Police Forces and Courts of Law ...

Aaron:

"...debate itself is often needlessly devisive of people who should be on the same side. I hope we live to see a time when such discussions are relevant."

True.

However, I have come to the conclusion in recent years that the difference between the minarchist state and anarchism is not simply a matter of degree but a fundamental disagreement about capitalism itself.

But, yes, great be the day when this argument has imminent ramifications.

Ross

Post 41

Friday, November 18, 2005 - 4:53pm

"No - it is assuming this isn't an upstart organization and that prior agreements to arbitration of disputes have been made..."

Same thing, Robert, upstart or not. I don't like your solution, you don't like mine (same as declaring it void), so what are we going to do about it? Blank out.

Ross

Post 42

Friday, November 18, 2005 - 5:25pm

Then the solution is to grasp that the issue is a belief one, not a fact one - and those who advocate violence over a belief should get what they deserve - oblivion

Post 43

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 2:19pm

     I thought that I'd point out something I consider interesting.

     Re 'competing govts', we really do already have that situation (and, it's been existing throughout history). The situation is called 'countries' that have their own govts. How close to 'competing govts' can one get?

     Most of the arguments re 'limited govt' vs 'anarchy' seem to be oriented to a localized-community (whether village, town, city, etc) idea, as if all that's worth discussing is police rather than armies (indeed, too many arguers seem to confuse the two); in themselves the arguments seem to be a bit myopic in never suggesting what the U.N. ought to do re its own near-myriad groups.

     Indeed, originally, for America, the 'States' were themselves mutual competitors for who applied what set of 'rules for using force' in which land-areas...until they accepted sending Ambassadors/'Representatives' to debate about a unifying alliance under a self-binding (and limiting) Constitution. Even before that, the States had little prob in agreeing to land-boundaries re 'authority.'

     Just 'food-for-thought'.

LLAP
J:D

Post 44

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 - 5:41am

If government police forces were effective, it might be an argument in their favor, but they are not. In fact, government police forces are as efficient at protection as Soviet collective farms were at agriculture -- and for the same metaphysical reasons, which we here all understand.

I have three Criminal Justice classes this term: Intro, Investigations, and Constitutional Law. Last term I had Ethics and then decided to make this a major so that my wife and I can get licensed as a private agency. She has two associate degrees, one in mathematics, the other in computer science, and she is enrolled in her third, Computer Forensics. (She is also Microsoft Certified now and this curriculum includes Cisco certification as part of the process.) Before this, I earned certificates in Computer Crime Investigation and Frontline Supervision from the New Mexico State Law Enforcement Academy when we lived in Albuquerque (2002-2003) and I was working for Akal Security. That was just a part-time job at first, but I have a libertarian's predisposition to private security and I did well at this, going from rock concerts to uniformed patrols to dispatcher. When I complete this program, I will transfer to a four-year university and complete a bachelor's in criminal justice, one of the usual requirements of most state licensing laws. (From state to state, most require some mix of a 4-year degree, so-many years of police experience, etc.) I am currently employed as a patroller on campus.

Earlier, I cited facts from my Ethics class about the low rate of success in clearing crimes and obtaining convictions. This week, we got more bad news in Investigations. Robberies have about a 25% clearance rate and Burglaries about 14%. Then our instructor told us how they "cleared" cases in Flint. Clearing a case is not the same thing as a conviction, of course. If they arrested a guy in the 500 Block of Main Street, all the recent, unsolved cases were attributed to him. If he had a car, any case with a similar M.O. anywhere in the city was also cleared. That brought the number up to the 15% national average, give or take.

Last year, we learned that detective work accounts for about the same 15% clearance for serious crimes. Most crimes are solved when witnesses and informants tell the police what they know. The rest are solved when the police -- by virtue of patrols -- know the perpetrators and finally catch him red-handed. Murders are easy to solve because 85% of victims knew their assailants.

