Table of Contents

Introduction...................................................................................... .. 2

Chapter 1.............................................................................................5
Nonviolent Dispute Resolution: A Detroit Case Study

Chapter 2...........................................................................................27
Private Police?

Chapter 3...........................................................................................39
The Paramilitary Police

Chapter 4...........................................................................................56
The Shocking Kill Rate of American Police

Chapter 5........................................................................................ . 68
The Problem With Government Police

Chapter 6.......................................................................................... 81
Is America a Police State?

Chapter 7.......................................................................................... 95
Some First Steps

Recommended
Resources........................................................................................100

1
 Introduction
The conversation about the future of the police has shifted
dramatically since the death of George Floyd on May 25. At
first most people doubtless assumed that activists would
demand a series of reforms to American police departments.
And yet before we knew it, the call to “defund the police” was
being heard everywhere.
So far, though, calls to defund the police have been fraught with
confusion.
On social media, curious observers have wondered how people
will acquire security services in the absence of police. In
response, many defenders of the “defund the police” cause
have impatiently lectured them (“do your research!”), explaining
that of course defunding the police doesn’t mean reducing their
budget to zero. "Defund the police" means the police will be
funded, but we’ll just rethink the way they operate.
That’s fine, of course, but had they wanted to avoid this
confusion they could have refrained from using the word
“defund,” which has rather a precise meaning.
But others, meanwhile, seem genuine in literally wanting to
defund the police.

2
The president of the Minneapolis City Council, for example,
said she looked forward to a “police-free future,” and therefore
does appear to have wanted to defund the police in the ordinary
sense of the word. But when asked what people should do if
their homes are invaded, replied that, well, maybe it’s about time
they got a taste of how the marginalized feel.
These are not very good answers, to say the least.
Yet the cause of defunding the police is not without merit. It is
the correct view, in fact. The problem with the standard
proposals is that they are not nearly radical enough.
The voices in this book help us see the way forward. They are
drawn from episodes of the Tom Woods Show, the Monday-
through-Friday libertarian podcast I have been producing since
2013.
What we need is a separation of police and state.
We need an end to victimless crimes, which are a major source
of unjust profiling and harassment. You cannot meaningfully
“defund the police” while still intending to harass the public
with an endless array of intrusions and regulations.
Now to be sure, there are reforms that can be made that can do
some good.
We can start by demilitarizing the police, both in equipment and
3
in approach. We might decentralize police forces and make sure
officers live in the neighborhoods they patrol, thereby reducing
the chances of misunderstanding and conflict, and increasing
the likelihood of nonviolent conflict resolution.
Justin Amash’s bill attacking “qualified immunity,” a doctrine
that makes it easier for police to get away with rights violations
and more difficult to hold them accountable, should be
supported.
We should confront police unions and recognize their role in
establishing provisions that obstruct police accountability.
But as long as we refuse to entertain original thoughts, and
instead stay wedded to the monopoly model for police, there
will be problems. The predictable results of any monopoly are
less satisfactory service at ever-higher prices. There is no reason
to expect that security provision to be any different.
Want to defund the police? Start by busting the monopoly.
Tom Woods
Harmony, Fla.
June 2020

4
 Chapter 1
Nonviolent Dispute Resolution: A Detroit Case Study
with Dale Brown
Dale Brown founded the Detroit Threat Management
Center in 1995. This chapter is drawn from episode 597 of
the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: I am very interested in the Detroit Threat

Management System. Give me the overview of what you do and
what’s valuable about it.
BROWN: First and foremost, we are a school. We are an
educational resource. We teach people how to manage threats
for their families, for themselves, for their communities, and for
their corporations, and how to do it nonviolently. Then I took a
step further and — out of necessity because people were being
home-invaded and murdered on the east side of Detroit, where
I lived, and the reluctance of law enforcement to be preventive
as opposed to prosecutorial — created a long-term sustainable
solution to community safety. At first, I just volunteered to
protect families by getting the legal rights as the security for the
building that they lived in to protect them. I was able to do it
legally—meaning not be stopped by the legal system from
protecting other American citizens from violent aggression.
I created a sustainable system. I trained people as bodyguards to
5
create excellence in managing threats through nonviolent
approaches. Wealthy people get wealthier when there’s less
death, carnage, lawsuits, injuries, and incarcerations on their
property. This means that they like my peaceful approach
because it means more prosperity for them. But my focal point
was community and family safety — not allowing violent
criminals to attack families. So, it’s a win for everyone. And it’s
sustainable because it’s profitable. That’s the main thing that I
want to get across. People need to know that there is prosperity
with preventive protection as a model for managing threats.
WOODS: How long ago did you get started?
BROWN: In 1994 I started teaching. In 1995 I started the
security side of what we do, out of necessity. I’m originally
from Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of
Michigan, where law enforcement views their position as one to
protect the public community from violence, especially the
students, who pay their salaries.
When I came to Detroit, I found out that the law enforcement
community was bent on one thing, and that’s prosecution. No
matter how much I pleaded with them to protect the
population, they just weren’t interested as a group, African
Americans as well as Caucasian officers. It was across the board.
The preoccupation was with predatory policing, the idea that we
need to incarcerate people by any means necessary, setting up
6
police stings, selling drugs, anything to do to create conditions
for crime and then send people to prison for crimes that were
preventable.
That’s what I do. I prevent violent criminal activities. My staff is
focused on public safety through nonviolence by creating
conditions where violence cannot occur because predators
cannot prey upon families and businesses. And it’s profitable for
everyone and positive.
WOODS: You can’t arrest people the way the police can, so
some people might be inclined to wonder, “What can you do?
Without the power to arrest, there isn’t any contribution you
can make.” But obviously you are making a contribution.
Exactly how are you able to provide security without having the
police's monopoly on force?
BROWN: People are very confused. How does arrest help you?
How does arrest help your community? Go and look at the data
and see if arrests help you in some way. It doesn’t help. What’s
going to help is everything that happens before an arrest, which
means before laws are broken.
There are two thousand law enforcement officers here in
Detroit now. They call it woefully understaffed. There were
seven thousand officers in the ’70s and ’60s. There were also
riots, and there was also lots more violence perpetrated against
civilians. There were a lot more officers being killed.
7
It was, all in all, worse for property values, more incarceration.
So, more cops did not have more profitable outcomes, more of
a prosperous community, more of a safe community. There was
no correlation between adding arrest-ability and the
enforcement of laws, which is an after-the-fact event. There’s
no correlation between that and a good quality of life.
So, arrest powers have nothing to do with safety. The only way
you can arrest someone is if in fact a crime has already been
committed: a rape, a robbery, a killing. We don’t get involved in
drugs and other issues that are nonviolent. We focus on just
violence. And any citizen can stop a violent act. Any citizen can
take someone into custody if they rape someone or rob
someone or kill someone. You can shoot and kill someone to
prevent that person from killing somebody. So that has nothing
to do with arresting. That’s what we focus on — violence —
not: “Did you have a seatbelt on, are you texting, are you
arguing loudly outside?”
We don’t want to arrest people anyway, and I teach people that
this whole approach we've been taught to accept — force,
violence, aggression, and arrest — is completely
counterintuitive, counterproductive, and completely
unnecessary. And that’s what my model is demonstrating over
twenty years in the city of Detroit, downtown, in the
neighborhoods — not in Osh Kosh B’Gosh, Michigan. This is
the real city, and it really works. And if you look at
8
CrimeMapping.com, you will see an extremely low amount of
crime anywhere that we work.
This is the most important part: altruism and mission-motivated
action are the purposes and foundations of the organization. If
I go forward in a safety situation with the idea that I’m just
going to prosper and be profitable, then what happens is the
moment that I am in true danger I have to back down. I have to
leave because there’s no prosperity in death, and death is a
possibility when you are interacting with people, whether you’re
in Colorado at a movie theater or at a college campus where
most of our mass shootings are taking place—which I think is
very interesting since people are very worried about trailer parks
and inner-city ghettos. You never have mass shootings there.
But if you are going to intervene, you can’t think about
prosperity, because you’re about to die.
So, what happens is you have to think about the love of
humanity. And that’s very important to get across to your
audience: if we’re going to protect our families, our
communities, and our corporations, we can do that only with
love, not with law enforcement. The enforcement of laws takes
place after they’ve been broken, which means your family’s been
raped, robbed, or killed; you’ve already had a shooting at your
business; and you are now financially in a negative situation.
And of course, you’re very unhappy with rape, robbery, and
killing that happens to your family or in your community.
9
WOODS: What is it that you’re able to do before the fact to
stop these things from happening? Is it a lot of patrolling?
BROWN: It’s what we call scanning: deter, detect, defend.
Consider everything you think about in terms of law
enforcement, and we do the exact opposite. If a police officer
thinks you’re a threat, they pull you over. If we think you’re a
threat, we pull up to you and talk to you. If a police officer
thinks you’re a threat, they stay away from you and pull out their
gun. What we do is get so close you can’t pull out your gun. A
police officer believes you’re a threat, so they begin to talk to
you in an autocratic, aggressive fashion. What we do is build a
psychological bridge to explain to you that there’s no need,
there’s no option for violence, there’s no opportunity, and
there’s nothing to gain, so you must leave now, and I’m letting
you leave. My staff is letting you leave. You can simply go.
This works in any situation when a human being is attempting
to achieve something. When the person is not thinking well—
they’re on drugs or they’re insane—that action works very well
because we’re able to read their body language ahead of time
and know if they’re about to draw the weapon anyway, and
we’re able to take them into custody and take them down
without injuring them and without letting them pull out their
gun.
Again, we’re in Detroit, so this is not theory. This is what we do.
10
This is why none of my staff members are dead. Six of us have
been shot after learning over these years that my ultraviolent
viewpoint was wrong. I was a martial artist all my life, a firearm
instructor; I have lots of guns, and I love guns. I’m a gun
enthusiast. But that has nothing to do with public safety. An
example: The Secret Service have guns, and they never use
them. The police have guns, and every dead police officer had a
gun at the time of their death. So, guns were not the answer in
those situations. What would be the answer was a superior
thought process, being able to perceive situations before they
happened, being in a position to dominate in situations to which
we’re dedicated and create a psychological bridge for someone
to get to a peaceful outcome.
This is completely unique and a paradigm shift in public safety,
and it works. I can prove it. It’s not speculation. It’s not
anecdotal. The law enforcement community is responding
extremely well to our training system and the outcomes that
we’re having because they’re getting full credit for it. If you look
at the crime data, there’s no special crime data asking, “Does the
public-safety private sector help your staff ?” That is not an
option in their data. So, all they know is “I have fewer 911 calls
in this area, I have fewer injured and killed in this area, I have
less violence in this area; therefore, I’m good.” That’s law
enforcement getting credit for our work. And that’s fine; I don’t
care. What I care about is public safety, families not living in
11
fear and terror right here in America.
WOODS: What is your relationship with the police, and has it
changed over time?
BROWN: It definitely changed. It was terrible at first. Law
enforcement was very obstruction oriented. I grew up in the
suburbs. I’m African American. The people I grew up with were
primarily Caucasian. When I came to Detroit and I was
surrounded by African American neighbors, I was really
astounded at their viewpoint towards law enforcement. I
couldn’t believe that they had no trust in them, because I had
always seen police officers as professional and helpful. I was
very shocked to find out that I was giving them bad advice by
telling them to go to the police and report what’s going on, and
go the police station, and you’ve got to work with the police. I
didn’t know that law enforcement at that time was very fixated
on one thing, and that was imprisonment of every single
African American they could under all conditions, real or false.
I really didn’t believe them until I experienced it. I was going to
police departments, and they just could not believe that they’re
being asked to help people, and they were offended and became
aggressive towards the victims of crime they were bringing into
the police department. They were aggressive towards me, but
because of my speech pattern because of where I grew up — I
call it the Bryant Gumbel — they were intimidated by me. I
12
think they thought I was a Fed.
The law enforcement officers did not believe I was poor, but I
was very poor. When I started off, I had no money. I was an
airborne paratrooper, but I did not have any money when I got
out of the military. I was a private investigator when I got out
of the military. They really did not believe that I was actually
poor and volunteering to help people and teaching self-defense
in the parks. Now obviously we’re extremely wealthy. We have
boats and Hummers and all kinds of extremely valuable vehicles
and equipment. But that came from one thing and one thing
only: sweat equity and prosperity driven by the prevention of
violence in a nonviolent way. Otherwise I would not have boats;
I would not have expensive equipment and motorcycles and a
tactical-training facility that is one of the only full-time tactical-
training facilities open seven days a week.
I have these things because I created prosperous outcomes over
and over again without losses, without injuries, without deaths,
no killings of unarmed people, of innocents. And we have been
attacked. I learned through these extremely violent conditions,
and all I can tell you is it was also because I had to. I’m
accountable. I have no qualified immunity. That means if I put
my hands on someone, it has to be legal. There has to be a way
for me to explain this as a civilian. And as a result, we’ve had no
court cases in twenty years, no lawsuits in twenty years. That is
hard to do. If you understand this industry, that is like magic.
13
I’m like the David Copperfield of public safety.
People lie. There are mental patients out here; there’s actual
criminals that lie to and about you. We use video; we use audio;
we use every kind of advanced piece of equipment to create
these outcomes. We don’t use any trust; we don’t use any words;
we use everything we can prove. We use video evidence for
everything when we’re talking about our perspective. That’s why
we don’t have those negative outcomes, not because I have a
secret island, I get the best people from. It’s because I have a
training system that does not include aggression at all against
nonaggressive people. And when dealing with aggressive
people, there’s still a way to dominate them without injuring
them. If you scale this up, it's something that can be used
worldwide, across our country and in other countries. That’s
what I designed it for. How could I take this forward as
something you could use everywhere in our country under all
jurisdictions and in other countries as well without having
negative outcomes?
We're franchising, and we're looking at ways of expanding.
We’re an NGO, so I don’t get any funding from the
government, nor do I want any, nor do I need any. We are not a
nonprofit; we are a for-profit corporation that is altruistic. So,
we help people for free who do not have money. That’s a
volunteer effort by my bodyguards and me, and it’s how I make
sure I don’t have mercenaries. Mercenaries by definition are
14
cowards. These are people who carry guns and use force for
violent purposes for money. There is nothing positive about
that. And any mercenary who is faced with a situation that is
ultimately not self-preservation oriented realizes at that moment
that it’s going to be really hard to spend money when you’re
dead. So, if what you’re doing is for money, obviously you’re not
going to be doing it when you’re not going to get any. These
guys talk tough with guns and mercenary mindsets, but as soon
as death is on the table, they’re going to run. I have to make
sure I weed those kinds of people out, and I find people that
are genuinely driven by the love of humanity, that realize there
are women, children, elderly, and families out here.
It’s all families that need help with protection — that is,
prevention of their death — and no one’s providing that. There
is no law enforcement community, no law enforcement entity
that prevents your death. There’s no prevention unit. You can’t
call the police and say, “Listen, next Thursday at 3:00 p.m.,
someone’s coming to kill me — an employee, an ex-wife, ex-
girlfriend, ex-husband — they’re coming to kill me. I’d like you
to be here to die for me or with me or possibly kill him if you
can when he comes to kill me.” That does not happen. Only on
TV. In real life, they’re going to tell you, “Call us if they show
up with their gun to kill you.” Of course, you’re dead by the
time they get there.
WOODS: “We’ll be there half an hour later.”
15
BROWN: In Detroit it’s two hours later, and that’s for a good
reason. You can’t retire if you’re dead. Police officers signed up
for a job. They put in an application, and they went to work.
Just like anyone else, they went to work. Some of them went to
college. They didn’t sign up to die in your backyard because you
decided to date someone or have a husband or wife that’s not
right or live next to people that are doing something illegal.
That’s not what they signed up for. They don’t want a new mate
in their home for their spouse. They don’t want a new dad or
mom for their children. So when you’re asking them to rush
over for your problem, you’re asking a lot of a person.
What I do is look to those people on day one when I agree to
teach them: I’m not looking for employees with the mindset of
“I just want to work for money.” And when we have those
kinds of people, we make sure we don’t put them in positions
to be trusted as bodyguards. We have basic security positions
for them on the employee side of what we do, which is related
to a security guard function, and we actually partner with a
security guard company for that to take place. And those
individuals help generate income for us to function as well, but
understand that those are not bodyguards; those are just our
security guards, and we have a way of testing and validating
them for actual protective service that is related to protecting
people’s lives.
WOODS: So, we can understand your business model a little
16
better, how exactly do you earn revenue?
BROWN: We provide security guard services to communities
and corporations. An example is when I first started. I was in a
neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, a place the police and
the citizens called Crack Alley. Basically, it was ten apartment
buildings, four hundred dwellings, maybe a hundred aggressors.
One-quarter of the population was violence-oriented gang
members; the rest were just families, senior citizens. Hundreds
of people needed help, and I couldn’t get the police to help
them, so I got volunteers. I talked to the business owners. I said,
“Give me a free apartment in your building, and I’ll train a
person to protect your building, and we’ll get rid of these home
invasions and these murders.” And every day there was a home
invasion, and every month there were murders. From the day I
started there was only one more home invasion. I caught them.
And there were no more murders from the day I started. So the
building owners suddenly went into the black for the first time
in twenty years because no one moved from the buildings and
everyone paid their rent. As a result of people paying their rent
because there were no murders, rapes, and killings, all of a
sudden, the corner store, the liquor store, the laundromat
started to flourish because they had more customers.
WOODS: What’s been your biggest challenge?
BROWN: The challenges have evolved as we’ve evolved. At
17
first it was police officers interfering in protecting the families.
They’d see us with our rifles outside of buildings. When I
started, we were very gun intensive. Not only did I have guns, I
would have the best guns — anything that was 30 caliber or
higher, 7.62, and with lots of rounds. This, I thought, was the
best approach, because I was a soldier. To a certain degree it
worked. What I found out would work better was cameras.
Believe it or not, violent criminals hate video cameras because it
takes away anonymity and proves that they’re the ones doing
something, and they know that. That actually worked way better
than a thirty-round magazine or a fifth-round magazine or
drum. So, I slowly changed over many years from guns to
cameras. They were a lot more effective. A broken camera was
more effective in dealing with drug-dealing gangs than actual
guns.
Imagine that. In my mindset, that wasn’t even a possibility. I
went to a group of fifteen drug dealers sunbathing outside of
apartment buildings full of families who were terrified, and I
said, “Gentlemen, listen. I just want to let you know the police
are taking our footage, and they are analyzing it and they are
looking for criminals who are wanted. I’m not saying you guys
are drug dealers. I’m just letting you know they’re taking our
footage and they’re looking through their warrants and they’re
taking it from us.” The gang leader says, “Thank you. Good
lookin’ out.” So, they go in the building and hide from our
18
cameras, and they’re not our enemy, because they believe I’m
giving them information that helps them.
Want the truth? The police couldn’t care less about our footage.
And by the way, we had no money. So, I had broken cameras,
and I had some volunteers from a high school that scared the
drug dealers away. What does that mean? That means when a
nurse came home with her child, when elderly people got off
the bus — these are poor people primarily — they didn’t feel
terror. That meant they weren’t going to get spit on by thugs
who were upset because the mother wouldn’t give out their
phone number. That meant no tyranny for the children who
came into these low-income homes who were paying a very
high rate of money for their apartments and getting nothing in
return from the building owners, who were not interested in
public safety, would not get them better lighting, better doors,
better locks — which I did suggest.
Another example: I put a piece of paper on the walls entering
the buildings. Imagine inner-city buildings and drug gangs
running rampant. I put these signs up, and I laminated them to
the door. I know people said that basically gang members can’t
read. Apparently, they read very well. I typed this document up,
put it on the wall, made it look official. It said, “Notice to all
police. You must call this number because there are undercover
armed security posing as drug dealers in these buildings.”

