Police & Military: Most important professions in the country!

Why is law enforcement the most important profession in the United States? Ask yourself this question: What happens if a large group of police officers go on strike? History has answered that for us. In 1919, the Boston police strike lasted only one day. The city of Boston was plunged into civil chaos. President Wilson branded the walkout “a crime against civilization.”

In 1969, Montreal police went on strike, and during the first day, eight banks were robbed, 100 shops were looted, and there were sniper attacks and rioting that resulted in 3 million dollars property damage. In 1974, Baltimore police went on strike, and the results were similar to what happened in Boston and Montreal. When law enforcement ceases, civilized society collapses.

However, as we saw with the recent riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, even with a police presence, widespread crime and looting can still take place, although there would have been less looting and destruction if the police had been allowed to do their job and were more aggressive in responding to the violence.  What is also necessary for a civilized society is a willingness to respect other people's rights and property.

An armed populace is also important. Individual self-defense is sometimes necessary, as the police aren't always around when you need them. For example, Detroit has very strict gun control laws, yet the murder rate there is higher than anywhere else in the country -- 54.6 per 100,000.

The reason is two-fold: First, there is very little respect among the local residents for the lives and property of others. Secondly, law-abiding citizens tend to obey the gun-control laws, while the criminals do not. So the criminals have the guns and know that the law-abiding citizens are less likely to possess them and to resist being robbed and assaulted.

Another important profession is the military. Winston Churchill’s said that the story of the human race is war. History shows us that civilized society crumbles without strong law enforcement and a strong military.

The same problem exists with a ban on nuclear weapons. Who will respect the ban? Iran, Russia and North Korea? If the Western nations respect it and disarm themselves, they become easy targets. Our very survival depends on a strong self-defense and our willingness to use it.

Brazil has become infamous for the deplorable living conditions of abandoned children.  Progressives would point to this infamy as evidence that no decent society can survive without social programs such as compulsory government schools, a generous welfare system, child support services, etc.  Some might even argue in favor of parental licensing.  As this thread has argued against anarchists as essentially "libertarian wet dreamers," so progressives would argue against the Objectivist view of a minimalist "negative rights only" government as a "libertarian wet dream" -- a rationalism based on an idealism detached from reality.  In this case, this means the reality of helpless children struggling to survive and mutating into sociopaths because of their horrifying conditions.

How would you counter that argument beyond just pointing to the checkered history of Brazil and its rampant corruption?

Certainly U.S. history has its own stories of children in absolute poverty for which the Progressives will gladly take credit in rectifying.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 6/28, 6:30am)

I sometimes try to see things from other perspectives to get a better grasp of my own.  I have seen Brazil raised often enough as an example of rampant, unmanaged population needing "something" to be done by government that it seemed like a decent counter argument.  I can easily imagine if Bill had posted his argument in a global Progressive forum that someone would have made such a counter.

It is important to anticipate our opponents' arguments to strengthen our own.

Thanks for taking the time to answer with arguments that had not crossed my mind, Steve.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 6/28, 1:22pm)

Nothing in the article was untrue, but much was incomplete.  We are forced to be brief. Every work is finite.  That is why Ayn Rand called fiction a selective re-creation of reality.  Every human work is necessarily selective.  I would have selected other facts and made other conclusions, while keeping to the main point: law is fundamental to society.

In the past, Steve has provided us with links to Sumerian documents preceding the Law of Hammurabi.  We can accept that those codes only formalized what had been customs.  William Graham Sumner referred to folkways, mores, and laws. Textbooks in criminal justice point to Anglo-Saxon traditions of tenths and hundreths and the "hue and cry" as folkways in law enforcement that led to modern policing.  But the truth is that England was often a lawless place - and I refer not to the Dark Ages or Middle Ages but to the 18th century. Highwaymen were common. Coaches were robbed.  The king did nothing. Gentlemen carried weapons as a matter of course.  Yet, trade and commerce flourished. Mobs did not routinely loot the city of London.  (Mobs and riots were periodic events. And that points to a different problem, entirely.)  The Metropolitan Police Service was not founded until 1829.

Antecedent to them, the Bow Street Runners were a private group that took law enforcement upon itself.  A century before that, Sir Isaac Newton had himself sworn as a magistrate so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.  