Robberies and Burglaries are generally unsolved for several reasons. First of all, male burglars victimize their own neighbors, so the takes are small, and the victims are unimportant. (Female burglars are more compassionate and do not steal from their neighbors: they go outside.) On the other hand bank robberies have an 85% clearance rate because they are federal and the victims are important.

Now, realize, that this is in a context of socialized, tax-based, constitutionally limited, democratically controlled, monopolistic policing. In other words, this is the very system that some Objectivists claim would work better than applying capitalism to the problems of personal and societal security.

Post 45

Wednesday, March 15, 2006 - 1:39pm

Michael, how much of the current inefficiency is due to the fact that so much time and effort is being spent on drug enforcement and the various ripple effects that has on everything else by draining resources, increasing corruption, and lowering morale?

Post 46

Monday, March 20, 2006 - 7:09am

Michael, how much of the current inefficiency is due to the fact that so much time and effort is being spent on drug enforcement and the various ripple effects that has on everything else by draining resources, increasing corruption, and lowering morale?

Yes, Kurt, that is very astute. In a rational society, the police would be concerned only with protecting your rights. So, these inefficiencies might arguably disappear.

The historical record begs some attention, however, Investigations into corruption become headlines, go away, and reappear. Nothing solves the problem and this goes back over 100 years to the first commissions in New York City.

"The New York City PD has been the target of investigation by the largest number of commissions; so often, it almost seems like a 20-year cycle, for example:
1894 Lexow Commission Tammany Hall machine politics
1913 Curran Commission gambling, prostitution corruption
1932 Seabury Commission alcohol corruption
1949 Brooklyn Grand Jury gambling payoffs
1972 Knapp Commission drug corruption (Serpico)
1993 Mollen Commission drug corruption (Buddy Boys)
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/205/205lect04.htm"
from O'Connor's CJ classes at North Carolina Weslyan, which I regard as highly reliable.

Again, as you note, these victimless crimes undermine police morale and effectiveness. I point out also that London's Metropolitan Police faced the same challenges with fewer embarrassments. Part of that is that the "bobbies" were civil service while NYPD was a patronage job. The differences might be only those between socialisms. Would you rather live in the USSR, Nazi Germany, or Sweden? ... or Galt's Gulch?...

I took Police Ethics last Fall and during Katrina, our instructor put off showing us a video on how corruption in New Orleans had been cleaned up in the late 1990s. Apparently, there were still some problems...

Will the police of Objectutopia be paid to actually solve crimes? If so, how do we audit that? Who pays for it? If this is a government function then, do we not all deserve the same protection? If a businessman is leaving the shop with a large amount of cash on his way to the bank, can he call for a cop to escort? If he can, can my grandmother get one to go shopping with her? If the police cannot prevent crimes, then they are forced perpetually into playing catch-up. They are in a metaphysical void attempting to change the past.

Aristotle pointed out that tradition is stronger than law. I believe that this reflects Ayn Rand's assertion that a philosophical revolution must precede any political reforms.

Power corrupts and the police have the power over life and death. One of the reaons that police education is what it is today is to "arm" police with "weapons" like ethics so that they can think through a range of problems before they arise. That said, there is a world of difference between those of us in the academic criminal justice program and those who are accepted into the police academy. The people in the academy are not bothered by questions of philosophy because they wear all the answers they need on their hips.

While we are waiting for that new and better world, I recommend that if you need protection for your property that you follow market guidelines, rather than political alternatives. The market works.

Post 47

Saturday, March 25, 2006 - 9:06am

THE PRIVATIZATION OF POLICING: TWO VIEWS by Brian Forst and Peter K. Manning, Georgetown University Press, 1999.

Neither Forst nor Manning favors the complete privatization of police forces. Both Forst and Manning argue for continuing public police forces. Forst is somewhat more open to the opportunities that privatization of some police-like services bring to cities struggling to keep their budgets within their tax revenues. Forst is also cognizant of the some of the superiorities of market-based policies over social-contract models. On the other hand, Manning is generally antithetical to overall privatization and argues strongly against its dangers.