19
And I put my cell phone number up there. The truth is police
aren’t going to read anything on the wall, and they’re definitely
not going to call us for any reason, so they didn’t. But the drug
dealers stopped trusting each other. They were terrified of each
other. They thought each one of them was actually one of us.
I had no one with guns running around undercover. That was
just a lie. That lie caused them to not get along, to not want to
be in the hallways, to not talk to each other, which once again
led to a higher quality of life, safer for the families. Hundreds
of families with little children, older people, senior citizens
living in terror now have a quieter life because there are fewer
drug dealers and thugs. These aren’t drug dealers who are
dealing drugs to other adults; these are guys who are dealing
drugs just so they could get more bullets, more guns, and more
ability to hurt people. There’s a difference. There are real drug
dealers. These were not them. These were like thug dealers and
gangs of them. But we just made them psychologically not want
to be there.
The final one I’m going to tell you: I have a video that shows a
thug in broad daylight. I get out of a car, and it’s just getting to
be dusk, and there are eight drug dealers on a corner, just like in
the movies. There's one really big guy with a big afro, 6'8”, looks
like a lineman from a football team, and the other guy has long
hair, looks like a pimp. They step forward from this group of
eight drug dealers when I say to them, “You’ve got to clear the
20
area,” on a PA system. I’m in an unmarked van, and I’m in
uniform, but I said it. There’s a spotlight, and it’s just getting to
be dusk, and this is on a major street in Detroit very close to
where our mayor lives. And these two drug dealers get off the
curb, and they yell, “We’re not moving.” So, I approach them,
and as we approach, the one guy kind of reaches forward
towards me. You can see me on film take a baton, smash it
across his shin, and you hear a cracking noise. He stutters, lifts
me off the ground. I choke him out, and I get him into this van,
and I take him away, while another staff member takes the other
guy away.
These two men are seen being choked out, screaming, gurgling,
and they’re never seen again. The other drug dealers on the
corner never come back to that corner ever again. That corner
had had drug dealers up until 1994, 1995 — since the ’60s. This
is the first time it’s been clear. If you go there today, twenty
years later, there are no drug dealers on this corner. And the
building owners, some of whom flew in from Florida, very
wealthy people, came in to terminate me because they heard
that I had choked these drug dealers out and disappeared them.
There was actually an investigation launched, I learned later.
They called us the body snatchers because we snatched these
guys off the street, and no one ever saw them again.
They fired me immediately. They said, “You know what? You’re
disappearing drug dealers. We’re going to terminate you right
21
now.” I said, “Why are you going to terminate me?” They said
it’s because you can’t do that. I said, “Everything I did was
legal.” They demanded: “How is it possible for you to legally
abduct people in the city streets and drag them away?” I said, “I
didn’t abduct anyone, I didn’t hit anyone, and I didn’t take
anyone away against their will.” They were like, “What do you
mean?”
The two men we struck, the two men I choked, the two men we
dragged away, these men essentially are my students, a part of
my academy. They were acting like drug dealers. For four hours
prior to this, we were driving up to them and giving them
money — no drugs, just money — so the other drug dealers
thought they were real drug dealers. So, it looked real to the
actual drug dealers. The reason one of them was 6'8” with a big
afro and looked like a football player was that he was a Wayne
State University football player who joined our organization.
The other guy was actually a post office worker, and he was
posing as this drug dealer. And we beat them with rubber sticks.
There’s no actual metal or anything. They weren’t hurt. The next
day they got haircuts because we have a very strict dress code.
The next day they were in uniform with haircuts, so nobody
recognized them.
And the drug dealers stayed away. There was no violence.
There’s no court case. We cleaned up the area using psychology,
not physicality. That’s the moral of the story: nonviolence
22
works. You just have to outthink the violent criminals. It
changes their behavior. We can create a nonviolent outcome just
by having strategies to inspire people to think differently.
What we specialize in is nonviolence. The prosecutors and
domestic-violence shelters, domestic-violence units, domestic-
violence courts for serious domestic-violence situations have
used us actively for the past fifteen years, keeping people alive.
We’ve been doing it for twenty years, but the actual
organizations found out about us about fifteen years ago.
The bodyguards in my organization, in order for me to train
them, have to agree to volunteer to protect people the same way
they would their own sister, their own mother, their own
daughter. These are primarily domestic-violence victims. Quite a
few are elderly, and in some cases whole families are being
aggressed against. That means there’s a man at the house, there’s
a wife, and there’s children, and they need protection. There is
no protection in any city. And we work out in the country with
country people as well as inner-city people.
We have a multicultural staff. We have Christians, Muslims; we
have African Americans; we have Caucasian people. We have
every kind of person. We have a lot of people from other
countries, all working together toward one thing, and that’s to
create a peaceful place for people to live nonviolently. And
again, we work in all communities. We’ve helped families in
23
Canada, too.
One lady we’re actually working with — and this is only the
second time this has happened, where the law enforcement
community is directly coordinating with us to provide
protection for an actual crime victim — our objective is to keep
this lady alive. She was shot three times in her driveway because
she was going to testify against the man who robbed her at an
ATM machine. What happens normally is these women, these
old people who are shot, get scared and leave the community
and don’t testify. This family is leaving the community. They
have enough money that they can move wherever they want;
they just liked living in Detroit up until now. So, they’re moving.
But they also are still going to testify once she gets out of the
hospital, and we’re going to protect them to and from their
homes as they move their things so they don’t get killed just
moving their items. Because if this woman is killed these three
men could not go to prison. That’s how our legal system works.
Instead of complaining about police and no protection and
police brutality, we create conditions by training police officers
how to overcome fear by having tactics and skills that allow
them to dominate people without injuring them, without killing
them, in a very easy way. We teach a system based in
biomechanics, not based in physicality. It’s been used in real life
hundreds of thousands of times here in the Detroit area. For
twenty years we have used these techniques on actual violent
24
aggressors — not on people who don’t want to get a ticket, not
on people who are drunk having a bad day, but gangsters, thugs,
criminals, violent men who come to kill people. Our techniques
work, and they’re battle-proven in America under extreme
conditions of violence where there are laws.
I’ve been teaching for over twenty years and physically
protecting people in force-on-force violence for twenty years.
That knowledge has allowed me to develop this system. It’s not
theoretical. I say that because I get a lot of feedback from
people who think differently, and that’s because they haven’t
been in situations covered in blood and having to explain
themselves to law enforcement that are going to come to that
situation. The worst thing you can do is leave that situation. You
need to call police, you need to wait for them, and you need to
tell them what’s going on before someone else reinvents your
situation, rearticulates it, and now you’re in court. You would
rather get wounded and go home than go to prison for the rest
of your life because you thought you were doing the right thing,
and it was rearticulated or interpreted differently than it
happened, and you’ve got to go to prison.
So, we make sure civilians, especially business owners and
regular families, understand the law and how it’s interpreted and
then give them more tools. We give them psychological
understanding so they cannot just hope for, but create a
nonviolent outcome with their neighbor, with their employees,
25
with their problematic family member, with a family member
who has a mental problem or drugs that’s out of control. How
do you handle them without killing them? There’s a way to do
that, and we do it in real life. We have done it countless times.
There are solutions. We need to stop complaining, pull
ourselves up by our own bootstraps of knowledge and skill, and
just adopt a different way of thinking in order to have a
different outcome. It’s a paradigm shift in public safety. Threat
management is a new way of creating a nonviolent societal
structure by using psychology as opposed to physicality to
resolve issues.

