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Thread: Inside the mind of a "law and order" Republican

  1. #61
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    $#@! you man.

    I didn't start calling names or trying to hang labels on you.

    This is the kind of $#@! that'll get you knocked on your ass in person.
    You don't believe that government should do anything, therefore you are an Anarchist.
    I didn't say you were an evil Anarchist or a crazy Anarchist so you should be proud of what you are, I am proud of what I am I believe I am right, if you don't like what you are you should rethink your philosophy.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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  3. #62
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You don't believe that government should do anything, therefore you are an Anarchist.
    I didn't say you were an evil Anarchist or a crazy Anarchist so you should be proud of what you are, I am proud of what I am I believe I am right, if you don't like what you are you should rethink your philosophy.
    As I said; $#@! you man!

    I can't subscribe to the anarchist philosophy either............Just like libertarian there are parts that don't sit well with me.

    Notice I'm not trying to tell you what you are.........

    Civil discourse is taught with force..........And it's apparent to me you haven't been subjected to enough force yet.

    Maybe you should show where I've said "I don't believe that government should do anything" ?

    What I keep typing is that government isn't going to fix government.

    I could delve deeper into that idea but why?

  4. #63
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    Maybe you should show where I've said "I don't believe that government should do anything" ?
    The following quote


    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    Try to define the 'job' of government...........Just one segment..........Then think about all the other segments of government that exist to support/justify and finance that one segment to do one thing.......If you get through that exercise then try to determine if that segment you looked at does its 'job' well.......Does it do its 'job' cost effectively?
    If that doesn't say that you don't think that government should do anything, what does it mean?
    You are using questions to send the message that government can't do anything right or cost effectively.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  5. #64
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    The following quote



    If that doesn't say that you don't think that government should do anything, what does it mean?
    You are using questions to send the message that government can't do anything right or cost effectively.
    No I asked you a question, can you answer it?

    Or is it easier for you to name-call and try to pigeon-hole?



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  7. #65
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    Depends. Federal, State, County or local? At any length only that for which it can be voluntarily funded and abided.
    Any level. Just name a couple things. Without a military or police there's not much left for a proper government to do that I know of. The only other thing I can think of is a court system, but without a way of enforcing the rulings, it won't do much good.

  8. #66
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    No I asked you a question, can you answer it?

    Or is it easier for you to name-call and try to pigeon-hole?
    So what do you think the government should do?

  9. #67
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    No I asked you a question, can you answer it?

    Or is it easier for you to name-call and try to pigeon-hole?
    You are doing what I said.
    But to answer to your question

    Originally Posted by tod evans
    Try to define the 'job' of government...........Just one segment..........Then think about all the other segments of government that exist to support/justify and finance that one segment to do one thing.......If you get through that exercise then try to determine if that segment you looked at does its 'job' well.......Does it do its 'job' cost effectively?


    IT CAN.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  10. #68
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    So what do you think the government should do?
    Only what it's citizens can have a direct impact on.

    Which would negate much of the federal government as it sits....

    However.............

    With the digital age it is now possible for citizens to have direct contact which leads to the question I pose you;

    Which citizens should influence government? And why do you feel that way.

  11. #69
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    IT CAN.
    It hasn't.

    Why should I believe things'll be different now?

    What's changed?

  12. #70
    Someone's trying to call tod evans an anarchist? Dem's fightin' words!
    Quote Originally Posted by Torchbearer
    what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.
    Hear/buy my music here "government is the enemy of liberty"-RP Support me on Patreon here Ephesians 6:12

  13. #71
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You are using questions to send the message that government can't do anything right or cost effectively.
    You could quote me several hundred times stating;

    "Everything government gets involved in it $#@!s up"

    Which I hold out to be an unequivocal truth.

    In this thread the discussion revolves around "Law-n-Order Republicans", a specific area of government and a specific party in government who have consistently failed in the area being discussed....Thus bolstering my claim.

  14. #72
    Quote Originally Posted by heavenlyboy34 View Post
    Someone's trying to call tod evans an anarchist? Dem's fightin' words!
    Chicken$#@! dismissals with unsubstantiated claims of allegiance to any one philosophy to justify false superiority is "fightin' words"...

    I like to think I get along quite well with the anarchists who post here, I can think of two in-particular who are extremely intelligent and well spoken...

    Same with the libertarian faction....

    I have never been dismissed by them or vice-versa...

    Holier than thou gets my goat every time..........



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  16. #73
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    Only what it's citizens can have a direct impact on.
    Could you just name something specific? Post office? Design the flag?


    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    With the digital age it is now possible for citizens to have direct contact which leads to the question I pose you;

    Which citizens should influence government? And why do you feel that way.
    I feel very strongly that the biggest problem in almost all democracies/republics is allowing parasites to vote. Only people that pay more in taxes than they get in benefits should be allowed to vote.