That said, both authors marshall broad and deep arrays of facts and arguments in favor of privatization of at least some -- if not all -- police services. (School crossing guards, construction zone traffic control, and towing illegally parked vehicles are three jobs that have often been contracted out or privatized entirely -- and so often in the last 10 or 15 years that their privatization is now "traditional.") From my point of view, as an Objectivist, Manning's arguments against privatization are weak, watery, and vague. Both authors recogize the problems inherent and indemic to public police. Finally, although both authors believe that these can be solved, neither has such a solution.

Post 48

Saturday, March 25, 2006 - 9:14am

If it's any consolation I think my thinking is more in line with Forst from your description. I'm not opposed to police like orginizations occuring in the private sector. I just still think a central regulatory body would be essential in the case of competing police(like) forces maybe something like a guild system with governing rules and disciplinary procedures.

Just my view and I'm ready to get trounced again.

---Landon

Post 49

Saturday, March 25, 2006 - 12:11pm

I just still think a central regulatory body would be essential in the case of competing police(like) forces maybe something like a guild system with governing rules and disciplinary procedures.

Well, Aristotle was not the last to point out that tradition is stronger than law. We do have many such umbrella organizations. I just looked at the Career Opportunities section of Simplex-Grinnell, a security hardware firm (cameras, alarms, etc.). They ask that applicants for technician openings have private certifications from NICET (National Institute of Certified Engineering Technicians). I also just made contact with the National Insurance Crime Bureau (http://www.nicb.org/) which goes back to 1927.

TV shows about private investigators are rare enough and never about this kind of work. We have "Court TV" but we do not have "Arbitration TV."

Umbrella organizations exist. They set standards. Follow them (or not) as you wish, but the general market will deliver your profits -- or not... I think that those kinds of institutions might meet your need, Landon, for "governing rules and disciplinary procedures."

Post 50

Saturday, March 25, 2006 - 3:36pm

I guess I could see that.

I'll probably have sent you a RoRmail by the time you read this.

---Landon

Post 51

Sunday, March 26, 2006 - 8:06am

DO POLICE NEED WEAPONS?

FBI statistics suggest that the police might be just as effective without weapons.
Stay tuned to this channel for further updates.

Post 52

Monday, March 27, 2006 - 6:59am

Michael - have you ever been towed? That is a terrible example. They steal your car, which is far more valuable than any minor tresspass that may or may not have taken place. Then they hold it hostage until you pay their excessive fees. You have zero recourse to courts or due process.

Post 53

Monday, March 27, 2006 - 6:47pm

Michael - have you ever been towed? That is a terrible example. They steal your car, which is far more valuable than any minor tresspass that may or may not have taken place. Then they hold it hostage until you pay their excessive fees. You have zero recourse to courts or due process.

I like the encounter in Schulman's libertarian science fiction novel, Alongside Night, in which the hero is looking for his girlfriend during a mass emergency evacuation and the security guard is trying to be helpful and has to explain that he is trying to be helpful. The hero is too used to cops in uniform. The point is that while the privatization of towing is one thing, the towing itself may be another.

No, I have never been towed.

As a private guard, I have a real problem with people who park wherever they want on the unstated theory that they are so special that fire trucks and ambulances should defer to them.

I cut people a lot of slack for dropping off and picking up and waiting. At some level, though, towing is an option.

That said, I have no doubt that it can be unfair -- especially when it derives from collectivist concepts of traffic control.

