constituency for reform on this issue are a handful of radical political activists who have made this a pet issue, and a vast run of ordinary people who have been themselves threatened or hurt by police violence–and neither of these groups have or are likely to have any real power in partisan politicking anytime soon. And since there is no real difference within the ruling class on the issue, there’s no real wedge for driving it into the stage-managed political debate.

It’s for precisely this reason that I think any attempt at healing the survivors and defending ourselves from police violence has to come through fundamentally different means–means which disrupt, or simply bypass, that stage-managed political debate in favor of much more direct action. For example, supporting your neighborhood CopWatch.

GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2) in which David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, is acquitted on all charges, by a jury of eleven men and one woman. Not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence–but rather because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club.

Jeremy,

I’d like to suggest that the chief reason libertarians and anarchists spend more time assailing government than they spend assailing “mere” crime isn’t so much that the former is institutionalized while the latter isn’t. There are plenty of examples of “mere” crime that’s institutionalized — the Mafia, for starters — that libertarians and anarchists also don’t spend much time fulminating.

What I think is more likely is that libertarians and anarchists spend a lot of time and rhetorical energy on government because over and over again we see that the violence of the State apparatus, no matter how intense and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless its victims, is ideologically mystified, morally excused, and either widely treated as legitimate or else simply rendered invisible, whereas most “mere” crime is not. It doesn’t take a lot of rhetorical energy to convince most people that the Mafia is a band of thugs; most everybody knows that being a band of thugs is their business. Most people don’t know, or don’t consistently realize, that being a band of thugs is the government’s business. Hence the effort to demystify, delegitimize, and get people to come down and look at the actions of governors and their hirelings the way they would look at similar conduct by someone without a badge or a pompous title on letterhead.

Note that when libertarians have been especially concerned with exposing and condemning some form of systemic violence carried out mostly outside of the formal State apparatus — for example the “private” violence of race slavery, or violence against women, or adult domination of children — it is more or less always a parallel system of violence which is, like the State, mystified as being something other than violence, culturally excused, and either explicitly socially accepted or else kept silent and made invisible. Even when (as in the case of, for example, violence against women) there may be various kinds of institutional support or institutional denialism for the violence, but the paradigmatic locus of the violence is in informal actions by one ordinary person against another, carried out in private settings.

I should note that the mystification of State violence also seems to play an important role in arguments that try to undermine the ideal of a consensual society by appealing to the ignorance, folly, or vice of mortal creatures. Of course we are all prone to ignorance, folly, or vice in this vale of tears. But that is precisely the reason to oppose all forms of coercive power. Every government is run by those same imperfect, sinful people that it supposedly exists to straighten out, and certainly the would-be bellowing blowhard lords of the world are no more immune to pride, cruelty, or sharp dealing than ordinary business-people, workers, etc. Quite the opposite. If it’s utopian to imagine perfecting human nature, then certainly you have every reason to centrally concern yourself with institutions, practices, projects, traditions, etc. which take all the ignorance, folly, and vice of those who come out on top of the power-struggle, and then magnify it, concentrate it, regularize it, and insulate it from both criticism and resistance.

That libertarians are simply more consistent in their advocacy of non-agression is no mind-boggingly unique contribution to political discourse; it’s actually just a preference

I don’t know what you mean by this. Clearly one can have a preference for consistency — I’d hope everyone does — but is the phrase “just a preference” supposed to indicate that preferring consistent application of moral principles over inconsistent application of moral principles isn’t backed by some prior logical and/or moral obligation? That it’s just a matter of taste, like preferring milk over lemon in your tea? If so, why do you believe that? If not, then what work is the word “just” doing here?

And I agree with you that, as distasteful as it may be to us, government is comprised of genuine traditions, norms, and social identity.

Again, I’m confused by what you mean here. Are there libertarians or anarchists who deny that government is comprised of genuine traditions, norms, and social identity? (What then do they believe it is comprised of? Idiosyncratic rather than traditional practice?)

The point of anarchistic critique is not that government somehow exists separately from traditions, norms, and social identity, but rather that some traditions, norms, and ways of understanding your social identity are foolish, vicious, or otherwise objectionable, and in particular that the the statist elements of those traditions, norms, and social identity are in need of critique, reform, or revolutionary transformation.

One realization I’ve come to is that I don’t have a problem with force being exerted by society, so long as it is society, and not a particular class of society, executing the force.

And again, I’m confused by what you mean. Force is never exerted “by society.” It is exerted by individual people who live in a society, and, when it’s coordinated, it is always coordinated by an organized faction within that society (whether spontaneously or deliberately ordered), not by the “society” as a whole. This is no less true of “citizen militias” than it is true of professionalized police or government armies. (Barring universal conscription, there will always be a fair number of people who decline to participate. And there will always be a fair number of people — young children, frail people, paralyzed people, etc. — who are incapable of participating. Aside from any limitations through cultural or institutional prejudice, the nature of the practice necessarily limits participation.)

As far as I can see, the only important question here is, not who is or is not exercising the force, but rather how it is being exercised: whether it is being exerted prudently or destructively, and, when it is exerted, whether it is being exerted to vindicate just claims or to violate and suppress just claims. Insofar as there’s a question of “who” involved, it’s only a question of which factions, and which forms of organization, are the most likely to abstain from destructive or aggressive uses of force, and most likely to pursue wise and righteous uses of force. I think the superiority of citizen militias here over unaccountable paramilitary cops or imperial standing armies is obvious, but the reasons for that superiority have little if anything to do with some mythic direction of force by the General Will. It just has to do with what we, each of us individually, in our ordinary lives, are prone to do under different circumstances, when we are dependent on others for our safety, or when we have unaccountable power over others, or when we are able to defend ourselves, or when we are working cooperatively with our neighbors, etc. etc. etc.

John,

The most unfortunate thing about “anarchism” may be the name, which may lead one to believe anarchists are against all gov’t, when really (as I understand it) they are perfectly willing to cooperate with their neighbors for the common good, a good that must inevitably, at times, impinge upon their personal good.

But, John, the reason that anarchists call themselves anarchists is that they are against all government–as they understand government. If you want to introduce your own definition of the word “government,” which includes absolutely any arrangement for cooperation between individual people, no matter how informal, consensual, non-territorial, non-monopolistic, and accountable to external constraints of justice, then you’re free to use the word “government” that way, but your definition of the term (which I think is much further from the common use of the term than anarchists’ definition) would seem to be of little help either in understanding why anarchists call themselves what they call themselves, or in advising them on what they ought to call themselves to maximize clarity.

What they are not willing to do, and what no man [sic] should be willing to do, is to deprive the many in favor of the few,

I don’t see what numbers have to do with it. Of course it’s terrible when the many are forcibly deprived in favor of the few, and this is what almost always happens under the auspices of government (even so-called majoritarian government), where the governing class is always an elite minority parasitic upon the productive labor of the governed. But is it any less terrible when the minority, or an individual person, are forcibly deprived in favor of the majority, which has certainly also happened over and over again in history? (Cf. Socrates, Jesus, the Christian martyrs, Catholics in Reformation England, Protestants in Counter-Reformation Spain and France, Jews and Muslims and Romani all across Europe…) The only reason I can see why “the many” would, as a group, be entitled to demand that they will not be beaten or robbed or swindled by an elite few is because each of them, naked and alone with nothing other than her humanity, is just as entitled to demand that she will be beaten or robbed or swindled by anybody else, whether they are few or many. That’s rights, as I see it, and everybody’s got them whether or not they have a large enough posse.