Darian Worden on Almost Getting Away With Murder
William Grigg on Costumed Government Goons vs. Children and the Elderly
Charles Johnson on The Police Beat: Officer J. Smith, Las Vegas Metro
Radley Balko on More Watching of the Watchers
Radley Balko on Innocence, Schminnocence: We Have Rules, You Know
John Markley on To Serve, Protect, and/or Scare the Hell Out Of
Unfortunately, this post could be much, much longer ….
All you anarchists who criticise our heroic police officers – who are you going to call when you need your bedridden grandmother suffocated, tased, and lacerated?
If you’re interested in signing a petition asking Rand Paul to support Red & Black Café’s right to bar cops from their premises, click here.
(I don’t know how thrilled the Café would be with Paul’s support – but I doubt they’re at much risk of getting it ….)
My friend William Gillis writes to me:
For over a decade I’ve frequented The Red & Black Cafe in Portland – an IWW, explicitly anarchist, worker-owned coop – and over the years they’ve faced all the sort of police harassment and surveillance you’d expect for a venue catering to radical activists.
Recently a uniformed police officer entered the cafe ostensibly to buy a cup of coffee – I can only imagine the horrified looks – and was politely asked to leave by one of the workers/managers. PDX police have recently committed more than a few outrageous murders and the worker explained with infinite patience that a cop made his clientele feel like they were in danger.
For some reason this seems to be setting off a shitstorm of national-level outrage with coverage on major news networks and blogs. I have good friends on staff and their phones are ringing off the hook with death threats. Mainstream conservative and liberal pundits have talked of showing up with weapons to start a confrontation. Frankly my brain clouds over with rage every time I read the fractally idiotic comments or threats.
My friends could really use some support; in this environment some kind words or awareness from those who aren’t fanatical devotees of the police state would go a long way. I’d really appreciate it if you could use the magical reach of your blog.
Here are some links that don’t directly send me into a rage-coma: 1, 2, 3
I have nothing to add except ditto. Please let’s do what we can to support the Red & Black Café against this crap.
George Donnelly, whose case I’ve linked to before, is being prosecuted for, as far as I can tell, being an inconvenient witness to police brutality. More info here, here, and here.
Please help if you can:
Going through a box of old papers, I found this letter I wrote to the Chapel Hill News back in my North Carolina days; I don’t recall whether it was published.
18 May 1994
To the Editor:The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict between two radically different visions of social order: the Celtic-Germanic system and the Imperial Roman system.
Under the Celtic-Germanic system, which dominated much of Northern Europe (especially the British Isles) during the Middle Ages, there was no distinct governmental agency known as the “police.” Instead, the responsibility for keeping the peace, enforcing the laws, and maintaining social order lay with the armed citizenry as a whole. In a sense, everybody (or at least, every free adult male) was the police, and all arrests were citizens’ arrests. Like the age-old right to judge the accused in a jury setting, the right to defend the innocent by force was a right of the people, not of government officials. (To be sure, there was some division of labor in provision of security; but this occurred within, rather than as an alteratve to, the context of an egalitarian distribution of police authority.)
More familiar to modern eyes is the Imperial Roman system. When the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire, one of Emperor Augustus’s most significant acts was to establish Rome’s first police system – the Urban Cohorts and the Vigiles. From then on, keeping the peace in Rome was the prerogative of government agents, as in modern states. Where Celtic-Germanic system police authority was bottom-up, Imperial Roman police authority was top-down.
Growing up as we have under a system like the Roman one, we tend to assume that the Roman-style system is the only one that could possibly work. But highly civilised and sophisticated peoples (e.g., medieval Ireland) lived happily and prosperously under the Celtic-Germanic system for centuries. And although the Imperial Roman system has been on the ascendancy in the west ever since the centralisation of state power during the Renaissance, the rival Celtic-Germanic system has yielded only gradually. For example, as incredible as it may seem to many today, there were no police in England before the nineteenth century; the government exercised legislative and judicial functions, but left the actual apprehsion of criminals to the armed citizenry, in the form of the “posse comitatus” or, later, “Associations for the Prosecution of Felons.”
Similar arrangements may be found in American history in the colonial “minutemen,” and later in the so-called “Wild West” – “wild” and violent according to Hollywood depictions, but surprisingly peaceful and crime-free according to current historical research. (I am not speaking of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but [2010 note: apologies for the scrambled grammar; I should have written “I am speaking not of vigilantes or lynch mobs, but of”] responsible citizens’ associations that respected the rights of the accused.) Our country’s founders still recognised the right of self-defense as the foundation and presupposition of all other rights.
On a recent ABC documentary on guns, a gun rights advocate unwittingly echoed the Celtic-Germanic paradigm when he suggested that recent tragedies like the Long Island train shooting could have been averted if the other passengers on the train had also been armed and able to take defensive action. In response, a gun prohibition advocate expressed incredulity, and exclaimed that a society in which everyone “packs heat” would collapse into “anarchy” – a viewpoint unwittingly expressive of the Roman perspective.
Indeed today’s advocates of gun prohibition are so deeply in the grip of the Imperial Roman paradigm that they literally cannot grasp or conceive of the Celtic-Germanic alternative – and thus, for example, are unable to see the Second Amendment’s “militia” as anything but a government agency, despite clear historical evidence that in the eighteenth century “militia” meant the armed citizenry.
In this country today the Imperial Roman system is poised on the brink of its final victory: the complete disarmament of the citizenry. Before we take that final step, we should ask ourselves whether our long journey away from the Celtic-Germanic system has really been a move in the right direction. Are we really safer or more secure today as a result of this transformation? The evidence suggests otherwise.
A restoration of, or at least a move back in the direction of, the Celtic-Germanic system would have at least five advantages over our current Roman-style system.
- First, it would provide greater discouragement to criminal behaviour by in effect raisig the numbers, presence, and reaction time of the “police” to a maximum.
- Second, it would more flexible, efficient, and inexpensive than a tax-funded bureaucracy.
- Third, it would reestablish neighbourhood control over law enforcement, a desperately needed measure in the light of police harassment of minorities.
- Fourth, it would more faithfully embody our democratic egalitarian heritage by making the use of defensive force a universal right rather than the privilege of an elite.
- And fifth, by diminishing the power differential between citizens and their government, it would seriously block the evident tendency of contemporary western democracies to evolve toward a police state.
Roderick T. Long