  17. #74
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You are using questions to send the message that government can't do anything right or cost effectively.
    Can it?

    Can you name anything that government and central planning has accomplished that was not:

    A - Wildly overpriced.

    B - Superfluous.

    C - Badly managed.

    D - Mandated that the people comply with, at the barrel of a cop's gun.

    E - All of the above.

  18. #75
    Too Many Laws: Why Police Encounters Escalate

    https://mises.org/blog/too-many-laws...nters-escalate

    07/12/2016 Ryan McMaken

    [This is Part One in a three-part series on policing. See Part Two and Part Three.]

    The debate over the shooting of Philando Castile has ignited the debate over the way the police, generally speaking, often enforce petty, small-time offenses with often overwhelming force. In the case of Castile, the controversy hinges partially on whether or not Castile was being detained as a suspect in a real crime (such as armed robbery), or if he was being stopped and harassed for a small-time non-violent infraction such as drug possession or a broken tail light.

    People instinctively know there is a real difference between the situations. Moreover, it is a safe assumption that in the case of armed robbery, someone has actually requested the services of the police, while it is extremely unlikely that any citizen complained about, or was harmed by, a broken tail light or the possession of marijuana. If it proves to be true that Castile was, in fact, stopped for a small-time infraction, then the escalation to a situation in which Castile was shot dead can be shown to be all the more unnecessary and needlessly violent.

    But, of course, we don't need the Castile case to prove our point. Every day, people are stopped and detained by police for what should be regarded as peaceful non-criminal activities. But those situations often escalate to tense confrontations, and even in some cases to violent interactions.

    It doesn't have to be this way.

    Police Didn't Always Patrol Areas Looking for People to Arrest

    Modern policing is largely a nineteenth-century invention, and prior to modern urban police forces, state agents were generally called in to deal only with episodes of general social unrest.


    Prior to the age of the modern police patrol in English-speaking countries, state agents — often a sheriff-like official — were used primarily to compel named defendants to appear in court when another citizen had made a complaint in court against that person, usually to demand restitution for some wrong inflicted. It wasn't until the twentieth century that police agents routinely patrolled an area looking for places to intervene. In the United States, for example, as Jack Greene notes, "the American police service was originally cast as a reactive force, not as a preventive of interdicting force. ... America's police were to provide assistance on request, not to proactively intervene in the lives of the community."

    In England, the tradition of legal action only beginning in response to a private complaint is very old, and law enforcement agents were expected to act only in response to court orders. Michael Giuliano writes:

    Since early medieval England, long before the Norman invasion of England, criminal actions had been instituted by aggrieved private parties. They were primarily settled by compensation or restitution, and not imprisonment, capital punishment, or even the blood-feud that was common in much of Europe. For most offenses, specific civil fines and compensation were established. ... The affirmative role of the victim or next of kin initiated the legal process. Particularly heinous offenses requiring more than “mere” intentional homicide, were often excluded from the realm of compensatory remedy. As process, judges were appointed to preside over the courts and enforce the decisions made by the assembled freemen of a district.

    Policing and law bore elements of democracy.

    This reliance on a private restitution-based model continued into the late nineteenth century, and was hotly defended by many of the English on the presumption that a shift to "public" prosecutions — prosecution initiated by the state itself — would lead to a destruction of English civil liberties. Giuliano continues:

    The formal transition from private to public prosecution in England did not occur until 1879 and years passed before it could be implemented in practice. The English gentry had long been suspicious of both a public prosecution system and a professional police force.

    Indeed, the private initiation of criminal prosecution in England was a curiosity to visitors. Among them was the French jurist Charles Cottu, who like many was unaware of the “traditional arguments of English gentlemen against a constabulary and state prosecution,” according to legal historian Douglas Hay. Those Englishmen believed, in Hay’s characterization, that the power of prosecutorial institutions could lead to a “political police serving the Crown.” This opposition to public prosecution has been cast by law professor Bruce P. Smith as an example of old England's “national commitment to civil liberties.”

    Obviously, today, we see few traces of a legal system that even resembles the English Common Law system that relied on there being an actual victim for a crime to have taken place.

    Today, police actively patrol neighborhoods looking for potential offenders even if no one has requested the "service."

    In response, this has led to some observers to suggest that the police should function instead on a "fire department model" in which police respond only to actual complaints, rather than seek out "offenders" on their own.

    Certainly, this could potentially be a step in the right direction, but the larger problem lies in the fact that not only can arrests and prosecutions be initiated in the absence of any complaint or victim, but the list of offenses for which a person can be arrested and imprisoned has grown disastrously long.