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26
 Chapter 2
Private Police?
with Bruce Benson
Bruce Benson is professor emeritus of economics at
Florida State University. This chapter is drawn from
episode 145 of the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: A lot of libertarians are likely to know about you

because of The Enterprise of Law, a great and very important
book. But I think To Serve and Protect is equally valuable. Both
books cover topics that I think even most free-market people
want to run away from, because even they aren't quite sure the
free market can handle. Law (the subject of the first book) and
law enforcement (the subject of the second, and of our
discussion today) are classic cases of so-called “public goods.”
Give us the one- or two-minute explanation of why our
superficially plausible belief that government has to provide
these services might not be right.

BENSON: There are actually a few reasons. One is that

everything in the area of law enforcement, including criminal
law, has at one time or another been handled by the private
sector quite adequately. In some places it's occurring even today.
The second reason is that in fact law and law enforcement are
not public goods. Public goods are supposed to be goods that
27
everyone has equal access to and that the private sector will not
provide. As I said, the private sector does provide these things.
Furthermore, the idea of equal access to justice is just not true.
We have scarce resources being used in law enforcement and
adjudication and prosecution and in punishment, so the use of
these resources for one thing means they're not being effectively
used for something else. There are trade-offs. The vast majority
of crimes that are reported to police are never resolved. The
vast majority of crimes committed are never reported to police.
So, the belief that law and law enforcement are public goods
simply doesn't stand up to reality.

WOODS: I think some people assume that the government-

supplied system we have today is just the way things have always
been. There's always been a publicly supplied police force, and
it's engaged in the kinds of activities that it does today, and it
throws people in prison. But that's not really the case.

BENSON: No, in fact it's far from the truth. The first true
public police force in the United States was created in the 1840s,
I think. Before that, most policing was done by community
arrangements and that sort of thing. If we go back to England,
the first public police were instituted a little earlier than in the
United States. But going back through history, we see that
virtually all of the property and violent offenses that we think
of as crimes today were actually treated more like torts, where
28
voluntary community organizations pursued offenders and
supported each other to the degree necessary to bring an
offender to trial. And the trials typically resulted in
compensation payments to the victims or restitution. So, the
belief that we've always had a public criminal justice system is
false.

The shift that we see in England predominantly occurred after

the Norman invasion, when you get the establishment of a very
strong kingship. And the first use of the word crime indicated
that the payments by the offender went to the king instead of to
the victim, so a distinction developed between civil and criminal
at that point, but it was about who got the money. And over
time the kings expanded the scope of crime so they could get
more and more of the money. Of course, the result was that the
private arrangements, the voluntary arrangements to pursue
offenders and so on, broke down because people were no
longer getting compensation for the harms that they endured.
So ultimately after centuries of the king trying to force local
communities to voluntarily perform criminal policing and their
refusal to do so, we start seeing the development of public
institutions for that purpose.

WOODS: You have a chapter in here looking at the process by

which the public sector came to be so involved in this area. It
punctures the myths that most of us have been led to believe:
29
that the reason that the government is involved is it's deeply
concerned for justice in the abstract; it has no interest of its
own. As you pointed out just a moment ago, the real
explanation might be slightly more mundane than that.

BENSON: One problem I always have with these public-good

or public-interest arguments really is that public officials, people
who work for the government, are just like everyone else. They
have their own objectives. They're concerned about job security,
they're concerned about taking care of their families, they may
be concerned about the wages they get or the kind of power or
influence they have, and so on. So, the idea that public officials
are both omnipotent and also totally altruistic is simply a
misrepresentation of the human mind.

WOODS: Let me read a passage from page 224. You say:

After the first true public police force was established in
New York in 1844, other cities followed suit shortly. From
the outset, however, these police departments were used
primarily for political purposes. Crime control was at best a
secondary concern. First of all, local elected officials used
their police departments as a way to reward political
supporters. A newly elected mayor typically fired virtually
the entire police department and replaced it with his own
supporters. Bribery was often necessary to obtain a
position on the police force. That practice was financially
30
 reasonable given the potential payoff from police
corruption. At any rate, mayors and their political machines
then used their police departments to control the city for
their own benefit.

And you point out that it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that

this is when the modern private security industry developed,
apparently as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the
public provision. Thank heavens, Professor Benson, we've done
away with police corruption today.

BENSON: Yeah, that's fortunate, except for the repeated

stories virtually every week, it seems like, in newspapers about
police corruption someplace.

WOODS: We've been tiptoeing around the key question, which

would be: why should people favor this? It seems like a leap in
the dark. Yes, there's some historical precedent for it, but that's
way, way in the past.

BENSON: First of all, it's not in the past. Today in the United
States it's estimated that we employ probably three times as
many private security personnel as we do public police. The
private security industry is one of the fastest-growing industries
in the country and has been for quite a long time, as people turn
to private alternatives to try to make their property or their
31
persons safe. So, it isn't just a thing of the past.

Today, for instance, the railroad system in the United States and
Canada is policed by a private policing organization that has full
police powers. It turns out that they resolve many more crimes
committed against the railroads than public police do for crimes
against the people they're supposed to be protecting. They also
have a larger portion of the crimes committed that are reported
to them, because the railroads expect their police to do a good
job — whereas the public citizen often expects no response and
no consequences from reporting to the public police, except
perhaps that they get hassled and have to go talk to different
people and miss work and that sort of thing.

WOODS: What about the complaint we might anticipate that if

we privatized security and police the rich would be favored?

BENSON: First of all, when I talk about privatization, I don't

just mean markets. I mean voluntary organizations as well.
There are voluntary neighborhood watches and that sort of
thing all over the country, in poor communities as well as in
more wealthy ones. And secondly, when there's an opportunity
for serving a segment of the market that isn't being effectively
served, entrepreneurs in the United States try hard to find a way
to do it.

32
One example is a private security firm that is headquartered in
Tampa, Florida. An individual recognized that the low-income
housing areas of the city were not being effectively policed by
the public, so he started his firm with a $2,000 loan from his
father and offered various landlords the service of protecting
the housing projects that they had, as well as their tenants.
Landlords, it turned out, found this was a tremendous deal for
them, because it of course reduced turnover rates, vandalism, all
those sorts of things. And the tenants also benefited
dramatically as crime rates in these housing projects declined by
an estimated 50 percent. Someone will say the tenants had to
pay for that because they're paying rent to the landlords. But if
the cost to the landlord of things like vandalism and turnover
and those sorts of things falls enough, the tenants end up not
paying any more for a much more secure environment.

This particular individual very quickly expanded his firm into

several other cities. He's written a book about how to go about
doing this, and it's been a dramatic example of the private
sector protecting the poor much more effectively than the
public sector does.

WOODS: I think people who are inclined to believe in the free

market will hear what you're saying and possibly revise their
own skepticism about whether the market can handle police
services. But if I were talking to somebody on the so-called
33
progressive left, where there is great suspicion of the private
sector in general, the idea that someone would want security
provided by the private sector would be viewed as hopelessly
naive, that there would be abuses of power the likes of which
we could not imagine. What would you say to that?

BENSON: First of all, a private security firm is liable for

damages that arise through abuses by its employees. They're
subject to lawsuits. So, their incentives are very strong in terms
of hiring the right kind of people who are not going to be
abusive and making sure they do not behave abusively once
hired. On the other hand, we see things like the Rodney King
incident cropping up all the time with public police, in part
because they're rarely liable for those sorts of things. They
might be reprimanded, and sometimes they might even lose
their job, but they're not going to be sued into bankruptcy. The
public officials who run these police programs generally aren't
liable at all. Taxpayers are sometimes liable for such damages,
but it's very difficult to sue the public sector anymore. So, the
incentives are there for abuse, and I believe the level of abuse is
much higher in the public arena than it is in the private arena.
People forget that we have a legal system where abuses by
private individuals can result in substantial costs to the
individual. I think that oversight really is a big flaw in the typical
arguments against privatization of anything. Sure, we have abuse
occasionally by private individuals, but I think one response
34
would be: do a search on the web looking for police brutality,
police corruption, and police abuse, and then do a search
looking for private-security corruption and private-security
abuse and brutality. I suspect you're going to find far more
stories about public police than you are private security. And as
I said before, there are about three times as many private
security as public police in the country.

WOODS: Also, I don't think it's particularly controversial to say

that judges seem to have an inclination to give the public police
the benefit of the doubt, by and large, which I don't think they
would do if it were some private security company. I think they
would look more impartially in that case. Public police, by
contrast, tend to be thought of, particularly in the courts, as
being a special class of people, and it's your word against the
police, so they're inclined to support the police.
You're proposing a system that would be based less on
retribution and more on restitution. Can you elaborate on that?
I think that's the most attractive part of all this.

BENSON: As I pointed out earlier, the earliest forms of law

and law enforcement that we find involve voluntary
organizations pursuing compensation or restitution for victims.
We've totally moved away from that. We call it criminal justice
now; we don't call it victims’ justice. There's very little concern
in a relative sense about trying to make the victim whole or at
35
least compensating the victim to a degree, compared to the
concern about making the criminal pay. But the offender isn't
paying anything to the victim; he's just spending his time in
prison or something like that.

My proposal is to refocus the system on victim justice, victim

restitution. That would create much stronger incentives for
victims to report crimes, much stronger incentives for the
private sector-like insurance companies and individual
consumers, individual communities that form joint policing
arrangements, and so on, to pursue offenders, because they are
expecting compensation from the offenders. Obviously you
can't collect compensation from everybody, but I think if we
look at what's going on around the world in terms of prison
work programs, with firms going into prisons and contracting
with prisoners to work in secure facilities and so on, we would
see that, in fact, it's quite possible for a lot of criminals to work
off their debts to victims over time. So, I would expect an
increase in these kinds of private policing, private security,
private investigation, private contracting with offenders in order
to use their time productively, rather than just locking them up
and leaving them sitting in jail.

I think this refocus would have a tremendous impact

throughout the entire process. And of course, if more victims
are reporting crimes and more criminals are being caught, as
36
with the railroad police, then crime should fall through
deterrence effects. So, the whole system would improve.

WOODS: I understand you have an article coming out this

summer in the Independent Review, which is the academic
publication of the Independent Institute, in which you're taking
the thesis of this book and updating some of the data. Are the
trends positive or negative?

BENSON: I think they're very positive. We've seen very

interesting developments in the area of adjudication — for
instance, the development of victim-offender mediation
programs and community mediation programs that are
cropping up around the world and handling more and more
kinds of crimes. When they first started, they were typically
minor crimes or juvenile crimes or something like that, but now
we're seeing some of these victim-offender mediation programs
dealing with felonies, even serious ones. About 92 percent of
them result in an agreement between the victim and the
offender that involves compensation for the victim, and
something like 90 percent of all of those contracts are fulfilled.
So, the potential there is tremendous. And of course, we have a
huge private adjudication process in contract law and labor
arbitration and so on anyway.

Another example: There was a reaction to the private bail-

37
bonding market, where individuals, if they want to be released
before their trial, had to pay a bond. So, a public alternative was
created. And initially there was a big shift to the public
alternative. But judges have been so dissatisfied with that, that
the portion of released prisoners before trial that are being dealt
with by the private bail industry is growing over time due to
judicial pressures.

So, in addition to private security, we're seeing private

investigation and pursuit. We're seeing private adjudication.
We're seeing private firms contracting with prisoners for their
labor. All of these things are happening in increasing amounts.