Personally, all traffic laws fell apart for me about 30 years ago when I completed a certificate in traffic management. I realized that many (most? all?) traffic laws are irrational, i.e., divorced from empirical validation of internally consistent theory.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 3/27, 6:50pm)

Post 54

Monday, May 1, 2006 - 10:00am

In the thread "FOUND ON THE WEB"
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0863.shtml#0
Kurt Eichert wrote: "...and he conveniently ignores the point that no one expects crime to disappear. Rand never said that it would be utopia with no need for courts or police or even the armed forces (only tha anarcho-capitalists think that). Of course some people will cheat and steal. That is what the jails are for. In fact, fewer will get away with it because we won't waste our time on non-crimes like smoking pot."

Unfortunately, Objectivists have no better a view of law enforcement and criminal justice than do the great mass of non-police civiliams. I highly recommend The Limits of the Criminal Sanction by Herbert L. Packer. This work was cited by one of my instructors in criminal justice near the close of the academc term a couple of weeks ago.

Basically, drawing and quartering did not work. "Penitent" houses did not work. Reforms do not work. The two models we know are retroactive (retribution) and utilitarian (proactive). We here know these as Power and Market. The Power mode is to punish people for what they did in the past. Government seeks to change the past. Government looks to the past. The Market mode derives from Bentham and Mill who posited the need for preventing future actions. Businesses look to the future, anticipate the future, buy and sell the future.

The problem is that as far as the perpetrator goes, neither mode works. Predators exist.

However, lest we focus on only half of the equation, realize that law enforcement and criminal justice is more than "criminology." There is also the study of "victimology." (See for instance The Victim and His Criminal, Stephen Schafer.) Some people are what Dr. Michael Baden (former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and is presently the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police) called "sympathy junkies." Yes, you can be the random victim of a random attack. Most people are assaulted by friends and family. Most victims are repeat victims.

If you do not want to be a victim, then take the appropriate precautions. Sometimes, that is not enough. Usually it is. If you are preyed upon -- and if you do catch the predator - -then, the only rational outcome is restoration (restitution). You cannot change the behavior of the perpetrator in any meaningful way. Locking them all up together is like locking down a pressure cooker. We tried killing them all with huge bonfires and mass hangings, but more were born. In fact, the outcast, the criminal, the alien, the exile, is the INDEPENDENT THINKER.

In the Entrepreneurs Forum, I touted Mary Reibey. Arrested as a horsethief in England, she was transported to Australia where she became a millionaire and a paragon of society. A society that is OPEN allows this to unsocial, anti-social, non-social individuals. Such societies may have fewer de jure criminals because it has less jure in the first place. Punishing people has not been the answer, since the days of Ur when people were beaten en masse for transgressions. The Code of Hammurabi is entirely retributive. It has not worked.

We need to try something else.

Post 55

Monday, May 1, 2006 - 10:04am

It's not the job of society or government to fix criminal mentality.

A capitalist societies rules would legalize many of the acts that people are prosecuted for today. Those who violate the reamining laws are to be punished. If they break the law again they are to be punished. The punishment should fit the crime. You cannot force someone to stop being a criminal, they have to choose not to act in a criminal way. No problems here.

Ethan

Post 56

Monday, May 1, 2006 - 2:34pm

In fact, the outcast, the criminal, the alien, the exile, is the INDEPENDENT THINKER.

Michael, I spent a number of years chronicling the handiwork of these "independent thinkers." Their many, many victims, whose faces are seared into my memory, would characterize them otherwise.

And I doubt that if I introduced you to those victims, you would have the nerve to repeat that outrageous characterization to their scarred faces.

To the point about law:

Governmental criminal law looks to "the past" for a simple reason. It's called "justice." To deal justly (proportionately) with the consequences of actions, you have to look backward in time at those who caused them. Only then can you treat them as they have earned: retributively, i.e., with proportionate punishment.

That is what justice IS.

Anarchists like Gregory Benson, who have tried to undermine the need for government, have been driven, logically and inexorably, to repudiating retributive justice as a goal of criminal law. (I can provide the citations.) They have argued instead that the crime victim should be compelled (you read that correctly) to surrender his desire for "proportionate retribution," and instead accept whatever compensation or restitution (if any) that some private "arbiter" decides is appropriate.

