You Have the Right to Remain Consistent

Addressing anti-police currents in Libertarianism

After recently receiving – allegedly – a traffic ticket, the trooper told me that I could either plead to it or contest it. Instead I decided on the third best option, which of course is to write about it.

Through Libertarianism runs a current which often manifests itself as anti-cop, but that is not the case, and certainly should not be. Our superpower is critical thinking, which means that we are naturally skeptical of authority, especially that which demands obedience on sometimes feeble pretexts. Yet by creed we oppose the initiation of force and fraud – our Non-Aggression Principle – which means that implicitly we appreciate the value which the police provide to modern society insofar as the police deter, detect and intercept those who perpetrate force and fraud against others.

Obviously this appreciation has stark limits. Modern society values police prevention of force, fraud and even negligence, but police can easily take that mandate too far. Police crackdowns on children’s lemonade stands, for example, puts police in the role of initiating force or threat thereof to prevent no harm whatsoever. Likewise police intervention for social media posts of “wrongthink” absent identifiable threat, which happens occasionally. On the continuum’s deadlier side, too often we hear of calls for “wellness checks” seeking to prevent a citizen from possibly harming himself, yet which result in the police killing the citizen on whose behalf police were called (The Washington Post reports 178 such instances between 2019 and 2021). Nor should we soon forget the Covidian regime’s iconic excesses when police arrested lone windsurfers and motorists for the high crime of public masklessness (police oblivious to the increased risk of viral transmission during citizens’ incarceration)!

We as a society appreciate the police to the extent their goal and result is the legitimate prevention of force, fraud and negligence… and we resoundingly condemn the police to the extent they deviate from that noble purpose.

One major criticism of police which Libertarians share with our fellow citizens is the observation that modern police training instills in police a mentality of “us versus them.” Radley Balko documents this in Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013). However, against the worrisome trend towards enmity between police and the citizenry they serve, some people in our circles develop their own “us versus them” mentality vis-à-vis the police, which of course only reinforces the police’s defensiveness. This is both counterproductive and inconsistent with our philosophical underpinnings of individualism whereby we take a person as s/he comes, one at a time. Some cops will be empathetic, and others, aloof. Some will be diligent, and others, lazy. In the abstract we can appreciate the contribution of police officers towards the goal of preventing force, fraud and negligence in our society – even if they’re doing it for other institutional or personal purposes – and at the same time, we can and do demand accountability and divestment of police power extraneous to that goal.

Feel free to burn me in the comments for being a “boot-licker”… but you may first want to refer to my published criticisms of police (as on my Facebook page on 6/01/20, 6/12/20, 7/8/20, 12/14/20, 3/25/21, 4/27/21, 1/23/23, 8/04/23 and 10/25/23) and follow my example during the alleged traffic stop by remaining silent.

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