Law enforcers in Dallas and Ft. Worth recently made the North Texas Metroplex proud with their high profile high idiocy high jinx in a span of 14 days.
First came the report of the Dallas PD patrolman who caught up with a couple in front of a hospital after they ran a red light during a headlong rush to reach the woman’s dying mother.
That traffic infraction, the bully-in-blue decided, was incredibly more important than someone’s mom meeting her Maker.
The badge bum lectured the couple for thirteen minutes while scribbling out a moving violation citation. Midway through, the wife made a break for it and reached her mother just before she died. The husband didn’t.
During the “I am God” grandstanding the public protector actually drew his gun, threatened the man with jail and told him, “I can screw you over.”
The fact that the man was Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats made the traffic stop national news. The dashboard video went coast to coast.
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Fun while you stun time in Texas: playing taser tag
with lowly peasants known as “citizens.” (AP photo)
A few days later a pair of police punks decided to play taser tag with a perp when he “became combative.” (Keep in mind that in today’s officialspeak being branded “combative” might be nothing more than failing to instantly bellow “Sir, yes sir!” when a Serve and Protect praetorian orders you to drop and kiss the asphalt.)
The patrol car’s videocam recorded the mocking voice of one taser-wielding officer sneering, “take it like a man” while another derisively shouts, “Do you want another one?”
Unfortunately for the enforcers, the screams of the suspect were also recorded.
Then it was the Pride of Fort Worth’s turn.
The city made headlines by settling a suit for 50,000 smackers after an officer smacked around a deaf man during a traffic stop back in 2007.
Pulled over for speeding, the driver reached for his ID. The road warrior naturally assumed he was reaching for a gun, spun him around and slammed his kisser into the rear windshield, breaking his nose.
The dashboard video caught it all.
So what’s going on here? Whatever happened to those friendly neighborhood cops like Bert from “It’s a Wonderful Life?”
The cops of course always claim each case is just one bad apple in the barrel, but over the years the whole barrel seems to have rotted.
Any libertarian worth the label will tell you that anyone committing coercion, whether king, cop or commoner, must be held personally accountable. And thanks to dashboard videocams and citizens with cell phone cameras, that’s happening.
But this problem goes deeper.
Cops enforce the laws. The more laws there are, the more cops there must be. So the cop shops all over the country lower their standards to reel in more recruits. But lower standards attract lower recruits. Like the kids you grew up with who bullied you and stole your lunch money and muscled you into the hallway lockers.
The result is not more police on patrol but more bullies bedecked with badges.
And the problem goes deeper still.
Politicians. Bureaucrats. Civil servants.
Once upon a time these public poobahs knew their place; they worked for government and performed a service. Today they see it as their mission to rule, regulate and run absolutely every aspect of human existence.
Politicians promulgate thousands of new laws every year. Bureaucrats relentlessly bombard us with regulations. Civil servants everywhere compel us to cope with a multitude of meaningless minutiae simply because they can.
Rules, regulations and laws are meaningless unless they are rigorously enforced.
And so the Thin Blue Line becomes the Thick Brute Slime and the Free State of America turns into the Police State of the political classes.
The solution is simple, but radical. As radical as the founding of America. Repeal all victimless crimes. Stop prosecuting people for committing the act of harming no one. A good start would be shoving the genie of gargantuan government back into the bottle of the Constitution.
The result? Free society. Minimal government. A criminal justice system with zero tolerance for coercion, intimidation and fraud. A police force adequate to policing criminals, not citizens.
Democrats won’t shrink government. Republicans won’t either. They’re all addicted to power. Only libertarians will do it.
So forget love of money. Here’s a fact you can frame and hang on what’s left of your wall once the SWAT team is finished busting through your door at 3 AM and wrecking your home while clutching the wrong address in their gnarled knuckles:
Coercion is the root of all evil.
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Comments
Rothbard pointed out that the primary duty of the police is enforcing tax payments. Being a big revenue producer for local governments, issuing tickets for moving violations would fall in that general category. If alive today I wonder if he would add that slaughtering pets while conducting drug raids at the wrong addresses is their second most important role.
Garry,
While your article is great I think you have it a little backwards. The problem doesn't stem from too many laws it is caused by the fact that the govt has police in the first place. It was around the mid 19th century that police as we know them were introduced. Once the govt had enforcement powers they started passing all the ridiculous laws like the victimless crimes, traffic, wear your underwear on the outside :-), you know, all the nitpicking, stupid things.
The solution is to go back to private security & prosecution. No more govt police or prosecutors. Take away the enforcement power & the silly laws will go with the it.
Darren makes a good point: when a sheriff had to rely on a posse of citizens who were NOT full-time police, attempts to enforce bad law were less effective.
Actually, there's only one victimless crime you'd need to repeal: tax evasion. That pretty well takes care of all the rest.
Yes. They slam our heads on the pavement and we line up to vote like sheep.
That's good. Sheep's blood and the voting booth. Yeah! I'm stupid, hit me again. I'll go vote if it hurts.
"Coercion is the root of all evil." Truer words have perhaps never been spoken. But doesn't that imply that any government, even restrained by the Constitution, is inherently evil. After all, government exists only as an institution of force and violence. Without coercion, it is an entirely powerless entity, and for all intents and purposes need not exist at all.
a word in defense of civil servants. As a "civil servant" I can tell you that no one takes some kind of pleasure in enforcing regulations. The fact of the matter is, regulations are weighing more heavily on the civil servant than on the citizen. Every time some jack ass complains about something that happens, some other jackass in the legislature decides to pass a law or regulation that must be adhered to by the civil servant. In order for you to be abused by a civil servant, there has to be discretion allowed to the civil servant, usually there is none. And the first people to complain if regulations are not enforced...is the media.