(Being compelled to participate in such a private arbitration arrangement is not, of course, referred to by anarchists as a "monopoly government" that "excludes competitors" or "secessionists" -- competitors and secessionists like me, for example, who might prefer retribution to some paltry or non-payment for a heinous offense against me.)

How anarchism can be upheld as a "moral" alternative to government, when anarchists dismiss the moral principle of proportionate justice, is one of many contradictions in anarchism I have cited over the years, and which anarchists simply refuse to confront.

But in my experience, anarchists are willing to accept and say ANYTHING in order to deny the need for government -- whether it is rejecting the moral principle of justice...or even characterizing malignant sociopaths as "independent thinkers."

Post 57

Monday, May 1, 2006 - 8:14pm

It is no accident of language that police departments and electoral districts are both called "precincts." Policing was a patronage job, awarded at the precinct level. In the last generation, we have probably done away with that completely. Today, your local police all have some level of college education, either an associate's or a bachelor's, in criminal justice or law enforcement, or something related such as sociology or psychology.

In the criminal justice classes I am taking, we do not study anarchists. We study criminologists, such as O. W. Wilson and August Vollmer. Police chief of Berkeley, California, in the 1920s, Vollmer instituted motorcycle patrols and polygraphs and required that his cops be college graduates. Wilson took these practices to Wichita, where he proofed them, and improved them. Then, Wilson went to Chicago. The Wilson book I own is Police Records: their installation and use -- from 1940. Wilson was a pioneer.

Today, law enforcement professionals know that they are between Scylla and Cherybdis. Neither retributionism nor utilitarianism offers a complete, coherent and correct set of questions, to say nothing of answers. I believe that Objectivism is a better way to look at the problems subsumed under the rubric "crime. "

I cited Herbert Packer. His 1968 opus sums up what we know -- and what we do not know -- about crime and criminals. Packer is a dense writer.

Consider the definition of punishment. Procedurally, there is no difference between taking someone's driver's license for repeated offenses and taking it for loss of eyesight. Are both "punishment"?

What is the enforced hospitalization of a mentally ill person? The "insanity" plea is especially troubling to a legal system than demands that people be defined as moral agents, i.e., capable of making a choice, i.e., possessing free will. About one-fifth of those in jail today (right now; where you live) are mentally impaired or mentally incompetent.

What Packer does in his book is attempt to define contexts. His approach is not perfect and his answers beg other questions, but I recognize this work as being substantially important and useful. It is still in print after 40 years.

Retribution feels good to some Objectivists because it seems to correlate with cause and effect. If you violate someone's rights, then you get punished. The problems with this are manifold. There is the epistemological problem of establishing guilt. Something like 90% of all cases are plead out, which means that the accused pleads guilty to something they did not do, to save the state the trouble of trying them for something else they are accused of. Why would someone plead guilty to a crime they did not commit? There are many reasons why. The prosecutor uses sales pressures; the public defender is socially closer to the prosecutor than to the acccused; the accused does not expect justice. Eyewitness testimony is most compelling to a jury and most likely to be wrong. (See the the Frontline video What Jennifer Saw, in which the victim spent 30 minutes with her rapist and then identified the wrong man -- a man with priors for B&E and CSC, but who was innocent of this particular crime.) Criminal justice professionals know these unsettling facts. There are no easy answers.

I stipulate to the existence of predatory persons in our society. "Punishing" them has never stopped them. (It might be better to identify them early in life and just kill them. That, of course, opens another can of worms.) Statists admit that government cannot act in retribution until these predators victimize an innocent person. Allowing for the moment the premises as the statists posit them, of what use, then, is a socialized police force since it cannot protect the rights of its citizens but can only apprehend those who violate them?