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38
 Chapter 3
The Paramilitary Police
with Will Grigg
Will Grigg (1963-2017) was a prolific author on many
subjects, but especially police misconduct and abuse. This
chapter is drawn from episode 51 of the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: When I was growing up, I was suspicious of

government, I didn’t believe what they told me, I didn’t support
their farm subsidies, etc. But when it came to the local police, I
felt like if you didn’t give them your unconditional support then
you were some kind of commie. I don’t think I’m the only one
who felt that way who now thinks: I’ve been burned; I shouldn’t
have been so stupid and naive. Do you think that over the past
twenty years or so as I’ve come of age, I’ve gotten wiser or that
things just have noticeably gotten worse?

GRIGG: It really is a predicament to decide which of those two

propositions is true. Are the police more abusive today? Or are
the abuses simply more visible because of the advent of
decentralized information gathering and publicity through
YouTube and social media? I suspect that we’re dealing with a
little of each.

39
Like yourself, Tom, I’m somebody who, perhaps two or three
decades ago, had a rather winsome perspective on the local
police. I subscribed entirely to the concept of Officer Friendly,
in large measure because as a young man I myself aspired to
become a police detective. I spent a great deal of time in the
company of law enforcement officers. I’m talking about
municipal police or sheriff ’s deputies. I actually studied that for
a while academically.

One of the things that I’ve come to conclude is that starting

probably in the early 1970s and then accelerating dramatically in
the early 1990s, you had a sort of forced-draft re-composition
of the police culture, the law enforcement culture, where some
of the things that were obvious even then, some of the trends
that were unfortunate, amplified dramatically. That would be, of
course, the militarization of police tactics and hardware and,
more importantly, the militarization of their mindsets.

But, like yourself, Tom, I’m somebody who considers himself

to be somewhat chastened at the memory of some of the
attitudes I had about the police decades ago. And I should have
been paying more attention. Somebody once said that a
conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality. You
could say that a civil libertarian is a conservative who’s
discovered that the police are not our friends.

40
WOODS: As I say, I’m kind of embarrassed now when I look
at how silly I was in the past. That’s not to say you can’t find
honorable people in every profession, but the fact is that a
government employee is a government employee. You’re not
supposed to have an “I’m going to salute” type of attitude. You
have to have a skeptical attitude.

What do you think has been driving it? Is there a factor that
accounts for it? Is it that they’ve been, little by little, seeing what
they can get away with? And they’ve grown to conclude they
can get away with an awful lot because no one responds? Is it
the drug war that’s the driving factor? What accounts for this,
do you think?

GRIGG: The drug war, of course, I think is a very important

breaking point between what had existed before about 1971 or
’72 and what we have now. This was declared by the Nixon
administration for reasons of cynical political opportunism.
They wanted a wedge issue generationally. They thought that
going after the stereotypical denizens of the drug culture would
have multiple benefits when you’re talking about their Southern
strategy in appealing to the so-called silent majority.

I think they used that as a way of rebranding their effort in law-

enforcement-friendly terms, law-and-order terms that would
appeal to blue-collar ethnic Democrats. As a result, you had the
41
SWAT concept that had been pioneered back in 1968 by the
LAPD, using a concept that had actually been field tested in
Vietnam.

That’s an important aspect of the story, too. The SWAT

concept really took root and flourished – about 1971, ’72, or ’73
– and then a generation later you had an escalation under Bill
Clinton, who came from a rather different social cohort than
Richard Nixon in terms of his personal behavior and his
personal acquaintance with drugs. But they militarized the war
on drugs dramatically during the interim. George H. W. Bush, as
the vice president, somebody who had been an employee of the
CIA – which is the world’s largest drug cartel, as far as I can tell
– in the 1980s presided over this effort to carve out exceptions
to Posse Comitatus to allow direct military involvement in drug-
interdiction efforts.

Waco was another important milestone. The drug warriors

introduced the drug nexus there by imputing to the Branch
Davidians a supposed involvement in methamphetamines. The
Branch Davidians were actually very much opposed to
methamphetamines and other narcotic drugs. But Governor
Richards of Texas took advantage of one of the Posse
Comitatus exceptions that had been pioneered by the
Republican presidential administration in the 1980s, so that
there was a drug nexus to the investigation of the Branch
42
Davidians, which allowed her to get Special Forces involved
directly in planning the ATF raid, which she authorized, and the
subsequent FBI siege of the Branch Davidians.

A couple of years later you had Janet Reno, who distinguished

herself by immolating the Branch Davidians in April 1993,
creating the Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO)
program, which is used to send surplus war hardware from the
Pentagon directly to local law enforcement bodies.

So, I think that’s driving this to a large extent. Rather than

defining the needs and finding the technology that might be
suitable, because all this hardware is available from the Pentagon
you have police chiefs and county sheriffs saying, “Because the
hardware’s available, we’ll reconfigure the mission to meet the
availability of the hardware.”

So, they get all kinds of military and war-grade munitions from
the Pentagon. They have Special Forces operators training their
SWAT teams, their tactical teams. Suddenly, rather than seeing
themselves as peace officers, you have police officers and
deputy sheriffs seeing themselves as combatants fighting a
counterinsurgency war that’s a 360-degree battle zone. That
started the development.

43
WOODS: I had Carla Gericke of the Free State Project on the
program not too long ago. The authorities in Concord, New
Hampshire, wanted to get – and apparently did get – an
armored vehicle because they needed to protect themselves
against the terrible Free Stater’s and all these other domestic
threats.

Let’s talk about the article you wrote about a place probably no
one listening to this program has heard of, the five-thousand-
person town of Preston, Idaho. You would think, given that
Preston is a fairly tranquil place – there’s no violent crime there
– they wouldn’t need a militarized police force. But I love the
way you explain how the police chief says that this is precisely
why we need to make sure that we have this sort of militarized
force: you might be deceived into thinking that there’s no
prospect of violence here, and you’d be wrong.

Can you tell us about this? I think that is such a classic,

illustrative example of what’s going on in many neighborhoods.

GRIGG: As you point out, Tom, there is no measurable violent

crime in Preston, Idaho. It’s culturally homogenous; it’s rural.
It’s the nearest equivalent to the mythical Mayberry you are
likely to find. Sheriff Taylor, of course, did not have an MRAP,
which is a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, and he
gave one bullet to his deputy, and he was very, very leery about
44
the disposition of that ordnance when he gave it to Deputy
Sheriff Fife.

Chief Geddes really should not have a police department to

begin with. They don’t need a police department in this town of
five thousand in southeastern Idaho. It’s the county seat of
Franklin County, which means that the sheriff ’s office is right
there. But Chief Geddes, like several other police chiefs in the
state of Idaho, found out through this 1033 program – part of
the LESO program – that these MRAPs were being made
available.

There are about 2,700 of them that the Department of

Homeland Security has now made available for domestic use, so
we filed an application and got one for “free,” as he put it to
me. “It’s free. Granted we don’t have a whole lot of violent
crime here, but you can never tell when we’re going to have a
Columbine erupt. Or perhaps we’ll have some kind of a siege
involving some restive splinter faction of the patriot movement,
or some such nonsense might erupt here in Preston.”

“Besides that,” he said, rather prickly and defensive as I asked

him these questions, “why aren’t the people in Preston this
important? You are seeing MRAPs being delivered to police
departments in Nampa, Idaho, which is about eighty thousand
people, which is not a very big city, not a very high crime rate.
45
And in Boise, they just acquired an MRAP. That’s a town where
the violent crime rate has gone down every year since 2000, and
it was less than half the national average in violent crime to
begin with. Why are these people more important than the
people in Preston?”

I tried to point out to him that you’re not dealing with

technology that would be terribly beneficial to the public at
large. It would conduce to officer safety, which is the highest
priority, apparently, for every law enforcement department in
the country.

He’s trying to say that by making officers safer, you’re making

the public safer. Of course, there’s a disconnect there. It’s an
undistributed-middle argument, if you will. It depends upon
what the officers are doing, whether making them safer will
make the public safer. His rationale was, “It’s free to the
taxpayers.” But that’s not true, since they have to maintain the
thing. It is a tremendous fuel hog; it gets fewer than five miles
to the gallon. You have to train people in maintenance. And you
have to invest some money in the upkeep of the vehicle itself.
But, because it was free, he got one.

The same thing happened with Nampa. The Nampa Police

Department got one. And the Boise Police Department recently

46
got one. They’re being given away to even smaller county
sheriffs’ offices in rural counties across the country.

This is, once again, a really good example of how the

technology is driving the perceived need. These people were
crying out for militarized hardware to deal with a violent-crime
problem. They are trying to define a problem in order to justify
the acquisition.

WOODS: I’m not trying to be flippant here, but doesn’t it seem

that, according to his reasoning, there would be no reason for
any place in the country, any police department, not to have one
of these? If Preston gets one, why wouldn’t any old backwater
get one? I don’t mean to insult Preston, but, for heaven’s sake
it’s not exactly ground zero for danger in the country.

GRIGG: Yeah, if it will play in Preston, it should play anyplace

else. They’ve really set a marker here that’s alarming or should
be alarming. If you have a town of five thousand with no
measurable violent crime rate and then militarize the police
department there, then I suppose the question is, “If it’s like
that in the greenwood, what’s it like in the dry?”

WOODS: Tell us what happened in Deming, New Mexico, not

too long ago, with a guy named David Eckert.

47
GRIGG: I’m persuaded that David Eckert was singled out for
retaliation because he had committed contempt of cop in
September of last year. He has become famous in one of the
most unimaginable ways. He was subjected to object rape at the
orders of the police last January.

He was stopped after supposedly rolling through a stop sign as

he pulled out of a Walmart parking lot. The police officer, who
allegedly witnessed this violation, did not stop him, but radioed
ahead to another police officer, who appears to have been lying
in wait for Mr. Eckert. He appears to have been under
surveillance. Within a few minutes after he had refused a
citation for this moving violation, he was told he was free to go,
and they pulled the infamous Detective Columbo routine: “Just
one more question I’d like to ask you.”

Then it happened in September of last year, just a few blocks

away from his house. He lives in another town just outside of
Deming, in a different county. He was stopped just short of his
house and the police officer said, “You’ve got a cracked
windshield. I’m going to write you a warning citation, and you’re
free to go.” As he turned to go, Eckert was given that Columbo
routine once again: “Just one more question.” Eckert said, “You
said I was free to go. I have no intention of answering your
questions. Goodbye.” The police officer professed to be
offended and said, “That was rude. Now we’re going to search
48
your car. We’re going to search your person for narcotics.” He
called in a K-9 dog, and they seized his car and kept it for a day.
They searched his car. They searched his person. Found no
weapon, no narcotics. That happened last September.

In January this year [2014], the same kind of thing happened,

but this time they brought in about a dozen or more police
officers from three separate jurisdictions, including two who
were part of a federalized, multi-jurisdictional narcotics
enforcement task force, which is headquartered there in
Deming, New Mexico. This is a town of about twenty thousand
people, I think, and it’s afflicted with an outpost of the
Homeland Security Department that’s involved in the border
narcotics enforcement team. You have a couple of people who
are cross-deputized to this federal task force, one of whom is a
K-9 operator with a K-9 that isn’t certified to conduct drug tests
in New Mexico, as it turns out.

They once again seized his car and seized his person. They said
that he was not under arrest, but he was handcuffed and put in
a police vehicle and not allowed to call anybody. Which means
you’re under arrest. They obtained a warrant from Deputy
District Attorney Dougherty, and they requested permission in
the search warrant not only to search the car, but also to search
the person of Mr. Eckert.

49
Why was the search of his person warranted? Because one of
the people with this task force said that Mr. Eckert was known
in the county where he’s from to be somebody who smuggles
narcotics in his rectum. This was either a rumor or a lie, but in
neither case does it constitute probable cause. But it was taken
as if it constituted probable cause. He was taken in Deming to
an emergency treatment facility – an emergency room, basically
– and the attending physician said, “I’m not going to take part
in this because what you’re doing is illegal, it’s unethical, it’s
unconstitutional, it’s immoral, and it’s wrong.”

The police officers called the attorney, and he suggested that

they go to another town outside the county, where apparently
they have a standing relationship with people in the emergency
room to do this kind of invasive search of a person’s body,
because they had done so on at least one other occasion. Mr.
Eckert was taken out of the county, meaning that the search
warrant was invalidated. The search warrant was issued for the
hours of 6:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night the day of his
arrest. It wasn’t described as an arrest, but by the time he got
there it was almost 9:00, and he underwent an abdominal X-ray
that cleared him. There was nothing to be found. Not being
satisfied with this, the police demanded, and the medical
practitioners carried out, several invasive digital probes of his
body cavity, then several forced enemas, and ultimately a

50
colonoscopy, which is an invasive surgical procedure. This all
took place after 10:00 at night. Once again, outside the county.