Bill's article failed to explain why the city of Boston did not descend in to lawless anarchy before its police force was created in 1838.  New York follwed in 1844, and then Philadelphia in 1854.  After the War Between the States, cities created police forces, relying on popular blue uniforms echoic of the union army.  Why were there not daily riots all across the nation from the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation until the formation of these police departments?  The answer is that we had other ways to deal with the problems of crimes against property and persons. Generally, people did not turn to government for law enforcement by bureaucratic administration until the middle of the 19th century. It still took two generations (about 60 years) for policing to approach effective professional competence.  

August Vollmer is credited with the invention of professional policing following his appointment to be chief of police in Berkeley, California, in 1909. Eventually, he hired African-Americans; and he hired women. He brought in the polygraph.  He created motorcycle patrols.  He taught his officers to be apart from the community in order to remain objective in service to it. At that time (1909), the best police officers were actually "roving magistrates" who knew the people on their beats and who often administered justice on the street without resorting to courts.  And I do not mean just beating up bad guys without a trial. The constable on patrol mediated disputes between neighbors.  See, "An Officer of the Neighborhood: A Boston Patrolman on the Beat in 1895" by Alexander von Hoffman, in The Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 309-330

In a recent study,A llen Steinberge xamined the transformationo f state powers by investigating Philadelphia's criminal justice system in the nineteenth century. He demonstrated that for much of the nineteenth century, the criminal justice system, characterizedb y private prosecutionsa nd the sitting of local aldermen as magistrates, was localistic, informal, and highly democratic. In the late nineteenth century, reformers replaced the private prosecutors and alderman magistrates with police and elected trial justices. This change, Steinberg concluded, created a centralized and impersonal judicial process which deprived working-class citizens of the immediate access to the legal system which they previously had enjoyed.

That last explains the interplay between public policing and private security beginning with the innovative capitalist of the protection industry, Alan Pinkerton.  The first police were used to keep the "lower classes" in line and to protect the homes of the wealthy.  So, merchants in poor neighborhoods turned to their own resources.  That changed with reform.  The police focussed on patrolling poor neighborhoods as the sources of crime.  That left the rich undefended, so they turned to burglar alarms and private security guards.  The see-saw still oscillates today.

Successful as Vollmer's policies were, they ultimately failed.  His student, O.W. Wilson famously "solved" many of the problems in the Chicago police department - racial prejudice in hiring and promotion, and continued graft and corruption long after the repeal of Prohibition.  Wilson was hired by Richard Daley and worked from 1960 to 1967.  However, Wilson's seeming successes were eclipsed by the 1969 Police Riot at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago.    

The riots in Boston, Baltimore, and Montreal are easy to explain as social panics, akin to mass sightings of flying saucers and the Virgin Mary - or Woodstock.  In fact, Ayn Rand's cogent essay, Apollo and Dionysius, underscores this.  In both events, masses of people came together with minimal interpersonal aggression despite the lack of policing.  In both cases, the seemingly very opposite cultures both accepted an implicit respect for persons and their property.

Without that respect, massive police or military presence is ultimately incapable of controlling the populace. 

Like Bill, I am limited in the time and space that I can expound.  So, I selectively chose my facts.

I present other facts on my blog:

Armies Without Weapons

and

Peace is More Powerful.

In closing, and without going into detail now, let me suggested that no profession or occupation or service is "most important" in a complex market society. Who is more important: garbage collectors, or doctors?  When you need a doctor, a million garbage collectors are no help.  But without garbage collectors, a million doctors would not be enough to keep a city healthy.

Thanks, Steve.  You made a point that I intended to: "In a different context I could make an argument that philosophers are the most important because of the importance of ideas, or inventors because of the contribution of technology to our lives, ... "  That said, Ayn Rand began with metaphysics and epistemology.  You know her famous quote, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism..." See also, "... on one foot." http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/introducing-objectivism.html  If the active majority of people accept the principles even implicitly, then society as a whole is moral, ethical, and safe.  

That was more the case in the early 19th century than it became later.  Back then, people controlled themselves as a matter of personal custom.  

Other controls were in place as well.  After transporting London's petty criminals first to Georgia and then to Australia, London became safe enough that the police could patrol without weapons (or at least without guns).  The London Metropolitan finally had to arm itself in our time as foreign gangs not acculturated to British folkways did not limit their own use of force.  Before that, London's criminals did.  

Allow me to venture that most of us here are agreed that if the govenrment makes an objective set of laws, that the actual provision of protection could be (almost) completely privatized.  Even if we started with police, since it would be wrong to prevent private security, eventually, the market would surpass the government sector.  Indeed, it is a fact that private security out-paces public policing two-to-one or three-to-one, both for manpower and for capital investment.  