Furthermore, being socialist, the public police force is woefully inadequate at actually catching perpetrators. Most victims are assaulted by their friends and family. That makes apprehension trivial. We know that about 85% of all crimes are 'solved" by the statements of victims and witnesses. Most of the rest of the crimes go unsolved.   Police detectives are about 15% effective.   Socialism does not work. We know that.

Punishment does nothing. Punishing the perpetrator does not restore the victim -- even if the victim feels that it will.

I serve on a citizens advisory board for community corrections. Initially intended for non-violent crime (drugs; impaired driving), these programs now serve mostly domestic violence perpetrators. Many of them (some fraction; about 20%; maybe more) are actually remediated by workbooks and talk sessions in which their mistaken ideas and attitudes are identified. That helps some. Others have other issues.

In every case, it is a matter of context. We cannot throw an intellectual blanket over the burning issue to put it out. There are many issues, many problems, many causes, many alternatives.

Robert Bidinotto says that the punishment should fit the crime. That sounds compelling. It might have been insightful when it was offered over 200 years ago by the pioneer criminologist, Cesare Beccaria.  In 200 years, we have gone from the steamship to the spaceship, but we have yet to find "punishments" that actually "fit" the "crimes."

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 5/01, 8:19pm)

Post 58

Monday, July 10, 2006 - 3:53pm

Writing in the "Basement Nukes" thread, Bridget Armozel opined:
Michael, largeness in this case as I define it for the DRO models is scope. How large or how many people can be under one DRO before the DRO considers itself a sovereign state? Cause, if you consider it, a DRO is basically a little state, just without all the pomp and tradition.

... the best solution ... but rather an emphasis on a universal legal code that would become the foundation for all transactions. ... then it follows all such individuals must be given direct means to recourse for their disputes whether a government is the facilatory agency or if a cluster of DROs does it as well. ...

Well, you can sing the "Bridget Anthem" when you get up every morning and pledge to the "Bridget Flag" before you go to work. In How to Start Your Own Country, Erwin S. Strauss recommends those kinds of little ceremonies, along with your own "passport" and "money" and "postage stamps" to give yourself the feeling of having your own country... like playing Civilization, as some here apparently do ... I do not know if they still do this, but in 1990 when I took college classes in Japanese for Business, I learned that Japanese corporations have anthems. The point is that any entity can "act like a govenrment." That does not make it a government.

Here in the real world, I know of no dispute resolution organizations that have songs, flags, money, or postage stamps. Most of them are not-for-profit corporations, local firms with two to ten attorneys, though, of course, the American Arbitration Association moved $117 MILLION dollars through its NFP books in 2004 (see: http://www.adr.org/si.asp?id=1873)

I have said often before, and I repeat now, that we do not need to theorize: these institutions -- private police; private courts -- exist today ... and they are TWO-THIRDS OF THE MARKET. Government is a minority player. They just have better propaganda because they need better propaganda. They need televison shows like Cops and Law & Order and Judge Judy and CSI to maintain public support for their wars and schools and roads and everything else. Market entities prefer profits over propaganda.

Also -- and this could start another thread -- the quest for one true system of laws reflects an authoritarian mindset. Some people are attracted to Objectivism because it promises a complete set of answers. To me, the best thing about a free society is not knowing what it will be like. Many political activists -- many people in general, actually; and many "Objectivists" -- find that scary. They want to know the rules and they want to be the ones to make the rules.

I have written here about PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW. It is also known as "the conflict of laws." It goes back to Roman times, back to when the state had all the laws, but people still had to live their lives in a complex, geographically and demographically complicated society. Inheritances, adoptions, marriages, the stuff of daily life must be resolved now, here, today, in the real world -- and it is -- and without a monopoly of law. Then, ask yourself how multinational corporations actually work... How are disputes settled? No contract can cover every instance. Free market justice gets done every day -- and without shooting.

Capitalism is peace.

Post 59

Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 1:19pm