Assuming that the search warrant was valid – and it wasn’t; it

was based on rumor – the search warrant was invalidated by the
place where they had taken him and the fact they had
transgressed the time limit. They kept him for fourteen hours
and forced him to undergo all these involuntary probes of his
intimate anatomy – which means this is rape. Anytime
somebody probes involuntarily, and without any kind of legal
justification, the intimate anatomy of another person, it is a
form of object rape.

The crowning indignity was that after he was released from the
hospital and had to endure the mocking and derisive comments
of his captors, Mr. Eckert went home – and began to receive
bills from the hospital. Six thousand dollars they expected him
to pay, for the privilege of being subjected to this procedure,
which, once again, amounts to a sexual violation.

Deming, New Mexico, is an interesting little town in that, as I

pointed out, you’ve got this node of Homeland Security and
this border enforcement and narcotics enforcement task force,
which, about five or six years ago, came under scrutiny by the
Department of Homeland Security because the people running
this local outpost of the war on drugs were embezzling taxpayer
51
funds and then allowing so-called “controlled buys” of heroin
that were in no sense controlled. They were double dipping or
triple dipping into various accounts in order to pay off a
protected drug dealer as a supposed confidential informant, but
would use that informant to build up the statistically impressive
number of arrests and so-called controlled operations, whereby
he could bring the heroin across the border from Mexico and
then simply sell it.

This was simply the price of doing business there in order to

help their careers prosper. The whistleblower who reported
what was going on, of course, was fired by ICE (Immigration
and Customs Enforcement in the Homeland Security
Department). There was no punishment meted out to the
official miscreants who were conducting this little scam in the
town of Deming. But that’s the task force that employed at least
two of the so-called local police officers who were involved in
this episode of grotesque sexual abuse of an innocent man. It’s
the sort of abuse that is begotten plentifully by the so-called
“war on drugs.” It’s actually a fairly common thing to see people
who are pulled over for routine traffic violations find
themselves on the receiving end of this type of treatment by
police.

There have been several episodes in Texas involving roadside

body-cavity searches of women after routine traffic stops, and
52
there are several cases I’ve reported out of the state of Utah in
which people have been forced to undergo involuntary
catheterization to inspect their blood alcohol content or inspect
their bloodstream for evidence of the ingestion of government-
proscribed substances.

It really is a fairly routine thing now for the police under the
rubric of the war on drugs to begin conducting what amounts
to government-licensed sexual molestation of innocent people.

WOODS: Let me play devil’s advocate – not to the extent of

defending anal-cavity searches or anything like that, obviously,
but I’m trying to imagine what the average person hearing the
details of this case would say. I think that person would say, “I
agree that this is despicable and disgusting, and that there may
have been motives at work other than protecting the public. But
we are talking about a handful of cases. When somebody like
Will Grigg focuses our attention so single-mindedly on these
abuse cases, it causes the public to have a general contempt for
the police, which is not good for law and order.” How would
you answer that sort of Archie Bunker response?

GRIGG: I would plead no contest to the charge that I’m trying

to cultivate contempt for the police, because I think that the
behavior of the police in most circumstances is contemptible
and, furthermore, contemptuous of the public they supposedly
53
serve. These are anecdotal examples, but they do accumulate to
the point where, if you’ve got half a dozen or more instances
of this sort spread across the broad geography of the country,
you’re not talking necessarily about something that would
simply be the skimming’s off the stagnant pond of corruption
in a place like Deming, New Mexico. You have Deming. You
have Texas. You have Utah. You have California. And when you
see this sort of thing proliferate across the country, of course,
you should ask somebody who offers that criticism how many
high-profile episodes of this type of abuse we are going to
countenance before it becomes obvious that it is a policy.

These officers are never held accountable in the sense of facing

criminal charges for this type of aggressive abuse of another
human being. They are never held accountable in that sense.
They might suffer some kind of administrative sanction, which
usually involves a paid vacation, or perhaps a letter of
reprimand.

The question I always ask is, under what circumstances is it right

for any human being to do this to another human being,
irrespective of the way the perpetrator is attired or whatever
title he might claim? It’s not a question of how you’re dressed.
It’s not a question of your occupational title. It’s a question of
what you’re doing to another person. In what circumstance is it
proper for anybody to pull over another human being to the
54
side of the road and subject him to that type of misbehavior?
Too many people have accepted the idea that there is some
special status enjoyed by people in government-issued costumes
called uniforms that elevates them above the rest of the
population. I’m trying to help people confront that assumption
here.

The promise made by Robert Peale, when he created the

Metropolitan Police in London back in the early 1800s, was that
the police would be just like the citizens. He said the police are
the public, and the public are the police, and the reason that
we’re going to have a constabulary here is so that certain people
by way of vocation will do what all citizens should do in terms
of protecting the rights and property of the innocent. But,
unfortunately, baked into the cake of that proposition was this
paramilitary order that is eventually now being revealed as the
whole purpose of the exercise. All the promises that were made
in terms of keeping this system under check and making it
subordinate to law have been dispelled, and what remains now
is this paramilitary institution of privileged aggressors. I am
trying to help people understand that that is simply unsuitable
for a civilized and free society.

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55
 Chapter 4
The Shocking Kill Rate of American Police
with Edward Stringham
Edward Stringham is President of the American Institute
for Economic Research in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, and the Davis Professor of Economic
Innovation at Trinity College. This chapter is drawn from
episode 426 of the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: This article of yours in the New York Daily News has
gotten quite a bit of attention: "America's Out-of-Control Cop
Kill Rate." You begin by talking about the homicide rate in the
US. Out of any given hundred thousand Americans, five will be
victims and five will commit homicide. That's our baseline
number that we're using when we then look at the police.
Before your article, I had not seen anyone compare this baseline
homicide rate to the police homicide rate. What did you find?
STRINGHAM: It's actually upwards of over 145 per 100,000,
so we're talking about a 30 times higher kill rate for the average
officer than the average American. We all hear the anecdotes in
the media about police killing individual people. We don't often
hear too much about the total numbers. The government
doesn't report very accurately the statistics of how many people
they kill. But over the past couple of years we've got some good
data sources: KilledByThePolice.net and the Washington Post are
56
starting to report that. How many police are out there, and at
what rate are they killing? They're killing at far higher rates than
we see in the most homicidal countries in the entire world.
WOODS: Is this a problem with the police everywhere, or is it
particularly concentrated in the United States?
STRINGHAM: We can compare the American police kill rate
to the citizen kill rate. We talked about it being 5 per 100,000. In
most European countries it’s about 1 per 100,000 people. So,
we're talking about an over 140 times higher kill rate of
American police than the average citizen. The average citizens
in the most dangerous countries, Venezuela and Honduras, have
homicide rates of 54 and 90 per 100,000. So the American
police are killing at 1.5 or 2.5 times the rate of the people in the
most dangerous countries.
And then we can talk about how it compares to police kill rates
around the world, and it looks terrible there, too. In most
European countries and elsewhere, there's a much lower police
kill rate. In places like England, they kill 1.6 per 100,000. In
most other European countries, it's also less than 10 per
100,000. So we're talking about police kill rates that are very
much in line with the regular citizenry, whereas in the United
States it's magnitudes higher. In Iceland, police have reportedly
killed one person in their entire history, whereas in the United
States they're killing 1,000 people per year, a really high figure
comparatively.
57
WOODS: You will no doubt encounter the objection that some
individuals who are killed by police are terrible people who
deserved what they got, and you're just spreading a whole lot of
bleeding-heart nonsense.
STRINGHAM: I think it's a bogus argument for people to say
that these victims deserved it. If you look at the high-profile
cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, he was shoplifting
cigarillos, and that's certainly bad, but I don't think we want to
execute this guy or drone him because he's stealing from a
liquor store. Eric Garner in Staten Island was selling untaxed
cigarettes, and that is illegal, but since when should we be calling
things like that capital crimes? And since when should we be
giving the police the authority to be the judge, the jury, the
executioner and to decide, “This untaxed cigarette is really
wrong; let me kill the person”? I think that's far from most
people's conceptions of justice.
WOODS: What exactly can be done? Of course, the response
from Al Sharpton will be that we need a federalized police
force, and then the federal government will oversee the police,
and that will solve the problem. I'm sure you're skeptical of a
solution like that. Is there anything we might learn from looking
at other countries?
STRINGHAM: I'll tell you my ideal solution in a minute, but
some really simple ones involve looking at other countries that,
for example, do not arm the police. Plenty of countries do not
58
arm the police. England is a prime example, along with New
Zealand and Norway; we can go down the list. The police kill
rates are much, much lower there. So that's something that we
can think about. We don't need the heavily militarized police
that we have now carrying around surplus military equipment.
It's just not a staple of society.
Another thing we can look at is whether we need so many
police. There are seven hundred thousand police in America.
On a per capita basis, plenty of countries have far fewer police.
We're talking about 20 percent or 40 percent fewer police in
places like Sweden. And they also have lower homicide rates. So
the idea that we need this heavily armed, militarized police is
something that I think we should start questioning.
WOODS: But wouldn't they say that it's because they have
lower homicide rates that they don't need as many police, but
we need more police because we have so many killers here?
STRINGHAM: A lot of the crime that we have today, one
could argue, is created by the police. Things like the victimless-
crime laws, persecution of teen pool parties, all these things that
the government does to arrest drug users — it's actually
destabilizing communities; it's putting whole hosts of people in
jail; it's preventing people from raising their children. And all of
that, I would argue, is bad for society and actually leads to
increases in crime. So we need to question the assumption that
more police are there to protect us, that they're there to lower
59
crime. In many cases, they're actually increasing problems.
WOODS: Continuing along the devil's-advocate line, somebody
might say that there are certain American cities, or portions of
American cities, that are extremely unsafe, much more unsafe
than any Norwegian city, and that nobody in his right mind
would want to walk into these neighborhoods unarmed, much
less a policeman who's trying to enforce the law. If they were
not armed, this would mean de facto that there simply won't be
police service in those areas.
STRINGHAM: There was a great article in the Wall Street
Journal a couple of months ago pointing out that as a practical
matter, huge percentages of African American communities are
simply not policed when it comes to enforcing important laws,
such as laws against murder. They talk about how it's much
easier for the police to focus on petty things, victimless crimes,
drug crimes, and patrol at the periphery instead of actually
going in there and getting their hands dirty. So the idea that
African American communities are being policed in a way that's
protecting individual rights is something we should question. If
we look at the average satisfaction of African Americans with
the police, it's much lower, and I think that indicates that the
police are actually in many cases harassing the citizenry — in a
thousand cases last year, killing the citizenry — rather than
actually protecting the citizenry.
WOODS: In getting to what your ideal solution would be, we
60
have to raise the issue of your new book.
STRINGHAM: It's Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic
and Social Life. I go through and talk about how the order that
exists in the world today, in tons of places we can look at, it's
very clear that it's not attributable to government. Rather, it's
attributable to certain private factors, all the way from things
like personal morality to things like private security, private
police. I think these are much more effective alternatives to
relying on a government bureaucracy, a government monopoly
over the use of force.
Private police have existed throughout history and to some
extent in modern-day society. I think we can view that as a
model, which is much better than the coercive and monopolized
government police.
I'll give you a couple of quick examples, the first involving the
history of San Francisco. During the Gold Rush there were
hardly any police, so merchants hired police. They still have
these people around today; they're referred to as the Patrol
Special Police. And they're much more responsive to protecting
people's property, rather than harassing the citizenry.
Here's another example. In North Carolina it's possible to have
a fully deputized private police throughout the entire state to
protect the property of those people who hire them. They're
often called company police or railroad police. The most
common of these that most people have seen before is
61
university police. At Duke University, they're fully deputized
private police, and they are a larger department than 99 percent
of American government police departments nationwide. A
major difference between them is that they don't have the same
incentives to harass the students. They don't have the same
incentives to bully their subjects, in effect. The private police are
paid for by an entity that cares about protecting the property
and the well-being of the customer, and I think that's a much
better model.
WOODS: We hear progressives writing about the horrors of
private prisons, which they say give the whole system an
incentive to arrest people because then the private prisons can
make a profit. But I wonder if the problem there is that so
many of these people are being arrested for victimless crimes,
so these so-called private prisons are really operating in a
government system that has already distorted what a real prison
population would look like.
STRINGHAM: I think you're exactly right. I think the term
private prison is very misleading — a misnomer, really — because
it really should be referred to as government-funded prison
populated by people who are arrested by government that are
mandated to be in there by government judges. Almost every
step of the way, the government is the group deciding to have
that prison, deciding how many people are going to be in there,
how long they're going to be in there.
62
Yeah, there are private people working for the government, and
there are also, in this case, private contracting companies who
are working for the government, but I think it's misleading to
refer to that as a private system. They're simply employees of
the government. In this case, they're a contracted-out employee
of the government. Yes, it's terrible; it's coercive; I'm against it.
But that needs to be emphasized, that it's a governmental
system rather than a private one.
WOODS: In terms of private police, you can imagine
opponents saying things like: private police would not be
responsive to the needs of the people and they would just be
thinking about wherever their money's coming from. A lot of
these vulnerable communities aren't going to have a lot of
money, so maybe these police would not be helpful for them.
The funny thing about this objection is that it sounds like
they're describing the current system.
STRINGHAM: Exactly. I argue the exact opposite, that it is
very clear that low-income communities are not served by the
government police. There are tons of surveys on this of
different demographics who live in inner cities and are
extremely unhappy with the government police, who do not
care about protecting their property rights and making them
safe.
We can now contrast this with the incentives of a private
system. In a private system, you can have one for rich people;
63
you can have one for poor people. It's not about money. There
have been examples of private community groups wanting to
organize voluntary patrol groups in their housing projects, and
the government comes in and says, “No, you can't do that; we're
protecting this area; we're keeping you safe.” So there's a clear
example of the government actively prohibiting neighborhood
watches and self-policing.
In addition, you can have plenty of businesses who are
providing services to people at zero cost. In New York City,
there are plenty of business improvement districts where you
have unarmed private security and people walk around and
patrol the areas. These are being provided at no cost to the user,
the people who are walking by. It's paid for by the businesses.
So, if you're a business, if you're a landlord, if you're a hotel,
you're going to want to privately finance this so-called public
good and then provide it for free to anybody who is passing by.
WOODS: Think of it as what would happen, for example,
inside a hotel or inside Disney World. I don't pay an extra
policing fee to the hotel; it's included in the package. It's
something they would want to provide for me. Likewise, if I'm
passing through a business district, even if the businesspeople
themselves laid down the sidewalks I'm not paying a sidewalk
fee. They want there to be sidewalks so that I'll walk by their
businesses and go in and buy something. Likewise, they don't
want me to be killed instantly when I walk down the street, so
64
they're going to want to have unobtrusive police. For example,
when you're at Disney World, you feel completely safe, and yet
you don't see a security person anywhere. Yet you know
somehow, they're doing it.
STRINGHAM: That's exactly right. They're bundling what
mainstream economists call public goods with private goods
and maximizing the experience for the user. Disney's a great
example. I love to talk about that; I talk about that in my book.
It's very much behind the scenes.
Same thing with Las Vegas: very much behind the scenes.
They've got lots and lots of security, but they're not committing
police abuse. They're not there committing acts of brutality
against the guests. Security is bundled with the other private
goods, which are entrance to the park or entertainment in the
casino. So they're there in a way to maximize the well-being of
the customer.
Government police, on the other hand, have totally different
incentives. They have incentives maybe to exercise power,
maybe to engage in civil asset forfeiture, and so on.
WOODS: In a residential part of a city, it may be harder for
people to envision how this might work. You mentioned
voluntary patrols, but where there aren't big businesses that
would have an interest in providing these services, how else
might people do this? Do they subscribe? Are they going to get
protection if they can't afford to pay for it? These would be the
65
common objections.
STRINGHAM: In San Francisco, one of the more interesting
examples of private policing throughout our history is the
Patrol Special Police. They were fully deputized up until the
1990s. They have since lost some of their powers, but they still
have the ability to patrol multiple properties, so unlike stationary
security guards, which have to stay at one property, the Patrol
Special Police in San Francisco patrol multiple properties. They
also can be armed; they're the only group of private parties who
can be armed in San Francisco for policing. And they will be
paid for by different merchants. They'll go and ask any
individual store, “Would you like to subscribe to my services?”
One might say yes; the other might say no. And in the process,
they are providing what mainstream economists would call
spillover benefits, including to non-payers.
To get to the specifics of private residential communities, there
are entire neighborhood groups who will say, “We want to hire
private security from the Patrol Special Police,” which is a
network of independent firms. They'll hire somebody from one
of these companies to police and patrol the neighborhood. In
this case, it could be done by a business group who's helping
sponsor the neighborhood, or it could be done through
individual contributions, and that's really been working well.
I did a survey of the customers of these people: why do you
pay for something when the government police provide it for
66
free? The responses were great. They were incredulous: "This is
a joke, right? You really think I have trust in the government
police?" "They don't respond." "They scare me." Going through
the list of things that an economist working from a free-market
perspective might have predicted, that's exactly what happens.
Government bureaucracies are not responsive to individuals
whereas private individuals are, and people are willing to pay for
that even when the government is providing so-called free
services.