Moral of the story, don't elect jack asses.
Government and laws are like cancer research because we spend more time making laws than we do fixing what caused the other laws to be needed. Spare the rod, spoil the child, or keep collecting money for things that were not necessary if we could just police ourselves and our families. We cannot cure cancer, because all the time is spent looking for causes, we cannot fix the government, because they are the cancer.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those blue caps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur---what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more, we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." - The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
FTP. The Police are not here to Protect and Serve any more. All they do is Intimidate. They over step the Law at every moment. They speed through towns and on the highway, the ride your bumper to scare you. They are the new NAZI regime. They have no idea what the Laws are and they treat you with such disrespect. They do not deserve one ounce of respect any more.
They will whine like babies when someone kills some of them.
We now live in a fascist police state. Teach your children to interact with the pigs as little as possible. teach them they could be the ones being tortured and arrested if they report a crime, even that happens all too often.
The pigs should be feared, mistrusted and avoided as much as possible. They are not your "friend", they are NOT public servants, most have taken a job they intend to use as a cover to rob, rape, torture and kill any one they see fit. The only good ones are the ones in urns or under headstones! "911" is for fire and medical emergencies only; it's a fact of life when living in a totalitarian police state.
The acid test for knowing if you live in an occupied country is by how the cops treat the citizens. If the cops treat the people with respect than you know they are working for you as public servants to serve and protect you. If they treat you like dirt and enjoy abusing, beating and shooting you, that should be your clue that they do not work for you, they are working for a foreign government and working to repress you and enslave you. That is the same in any country. Occupied people are treated like trash by the thug occupiers.
Think about this the next time you are pulled over for speeding by the cops. You are paying the salary of this thug to harass you. While he is harassing you someone is committing a real crime somewhere and getting away with it because the revenue collector is busy harassing you.
That does not even make any sense, why would anyone be crazy enough to pay someone to harass them? But you do.
Know the difference between Authority & Power, most cops do not know the difference between a statute & a Law
I hear all the time "most of these guys are motivated by duty"......are you efffffing kidding me? I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up amongst a family of corrupt St. Louis Cops....I've been around police and their departments my whole life and very few of them are motivated by duty........most of them are motivated by ego, power and the knowledge that they can get away with things most of us wouldn't dream of....get an honest cop to tell you about the carbon-copy warrant applications they use to trick judges (who know too) or the "throw-down drugs/guns" they keep whenever they have to justify their behavior....or how about the perjury they commit each time they testify.....go to any crack neighborhood in America and you see cops who pull over dealers with a wad of cash and product, with multiple outstanding warrants....but the cop just lets them "move along"...minus their cash and product....just the cost of doing business for the dealer....and while were at it, check out the next time a cop gets pulled over for the vaunted DUI that would ruin most of our lives and cost a fortune to battle.....before the cop gets to the car a badge is hung out the window and the cop just turns and walks away.....I watched my Father drink and drive for years...he used take us with him at 0330 as he crusied the ghetto's of north St. Louis.....duty my ass......
Yes, I am anti-corrupt police..and since most of them are more dedicated to their "thin blue line" fraternity....rather than following the law...or living up to their oaths...no wonder they are being shot dead in record numbers. Even the poor honest cop who wants to do the right thing cannot afford to.....less they want to find themselves out-in-the-cold when they find themselves in need of aid from fellow officers.....the world is made up of gangs....some wear blue polyester and a tin badge, some wear Brooks-Brothers suits....some call themselves Crips & Bloods.....it is all the same.....just society puts a nice coat of paint on their gang...
Regards,
O'Guillory
“When citizens fear their government you have tyranny. When government fears its citizens you have freedom.”
--Thomas Jefferson
Which way is it now?
I rarely agree with Libertarians, though I'd have supported any Third Party last year over what we got. (I voted for Ralph Nader, yet again.)
You say only libertarians will do it, but I'm an anarchist, and a Green, since anarchists don't seem to have a party. But I'm with you on everything you say here. We have a big police violence problem here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's not just on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), where a BART cop shot unarmed Oscar Grant, dead, on New Year's Eve.
Wow, this is really refreshing! First a terrific, hard-hitting libertarian op-ed piece, and then a bunch of comments that read like I've stumbled into some alternate reality where the public has fully woken up to the evils of government oppression and those who enthusiastically carry it out, with nary a single one of the apologists for authoritarianism that I'd normally expect to see responding to something like this published on a mainstream news site! Ah, if only... <sigh> But excellent comments, folks! Oh, and Stanhope for President in 2012! I wanted to include a link to one of his videos here, but I guess that's against the policies, so I'll just say go to YouTube and search for Doug Stanhope and watch some of his videos. If you haven't seen him before, you're in for a treat.
Well writ! These people have no conscience, which means they have no soul, which disqualifies them from the definition of "human." But of course psychopaths need jobs too -- so we pay for them to run our governments.
Thanks, Starchild, but I'll pass. I don't want or need ANYONE for president, or congressman, or city councilman or any other political government function you can think of - police included.
I'm a big girl. I can take care of my own life without any of them. And if I need some help, I have sons and daughters + good neighbors I can call on to back me.
None of us have any desire to harm or infringe on the rights of others, but we are dynamic in defending ourselves.
Expanding on my first comment is an article I wrote:
Drug Prohibition: Law Enforcement Is The Problem
(Just run the title thru a search engine)
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