In fact, with a minor shift in technologies and pricing, it might be possible to reduce patrols almost completely.  Jim Halperin is one of the owners of Heritage Auctions.  He wrote two science fiction novels, The Truth Machine and The First Immortal.  He imagined those changes in the 1970s.  Now think about today with Google Glasses and Apple Watches -- imbedded as nano-chips...  You cannot lie.  You cannot cheat. You cannot steal.  You cannot harm another person.  On my blog, I have an article on non-lethal weapons for the police.  (Just search for batshield.)  Everyone could have these like Spiderman's integral web slinger...

But as long as we think only of shooting people who steal television sets, we are not going to make much progress.

You got close to half of an answer when you wrote: "But this context is clearly about the growing negative attitude towards law enforcement that we see in many inner-cities and from the far left in general, and from Progressives."  You know that many political conservatives are also anti-cop.  Right wing patriots see the county sheriff as an elected official with powers defined by the state constitution, whereas the police are armed bureaucrats, placed above the people, and above the law. 

As for the military, this, too is an old argument because conservatives and liberals alike start from the same philosophical premises.  If the goal of the military is to prevent invasion, why do they have infantry troops?  Would the infantry not have been severely scaled back during the nuclear showdowns of the Cold War when they were proved to be largely ineffective.  Saddam Hussein had the fifth largest army in the world.  Unfortunately for him, he had about the 100th largest air force and the 200th largest space force.  I beleive that given a free market in military defense -- subject of course to a single objective legal code -- many "star wars" alternatives could have been deployed.  

Many cities operate their own electrical utilities.  Those could be used to power giant lasers guided by radars and similar systems.  Different cities would have different systems, but overall, one or a few would dominate.  Instead, we left it up to Congress to not deploy any of several "star wars" systems.  Of course, such systems might have vaporized the 9/11 passenger jets.... which, of course, the most powerful military in the world failed to prevent.

The most powerful military in the world has impressive string of failures.  Its most visible success, the killing of Ussama bin Ladin, was carried out by a handful of highly skilled operators.  That fact speaks to more fruitful lines of thought in military defense.

Allow me, also to come back to that earlier quote: "But this context is clearly about the growing negative attitude towards law enforcement that we see in many inner-cities ... " I assure you that working in security, I get far more resistance from those who think of themselves as "upper" class or "middle" class.  They think that they are above the rules, above the law, that their social capital buys them exclusion from the common controls. 

For instance, one time I was working a horse show.  The owners did not want spectators down in the central corral.  The only violators were management types.  Another time, I was assigned to the swimming pool of a resort. They gave me a standard "class A" police-type uniform.  "Wouldn't a suit be more appropriate?" I asked.  My boss said, "These people argue with suits all day long. You'll get better compliance with the uniform.  And I did: better, but not perfect.  

I don't get that much noise from what you call "inner city" people.  They don't want trouble because they cannot afford it and they know that "the rich get richer and the poor get prison."  Any poor person whom I ask to move along calls me "boss" and moves along.  It is the self-styled "middle" and "upper" classes who are habitually disreprectful of authority.  At least, that is my professional experience.  

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/30, 9:11am)

Marotta, I wrote: "But this context is clearly about the growing negative attitude towards law enforcement that we see in many inner-cities ... " and I was saying that this thread appears to have grown out of current events - what we are seeing more and more of on the news since Feguson.... the progressive cry that "Young black men are being killed by white cops, we need to federalize local law enforcement."  What we have seen is rioting, looting, protests, Talking-Heads on the left joining with Race-Baiters to ratchet up the rhetoric, and the number of inner-city shootings and murders are sharply increasing.  That is the context I was speaking of.  You chose a completely different understanding and went off into a science fiction rant about embedded nano-tecnology and privatized armies and if people just had the right understanding of metaphysics and epistemology all would be well.

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Some well-known rapp artist gave a concert where along with the rapp lyrics the theme of the concert itself was anti-police.  On stage they had a cop car with graffiti on it, and the rapper jumped around on top of the car, caving in the top, while 'singing' his anti-cop 'song' - all I could think was that it was too bad the police in that town couldn't have broadcast over all the different news channels, about a day in advance, that due to the anti-law-enforcement theme, they would not be providing any security or answering any calls to that location.  Everything might have gone well.  It might have been as peaceful as McCarthy Park love-In.  Or, the news the next day might have been about the concession stands that were robbed, the fights that turned into near riots, the people that were mugged, the vandalism and so on.