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67
 Chapter 5
The Problem with Government Police
with Tate Fegley
Tate Fegley is a doctoral candidate in economics at George
Mason University. This chapter is drawn from episode 1172
of the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: Let’s situate what you’ve been writing in the context

of the ongoing debate about police in our society. Some people
have claimed that there is a “war on cops” out there and that we
see this reflected in the killings of policemen or the general
cultural attitude toward the police. What’s been the result of
your investigation into that question?
FEGLEY: I think the most difficult part of that question is
how to define a war on cops. You mentioned that one potential
measure could be felonious killings of police officers or assaults
on law officers. So one of the things I looked into was the
measures of these things. What we find is that there’s nothing in
the recent numbers really to suggest that there’s any type of war
on cops happening in terms of law enforcement officers being
targeted. Heather Mac Donald, one of the foremost proponents
of the war-on-cops narrative, doesn’t really focus so much on
these questions of violence against police officers in her book.
She looks more at the rhetoric. Of course this is something
that’s hard to measure, but ultimately it seems her argument
68
really comes down to that cops aren’t as racist as people seem to
think, which seems entirely separate from the claim that there is
a war on cops. So, from my perspective, the search continues for
evidence that there is in fact a war on cops.
WOODS: There’s plenty of stuff that we could say about
police that I think a mainstream audience could listen to and
nod their heads, and there are things to which people on the
progressive side of things could listen to and nod their heads,
and we will get to that. But my libertarian listeners come first,
and I want to dive deep into this question of police and what
policing might look like in a free society. We would have
policing in the same way that we have private security guards
now, and by and large we don’t have a problem with that. What
do you think it looks like, given that it is somewhat speculative?
What does the system look like in a market society as opposed
to what we have now, where it’s monopolistic and government
provided?
FEGLEY: I think one thing that might be underemphasized by
those speculating about what a private system of policing looks
like is, in terms of what we do see from private policing in our
current world, how much it’s bundled with other services. As
many point out about Disney World or the mall, policing
services tend to be provided as a package with these other
things. I think there’s too much focus on this model of city
police departments instead being provided by a private provider.
69
Of course we don’t know without a full market system in the
provision of policing, but I imagine that we would see a lot
more of this type of bundling, whether it’s with a housing
association or other services that people enjoy.
WOODS: I think, by the way, that’s how a lot of public goods
problems would be resolved in a free society: you would bundle
them all together. When I had Fred Foldvary on many, many
episodes ago, he gave the example of a hotel. When you go to a
hotel, you don’t separately buy the elevator service; it comes
bundled with your experience in the hotel. Likewise, you don’t
pay for the lobby or the lighting and whatever. These things are
all bundled. So we would figure out in the market what makes
sense to bundle and how the different arrangements would
work, and that more or less solves these problems that non-
libertarians throw at us as if they were intractable, like there’s no
way we could resolve this.
How would private policing help in the situation where you
have many black people who feel like the police are hostile to
them and they can point to some cases that clearly are pretty
gruesome-looking to the average observer? How does that get
changed under a private system and why?
FEGLEY: I think the most obvious difference is that private
police would have to be voluntarily paid by their customers,
which is something that’s not the case for government police. I
think some potentially fruitful examples that I recently wrote
70
about were in regard to the Starbucks case in Philadelphia. A
point I was trying to make involved the response of Starbucks
when it faced public backlash after its use of the police to arrest
two African American men who had been at the Starbucks
without purchasing anything, were asked to leave, and refused to
do so. Critics say this was probably racially motivated since
sitting in a Starbucks and just enjoying the atmosphere without
purchasing anything is not really that uncommon an occurrence.
I’d say you can bet that Starbucks will be very careful in terms
of its corporate policy in terms of how it will use the police in
the future regarding these types of things, whereas it’s unclear
that the Philadelphia police, who actually performed the arrest,
will face any type of cost from this. So I’d say obviously the
biggest difference is in terms of the profit motive that private
individuals face in having to continually garner the interest of
voluntarily paying customers, unlike government police.
WOODS: I think sometimes we assume that in order for there
to be private police, we’d already have to have reached anarcho-
capitalism. We’d have to already have smashed the state’s
monopoly on the use of force. But you point out in one of your
articles that this is actually not right, that even with the state
maintaining that monopoly you could still have a diverse array
of services for policing. That, I think, is what’s hard for people
to envision. So what exactly would that look like? Of course, we
have it now. With Disney World, I’m sure there’s stuff going on
71
with Disney security that would be very interesting to know
about that I as a patron never even see. And we see it in the
shopping mall. But how could that work in my neighborhood?
FEGLEY: I know you had Dale Brown of the Threat
Management Center previously on your show. One of the
services he provides, in addition to his corporate clients, is to
neighborhoods. And I believe they contract through some type
of homeowner’s association to provide these types of services.
So, I think the collective action problem that economists often
cite regarding why it’s impossible for individual homeowners to
contract for policing services — because of the positive
externalities, there would be too much free riding — really isn’t
the case. I think that the non-excludability of policing services
is much overstated. So I don’t think this would be much of a
problem for you as a homeowner in terms of obtaining these
services on the market.
WOODS: If I were talking about crime prevention, it’s not so
much that I want a private company to come in and nab the
criminal once he’s in my house, although that would be nice. It’s
more that I don’t want him getting into my house in the first
place. And I think with a private company, given that I could
switch to another company any time I want to — any time I
find that that company is engaged in practices that I don’t like
or they’re too intrusive or they’re skulking around my house too
much — I can just get rid of them and get a new one, whereas I
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couldn’t do that with the government police because there’s no
choice with the government police.
In other words, there are things that I’m okay with a private
company doing because I maintain the ability to choose to go in
a different direction at some point. The trouble, it seems to me,
is that a private company could do more to prevent crime
because I wouldn’t really mind if the private company is looking
around on my property if I give them permission. Practices that
I could accept with a private company would be viewed as civil
liberties violations if carried out by the police.
FEGLEY: I think you make a really good point here. It’s
reminiscent of Robert Higgs and his ratchet effect regarding
how, when government grows, it’s very hard to shrink it back to
where it was previously. Once you allow government the ability
to intrude on your private space, it’s really difficult to get them
back out of it, whereas, as you mentioned, with a private
company, if you find you don’t like that type of intrusion, you
can switch providers.
WOODS: You have a theme in some of your writing about
how much policing we need. And this is really important. This is
where your economics training is going to serve you well. I
think a lot of people, especially law-and-order conservatives,
think “the more the better” because we think that’s generally
true of anything. But I’ve tried to say that even when you have
an unambiguous good like customer service, it’s not true that
73
the more customer service you have the better. All the
customer-service people you’re drawing in have been drawn
away from some other thing that they could be doing instead,
and maybe we value that other thing higher than we value
customer service. Or after a while, what more could I do with
customer service? I could give every customer a massage, and
I'll bet some people would start getting creeped out.
At some point, you can have too much even of something that
you perceive as being an unambiguous good because it
necessarily comes at the expense of something else that you’re
going to begin to value more as you get more of the customer
service or whatever it is that you have a surplus of. How does
that translate into policing?
FEGLEY: I think Ludwig von Mises has great insights into this
with the points he makes about economic calculation. His
original argument was about economic calculation in a socialist
commonwealth. I’m sure your readers are familiar with this
argument that in the socialist state, where the government
controls all the capital goods, there’s no private property in
them and therefore no exchange and therefore no prices. So
even if there are markets in consumer goods, the central
planner cannot engage in profit-and-loss calculation and
therefore is completely in the dark about how to properly
allocate resources.
I apply this same argument to the provision of policing or really
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any form of public administration in which it’s kind of the
inverse, where police can measure the costs of their inputs
because they have to buy labor and capital in the market, but
they’re not able to measure the value of their output because
they don’t make voluntary exchanges. Rather, they get their
revenue through coercive means like taxation or civil asset
forfeiture. Because of this, because they also cannot engage in
profit-and-loss calculation, they can’t know the value of their
output, however they decide to allocate that, whether it’s to
solving thefts or preventing other types of crime.
In this case, even though we presumably like at least some of
the output that police provide, we can’t measure the trade-offs
because of this lack of calculation. As you point out, this is very
much a problem of government policing, that we cannot
measure the value of their output and we can’t know what
trade-offs we’re making by having more public safety, even if it
is an unambiguous good.
WOODS: And then once we do have it, deciding how to
allocate it: what kind of crimes should they be investigating with
how many resources? I can’t do that right now because, as you
say, there’s no profit-and-loss mechanism. But I’ll tell you
something: I would be willing to bet with 99 percent certainty
that the way they allocate resources now is extremely
suboptimal, to put it mildly. You’ve got police monitoring
streets that are barely used to try to catch speeders while the
75
number of murders that go solved is shockingly low. That has
to be a bad allocation of resources.
FEGLEY: They respond to incentives. There’s not much
revenue in solving murders, where there is for catching
speeders. There is for finding drug dealers or potential drug
consumers who have things to confiscate. So they respond to
the incentives just like everyone else.
WOODS: Also, although to some degree they have to worry
about reputation because individual people might wind up on
the chopping block, the whole agency is a monopoly, so
whether you like them or you don’t like them, they’re still going
to collect the tax revenue. Private firms do have to worry about
their reputations, and if they’re responsible for using deadly
force in a case where it’s clearly not warranted, this is going to
be a big problem for them.
Let me give you an opportunity to answer the kind of argument
that a progressive might make: much of what you say makes a
great deal of sense, but we know how capitalists are, and what
would happen if capitalists do what is in their nature. Namely, if
they get to choose the police that they’re going to be using,
couldn’t they just hire police who will arbitrarily go around
cracking the skulls of troublemakers? Isn’t that what we would
expect from capitalists? How do we prevent a dystopia like that?
FEGLEY: As you mentioned, reputation is a very important
thing. As I mentioned, Starbucks, even in their relatively minor
76
case of enforcing their property rights, they have to consider
what impact this will have among customers who frequent
Starbucks; and if they’re going to maintain those relationships,
they can’t just be cracking skulls arbitrarily. Another important
point involves the legal privileges that police officers enjoy
through things like their union contracts or through statutes,
like the state law enforcement officer bills of rights, which
protect not only the police department but also individuals from
certain outcomes.
For example, some of these collective-bargaining agreements
allow police, after being involved in an officer-involved
shooting, to have this cooling-off period for forty-eight hours
or more in which they don’t have to give testimony. This time is
supposed to be for the purpose of obtaining a lawyer, but it
allows them to get their story straight, to see what’s in news
reports so that their testimony can be consistent with those. For
the rest of us, any non-police officer, we would be interrogated
right away.
So in addition to the market incentives, these legal privileges
that police officers enjoy make it very hard to see why one
would consider a private business, unless they really know
nothing about how actual government police operate, more
dangerous or less accountable to people than the government
police are.
WOODS: Can you say something about police unions? You
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have an interesting article suggesting that police unions may
have a detrimental effect.
FEGLEY: As I mentioned, one of these topics I’ve been
interested in is these protections that police unions are able to
get, both through their collective bargaining agreements and
through statutes. As I mentioned, some of these have to do
with interrogations or delaying interrogations. Some of them
have to do with the interrogations themselves. For example,
some police departments must inform a police officer before
they investigate him of all the evidence against him. Or they
may only have one interrogator at a time, thus precluding any
good-cop/bad-cop routine that we see in movies. Presumably
that might be an effective interrogation technique.
They also have protections like if a police officer has some type
of disciplinary record, this will be expunged after a certain
amount of time. This can be important because if they are
disciplined, either through firing or suspension, they can appeal
this disciplinary decision to an independent arbitrator. And
almost every time, the arbitrator will consider their previous
work history, and if any of these complaints, either sustained or
un-sustained against them, are not present, this can make the
difference between sustaining a firing or reinstating an officer.
It’s obvious why police officers may enjoy this, but politicians
may also enjoy this, in that if we consider these types of
protections as a form of compensation similar to how
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university professors enjoy tenure (where, all else equal, you may
be able to pay a professor less with the option of tenure),
politicians like these protections because while technically they
are budget neutral, from the police officers’ perspective they are
equivalent to an increase in pay. But these costs really come
home to roost later in the form of police officers you can’t fire,
or they’re transferred onto whoever is the victim of this police
officer’s brutality. Police unions all serve this purpose.
I also connect this to the lack of economic calculation, where a
competitive policing service may have some type of protections.
We could imagine, say, a private university system offering
tenure. But those universities offering too many of these
nonmonetary forms of compensation may be outcompeted by
those who offer a level of compensation that’s more in line with
the product they’re offering. But again, since police departments
are unable to engage in calculation, they can’t measure the true
costs of these protections, so they can continue along with
these types of protections where a competitive system might
not enable that.
WOODS: Let me ask you a big-picture question. The average
person listening to what you recommend may find it radical.
Even though they may think all your complaints are justified
and your insights are very significant, they still will feel like “the
devil I know is better than the devil I don’t know,” and that for
all its faults, the current system at least works tolerably well to
79
the point where most of us are able to live a fairly civilized
existence. What would you say to make them willing to consider
the possibility of a radical market approach to this question that
they would not consider otherwise?
FEGLEY: I think an argument that’s been convincing to me is
somewhat like John Hasnas’s “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” in
which he points out that we enjoy all these forms of private
security or private arbitration already and we just don’t notice it.
The very fact that we don’t notice it, I think, demonstrates how
seamlessly it fits into our life. There are three to four times as
many private police officers to every public police officer, but
we almost never hear about them. They’re frankly out of view.
Whereas probably most of us have had some type of bad
experience with a police officer, maybe in the form of poor
service or being unjustifiably stopped or even worse. So, I think
it’s really kind of a Frederic Bastiat–type thing, where it’s what
we don’t see that makes us not realize just how well private
policing can work.

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 Chapter 6
Is America a Police State?
with John Whitehead
John Whitehead is an attorney and the founder of the
Rutherford Institute. This chapter is drawn from episode
388 of the Tom Woods Show.

WOODS: Your new book, Battlefield America: The War on the

American People, is a follow-up to your book Government of Wolves:
The Emerging American Police State. You cover an enormous
amount of ground here, yet through all the specifics there is a
fairly ominous overall theme. What is that?

WHITEHEAD: That we’re living in a police state. There’s no

doubt about that right now. A police state is basically defined by
surveillance of citizens, violence toward citizens by government
agents, militarization of government agents, and on down the
line. We’re seeing all that right now. The statistics out there don’t
lie. It’s really zoomed since 9/11. I’d say that in the last twenty
years the face of the country has changed in terms of how
government agents view us. I have had the unique opportunity
since writing Battlefield America of dealing with a number of
former Secret Service agents who just meet and talk to me, and
they’re concerned. In fact, some are arguing that if you’re a
high-profile person and a civil libertarian, you should leave the
81
country, an option I have rejected.
There are a lot of things going on that should have people
freaked if you’re following the news, but you’re not going to get
it on television. You’re going to get it from programs like yours,
Tom, and people out there who are reporting things. As I say in
the book, by the way, it’s not what you see on the news that
matters. It’s what you don’t see on the news. It's what's not
reported. I talk to journalists, and I say, you realize there are
eighty thousand SWAT team raids occurring annually. That’s up
from less than three thousand in the mid-1980s. And they look
at me as if to say, “What?” So, most journalists are not up on
what’s going on. You’re having babies being burned, shot, killed.
Dogs are always killed in these raids, John Doe raids, where they
just show up and go through your door. They don’t even have a
warrant anymore. It’s happening on an increasing basis, so
people need to wake up right now. I think we have a chance to
change things, but we’re going to have to get educated because
education precedes action.

WOODS: Let me raise the traditional devil’s-advocate response.

I am a regular American. I don’t cause any trouble. So, the
police leave me alone and there are no SWAT-team raids on my
house. You’re elevating some high-profile cases into a general
rule, but if you stay out of trouble nobody will bother you.

WHITEHEAD: As I show in the book, it’s been a steady

82
progression, but it’s picked up steam since 9/11, when the
Department of Homeland Security was created by executive
order. I get that question all the time: if I am not doing anything
wrong, why should I care that the NSA is doing all these things?
I am a constitutional lawyer. My book has forty-three pages of
footnotes, so I am not a conspiratorialist. I document
everything I say. I draw conclusions from the facts, which any
good lawyer or any good person will do. To give you an
example: the NSA now downloads two billion emails a day sent
by American citizens. They are read. The NSA downloads
almost every text message. They admit now to hacking into
160,000 Facebook pages a day to see what you’re doing.
Brandon Raub, a good Marine, outspoken, served tours in Iraq
and Afghanistan. He defused mines in the minefields to protect
the troops. He captured weapons from al-Qaeda. He came
home. He didn’t like some of Obama’s executive orders. Most
Americans won’t like them because Obama could do whatever
he wanted to do, like an imperial president. Raub is a 9/11
truther, of whom there are a lot out there. He was saying these
things on his Facebook page on a Saturday morning about a
year and a half ago.

He heard some noise outside. He had just gotten through

jogging. He didn’t have a shirt on. He walked through the front
door, and he looked out, and there were eight vehicles pulled up
around his property and black-clad policemen running toward
83
his house –people in plain clothes. He stepped to a screen door.
It was a hot August day. He said, “What’s up?” And they said,
“Sir, we’d like to talk to you. Could you step outside?” He did.
They immediately handcuffed him behind his back. He was
resisting. He was arguing with them. They slammed him against
the fence and lacerated his back and took him to the police
station. His mother called me crying. She had contacted every
group. No one seemed to care about this particular situation. I
called the police chief and said, “What has this man been
charged with?” The cop actually said to me, “Excuse me, sir;
he’s committed no crime. We’re just concerned about his
Facebook post.”

Brandon had a five-minute examination in his jail cell. The

psychiatrist decided he was a 9/11 truther and he was slow in
his responses, which any American should be. If you don’t have
a lawyer, don’t be answering questions at that point. He was
given a hearing. He was put in a mental hospital. We filed a
lawsuit and got him out. The judge ruled that there was not a
shred of evidence to have him there.

What had he done wrong? Today, if you say the wrong thing,
there are over five thousand federal laws, over five thousand
criminal regulations. We’re having cases where people have a
chicken in their backyard for eggs. The police are actually
arriving and confiscating the chickens and charging the people
84
with a misdemeanor. There’s a list of these cases in my book.

So, you really don’t have to be doing anything wrong. Several

constitutional experts say that the average American commits
three crimes a day and doesn’t even know it. There are so many
crimes. You can’t collect rainwater in some states. The
government says they own the rainwater. There’s a guy in Texas
right now serving seventeen days in jail for overgrown grass. He
didn’t realize what he was doing wrong. If you’re sitting on your
butt, and you don’t give a poop, and you’re watching the country
go down the tubes, it probably won’t bother you.

I am seeing these cases – I detail many of them in my book –

where average citizens do not know they’re doing anything
wrong, and two seconds later, they have somebody at their door
who is handcuffing them.

I am not the only one saying this. We’ve got people on the left
and the right all backing my book. The former head of the
ACLU said this is a great book. Ron Paul wrote the
introduction. Judge Andrew Napolitano said that after he
finished the book, he couldn’t go to sleep.

These are good people. They are not stupid. These are learned
folks out there that are seeing the trends, and what I am trying
to do is wake the average American up to take action. What I
85
show is that we seem to be paralleling in a really eerie way what
happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Here’s the
other thing I show in the book: totalitarian regimes never
announce themselves with trumpets. It’s a very subtle transition.
How many people realize that in 1938 Adolf Hitler was Time
magazine’s Man of the Year? How many people realize that in
1939 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? People loved
him in Germany and around the world. We can see what
happened there about a year later.

WOODS: As this kind of behavior on the part of law

enforcement and the courts and the federal regulators and so on
continues, more and more people are going to know at least
somebody affected.

WHITEHEAD: They are going to see it, yes.

WOODS: There are people violating a diversity of statutes. It’s

not all the drug war.

WHITEHEAD: No, it’s not the drug war anymore.

WOODS: It’s a whole bunch of things. Yet nothing is more

guaranteed to get you a heap of Facebook likes than if you post
something about our brave men and women in law
enforcement. What do you make of the cognitive dissonance
86
here?

WHITEHEAD: I think there are several things going on. I

have worked with a lot of good policemen, by the way. I have
helped several develop constitutional courses, which they are
having trouble getting in their academies. The militarization of
the police academy started about fifteen to twenty years ago. So
many younger policemen coming out of the academy have a
different view from the older policemen that I work with. Some
chiefs of police don’t like what they are seeing. Some are
resigning based on it. These are well-known national figures
now. There are very powerful police unions that stop any
legislative efforts. I didn’t realize until about a year ago there is a
SWAT-team union. You can’t get legislation through Congress.
The unions block everything; they’re very powerful, moneyed
unions. We’re up against some pretty powerful things that the
average citizen doesn’t know about.

The Fourth Amendment is really clear. Read your Bill of Rights,

folks. The average American I run into has trouble telling me
what’s in the Fourth Amendment. I spoke to 150 lawyers not
too long ago – the best ones. In the middle of my speech, I
stopped and said, can any lawyer in this room give me the five
freedoms of the First Amendment? These are constitutional
guys that work on civil liberties. One guy started to raise his
hand. I started to point to him, and he put it down. My wife was
87
sitting in the back of the room, and she said they were arguing
about what was in the First Amendment. For the last twenty
years, I have asked incoming law students in my summer-intern
program the same question. I haven’t found one student who
can give me the five freedoms.

What’s happened? In the schools now, they have about half a

semester to teach anything about the Constitution. I had a full
year when I was in school. I learned about how radical the
Founding Fathers were and about the principles in the
Constitution. That’s all gone now. I just talked to a college class
not too long ago at one of the elite schools, and I was
astounded how disconnected these people were. These were top
students. They had no idea what’s in the Constitution.

So most of us are asleep. It’s like I am telling people we’ve been

on a ten-day drunk. We’re starting to wake up. The problem is
that sometimes you wake up and it’s too late. You can read my
book. It’s documented. I am one of the few people that gets out
there and digs and screams from the rooftops because I love
this country. I am a former military officer, and I am shocked
that the Department of Homeland Security a year and a half
ago contracted to buy 1.6 million hollow-point bullets, which
explode on contact. They violate international law.

The Social Security Administration purchased almost two

88
hundred thousand hollow-point bullets. They said in their press
release they were to be distributed to forty-one locations across
America. How many people know that all of the federal
agencies now have SWAT teams – including the IRS and the
Department of Education? The Department of Education’s
SWAT teams actually do raids for overdue loans. I challenge
people. Go on the Internet and look up the case of Kenneth
Wright. They took him outside and slammed his face down on
his lawn because his wife had an overdue loan. This is
happening in America. These are guys coming through the
doors. They are not reported. You have to dig to find them. The
local media doesn’t cover them very well. Are we willing to do
our research as good Americans and take our stand on the
Constitution? The government is not supposed to touch us in
our home or surveil us unless they have probable cause, which
means some evidence of illegality. And they can’t come through
our door unless they have a search warrant. They are going
through people’s doors now. Some of the people are getting
blasted away, and the SWAT teams are in the wrong home. That
never used to happen in America. Twenty years ago, it did not
happen.

WOODS: It’s hard to know exactly what the role of technology

is going to be on this, because it seems like it can swing both
ways. You talk here about different ways you can be tracked
using new technology, whether it’s in your car or reading your
89
emails or whatever. But on the other hand, never before in
history have we been able to track the state the way we can, at
least in its most in-your-face ways. I can have a cell phone app
that lets me record my police encounter. What do you think on
net the role of technology will be?

WHITEHEAD: Technology can be very good if we can put

limits on it. But there’s no limit. When the NSA is downloading
two million emails a day of American citizens who have done
nothing wrong, they are violating the Constitution. Congress
does nothing about it. Most congressmen are dominated by
lobbyists, and that’s a proven fact. You have to do a lot of
research to understand that, but again, I have worked out of
Washington, DC, for forty years. I know. We’re in a transition
period. In fact, history seems to show that when you see the
violence that I am talking about against the population, it’s in a
transition to an immoral, authoritarian regime – a surveillance
state where you will be watched continually.

How many people know that many local police departments

now have Stingray devices? They are small boxes that fit in
police cars. They can drive by your home or wherever you are
on the street and download everything on your cell phone. Now
cities are setting up what they call real-time crime centers, which
track your cell phone wherever you go throughout the day. Let’s
say you are a politician, and you have an alcohol problem. You
90
go to Alcoholics Anonymous. They know that. The FBI, as I
show in my book, is notorious for blackmailing people in
politics. So you’re being watched wherever you go. The devices
coming to local police are going to be amazing. There’s a new
one being introduced to local police departments called a
retinal-obfuscation device. It blinds you for fifteen minutes.
They point it at you and completely blind you. They have not
done scientific tests to see what it does to the retina. If you
keep up with the news, you see people getting beat up on the
streets and unarmed citizens getting shot in the back. When I
was a kid, that never happened.

WOODS: Your short section on community policing surprised

me. I always thought the term sounded benign enough, but it
turns out that community policing amounts to turning
everybody into a snitch.

WHITEHEAD: Yeah, and again, you can draw parallels to

former regimes. We did some amazing research at the
Rutherford Institute. When I was writing some of my
commentaries, I wanted to at least show some SWAT-team-type
raids in Nazi Germany. I thought they must have started it. I
found out that very few of those things actually happened in
Nazi Germany. There are some really good books by college
professors who studied all the records of arrests in Nazi
Germany and collated them. They have found that almost the
91
majority of arrests in Nazi Germany were from average citizens
turning other citizens in. That was a form of community
policing where you’d turn in your neighbors; they’d get fined,
and in Nazi Germany, many of them wound up in
concentration camps. Community policing is Department of
Justice program in which people are told to watch their
neighbors.

There was a case in Minnesota or Michigan where a kid had a

pet chicken in his backyard. A neighbor complained to the
police. The police chief actually went and took the chicken out
of the cage when the guy wasn’t home. He decapitated the
chicken. He left the chicken dead in the backyard. He took the
head and threw it on the front porch for the family to come
home to. That was because of somebody who called. We have a
case now where we’re helping a church that had a Mother
Teresa sign on their fence. The neighbors complained. The city
now is telling the church they are going to fine them and may
take them to court if they don’t take down the sign. It’s a
Mother Teresa quotation. It’s legal. I think we’re going to win
our case, but we see these cases all the time. A veteran wanted
to grow a vegetable garden in a side yard. The neighbors
complained. The police came out and said, you either cut it
down or we take you to jail. The guy is spending seventeen days
in jail now for the overgrown grass reported by neighbors. So
we’re seeing the same kind of trend.
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WOODS: You have a section called The Complicity of the
Courts.

WHITEHEAD: It’s very difficult to navigate the courts. When

we win a case, it’s celebration time. The Supreme Court nine
times out of ten votes in favor of anything the police want to
do. I can list all of the cases in which they take your DNA at
police stations when you’re not even found guilty. If you have
been arrested, they can do strip searches where they go inside
your pants. The Supreme Court upheld that in the Florence case.
Watch out if you get arrested these days.

And if you’re pulled over, watch out. I think you should state
your rights, but you'd better be careful how you state them. You
can go to our website at Rutherford.org. We have a
constitutional section that goes through your rights. There are a
lot of people getting slammed down. Malaika Brooks in the
state of Washington argued with a policeman who said she did a
rolling stop. She argued with them. They pulled her out of the
car, slammed her face down, and tasered her. She was six
months pregnant. That case was fought all the way to the
Supreme Court. Malaika Brooks lost. They said it was a
reasonable action by the police. The Supreme Court refused to
hear the case.

93
WOODS: Yet kids are still taught in school this civics lesson
about the way the courts work and the three branches and what
the purpose of government is, as if none of this is happening.

WHITEHEAD: There are good judges out there, and one of

the reasons I write books like Battlefield America is that judges do
read them. I am trying to educate judges – and everybody – that
we’re all citizens of the state. The term that’s rolling off the lips
of policemen when they refer to us that I don’t like is “civilian.”
A policeman a couple of months ago used that term. I said,
“Sir, I am not a civilian; I am a citizen. So are you. We don’t
have a standing army. George Washington was against that.”
Why does Florida need thirty-six grenade launchers and forty-
seven mine-resistant armored protection vehicles? Why does
Texas need seventy-four of those and $24.3 million worth of
Blackhawk helicopters? Your local police now are so militarized.
I have friends who are gun owners, and they say, “I am getting
my gun.” I respond, “Put the gun down. You’ll get blown away.”
What Martin Luther King called militant, nonviolent resistance
is the way to go if you’re going to do anything and get involved
in your local government.

We can change things. There’s a lot of hope out there. When I

walk through the lawn and I see a bad weed, I pick that weed up
and throw it in the garbage. The government is like that. If
you’ve got government that doesn’t act, you need to get down
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there and pull that weed, and that means by political action,
getting your picket signs and taking action. You can do it, but
you’re going to have to get up off your butts and do it, folks.

Enjoyed this chapter? I release content like this every

single weekday on the Tom Woods Show. Subscribe on
Apple Podcasts.

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 Chapter 7
Some First Steps
by James Reilly
James Reilly is a libertarian writer and former Chief
Operations Specialist for the US Navy. This chapter
appeared on the website of the Libertarian Institute.

Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was recently

interviewed regarding the Council’s latest political move towards
abolition of the local police department. The interview left me
underwhelmed. She gave no indication that she was familiar
with the technical details of what abolishing the police could
look like. I am not surprised by this, though. The speed with
which the City Council acted to signal willingness to change
gave them no time to thoroughly think through the implications
of, or a set of reasonable steps to take towards, abolishing the
police.

The first point to consider is that much to my dismay, nobody is

talking about getting rid of all publicly funded law enforcement
in Minneapolis. As it stands, there is a series of overlapping
jurisdictions, of which the local police are only one. Park police,
transit police, the County Sheriff ’s department, State patrol, the
Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and any number of federal
law enforcement agencies will still operate as they always have.
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Many investigations, arrests, and incarcerations will be handled
by essentially the same people handling them now.

Don’t worry, Minneapolis City Council, we have you covered!

Here is a list of steps you should be seriously considering:

Disarm all traffic patrol and restrict their interaction with

the public to traffic citations and response to traffic calls.
It is plausible that traffic patrol is necessary to keep reckless
drivers off the street. I remain unconvinced, but even if we
assume this as a premise, there is still no reason these people
need to be armed, or even to be cops. There are various towns
and cities across the country which employ non-police parking
enforcement, and even major cities such as NYC have special
divisions of traffic “cops” that are functionally distinct from
their beat and detective counterparts.

End patrol.
There is no evidence that going around looking for people
breaking the law does any good. More likely, it is the mechanism
by which the racial disparity in criminal justice is manifest. In
the transition period, any publicly funded police functionality
should be strictly limited to response, not to patrol.

Shut down all proactive non-violent crime investigations

and end no-knock raids.
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The vast majority of no-knock raids are used to execute search
warrants and result in the confiscation of zero contraband.
Instead, they often lead to innocent people being killed or
maimed. Getting rid of the police means that society will have
to fundamentally rethink the way it approaches nonviolent
crime, and drug crime in particular. Thank goodness that in
2020 that proposition is not as far fetched as it once was.

Form a first response team of mental health workers for

mental health/domestic violence calls.
This step may on the surface appear to be anti-libertarian. But
much the way Dr. Joe Salerno has suggested we meet the left
halfway regarding the Fed, this is a step where in a case of
alternatives, one is clearly the more libertarian choice. Mental
health is a crisis in the US. One in ten calls to police concern
mentally ill people who generally pose little harm to anybody.
Society has thoroughly neglected these folks, dumping them
into the laps of emergency rooms and county jails, neither of
which are equipped to deal with them. Coming up with an
infrastructure, either public or non-governmental, is a moral
obligation, regardless of the role you think the police ought to
play.

Disarm all investigators of nonviolent crime reports.

Once you’ve eliminated proactive nonviolent crime policing,
such infractions as vagrancy, public drunkenness, sex work,
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loitering, and on and on remain as the type of nonviolent
crimes our interim police department will have to deal with.
These types of calls do not require an armed response. We also
need to rethink the role that incarceration – in county or city
jail, for instance – plays in our society. Maybe the answer is in
fact leaving people alone and simply not enforcing these
“crimes.” If you can’t do that, however, not immediately
escalating the situation with an armed officer is perhaps the best
course of action.

Liquidate all tanks/submarines/LRAD/MRAP or other

military-grade equipment.
Please don’t tell me that we a need militarized capacity in case
of complete social breakdown. We literally just watched their
response to that. They have proven themselves to be completely
powerless, and more often than not they actually increase the
chances of social breakdown. I am not really interested in
making a nuanced case as to why local police shouldn’t have
submarines. These tools of war, designed to be used against
enemy combatants, have no place in a municipality used by
those sworn to protect the people, even would-be criminals.

Where Does That Leave Our Interim Department?

That leaves armed police as first responders to violent crime
calls. Private and community security will begin to develop a
citywide infrastructure to create stability for businesses. Case
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law will develop to determine what is reasonable and what
crosses the line when it comes to policing. Neighborhood
watches and private police patrols (such as can be found in San
Francisco and Atlanta) will organically form depending on the
needs of the communities and property owners.

Otherwise, there is to schedule dates for turning over

investigations of violent/non-violent crime calls to private
enterprise and NGOs. In the meantime, acquaint yourself with
the literature. Luckily, academics have been preparing for this
for many decades, and have developed sophisticated treatments
for what a world without publicly funded police would look like.

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 Recommended Resources
Barnett, Randy. The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law,
2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pay
particular attention to the thought experiment in chapter 14.

Benson, Bruce. To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in

Criminal Justice. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Chartier, Gary. Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a
Stateless Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Huemer, Michael. The Problem of Political Authority: An

Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey. New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Chapter 10 deals with our topic.

Stringham, Edward, ed. Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy
of Choice. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007.

I also recommend my video: “The Economics of the Police

State.”

And of course The Tom Woods Show, from which most of the
material in this book has been drawn.

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