    Every Police Encounter Is an Opportunity for Arrest and Criminal Prosecution

    Dealing with violent crime constitutes only a small minority of what police deal with on a daily basis. For example, in 2014, out of 11,205,833 arrests made nationwide (in the US), 498,666 arrests were for violent crimes and 1,553,980 arrests were for property crime.

    That means 82 percent of arrests were made for something other than violent crime or property crime.


    Moreover, many of these non-violent offenses — such as drug use, liquor violations, carrying an illegal knife, or other infractions that should be regarded as small-time offenses can result in serious jail time or prison time, as well as steep fines and lost earnings.

    For instance, the highly publicized death of Eric Garner at the hands of police officers was a conflict precipitated by the sale of untaxed cigarettes by Garner. The police officers who killed Freddie Gray in custody in Baltimore later claimed the arrest was necessary because Gray possessed a knife that violated city ordinances.

    And then there are the countless cases of non-criminals who have been stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned for petty drug offenses such as possession.

    Indeed, police departments spend an immense amount of time and resources on these non-violent offenses. In their book, The Challenge of Crime, Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz observe:

    [W]e do know that the effort to stem the tide of illicit drugs has been massive — and expensive. On the local level, 93 percent of county police agencies and 82 percent of all municipal agencies with more than one hundred police officers contained a full-time drug enforcement unit, as did about 60 percent of the state police agencies, and almost 70 percent of all sheriffs' departments. New York City alone in 1997 reported over 2,500 police officers dedicated to drug units and task forcese. More than 90 percent of all these police agencies received money and property forfeited by drug sellers for use in law enforcement opertations. ...

    State and local police made about 1.6 million arrests for drug abuse violations in 2000, four-fifths of them for drug possession. ... And in 1998, drug offenders were 35 percent of all felons convicted in state courts.

    In Gangs and Gang Crime, Michael Newton Reports: "In 1987, drug offenses produced 7.4 percent of all American arrests, nearly doubling to 13.1 percent by 2005."

    As Ruth and Reitz note, there are financial incentives to police agencies to pursue drug offenders. The nature of drug offenses also gives the police more reason to make arrests in general. As explained by Lawrence Travis in Introduction to Criminal Justice:

    With increased emphasis on drug crimes, agents and agencies of the justice system have uncovered offenses that have been present for years. Because drug offenses have gone unreported in the past, Zeisel (1982) noted that they present an almost limitless supply of business for the police. changing public perceptions of the seriousness of drug offenses has supported increased drug enforcement efforts.

    [Peter] Kraska observed that with drug offenders, police "can seek actively to detect drug crimes, as opposed to violent and property crimes, for which they have little choice but to react to complaints." Thus, the volume of drug offenders entering the justice system is more a product of police activity than is that of violent or property offenders.. Political pressure to treat drug offenses more seriously, coupled with giving incentives such as profit from seizing the property of drug offenders, spurs more aggressive police action."

    In other words, rather than react to complaints about violent crime or property crime, drug enforcement provides the police with nearly limitless opportunities to search, question, and arrest suspects for any number of offenses related to drugs. Moreover, if the police attempt to stop and search a person, and the person becomes uncooperative, police may then be able to justify an arrest for "resisting arrest" or similar offense even if no drugs are found.

    Arrests in turn then bolster a police officer's career, even though little time has been spent on investigating violent crime or recovering stolen property.

    The results of this emphasis among law enforcers can be seen in the incarceration data. Erinn Herbermann and Thomas Bonczar report that, of the 3,910,647 adults on probation in the US at the end of 2013, 25 percent (approximately 977,662 people) had a drug charge as their most serious offense.

    According to the Justice Policy Institute: "approximately one-quarter of those people held in U.S. prisons or jails have been convicted of a drug offense. The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than any other country. With an estimated 6.8 million Americans struggling with drug abuse or dependence, the growth of the prison population continues to be driven largely by incarceration for drug offenses."

    Consequently, more than one-fifth of prisoners (21 percent) in state prisons are held due to drug violations, while more than half (55 percent) of prisoners in federal prisons are held due to drug violations. This does not include offenders in county jails for shorter non-prison sentences.

    The Effects of an Expansive Criminal Code on Police-Suspect Interactions

    The effects of these trends should be predictable.

    Imagine, for example, a world in which the only offenses that brought significant jail terms or large fines were violent criminal acts and property crimes. Obviously, in this case, the range of action open to the police would be greatly reduced, and citizens stopped by the police would have little to worry about in terms of stiff jail sentences. The possession of a switchblade or a certain type of cigarette would be of little concern to either the police or the suspect. Even if policymakers could not bring themselves to legalize these activities but only de-criminalize them, the stakes would be much lower in police-citizen interactions when citizens fear only a citation and fine instead of prison time for any offense that does not involve thievery, fraud, violence, or destruction of property.

    When suspects know they are unlikely to be arrested or face a serious criminal charge, they are unlikely to panic and resist the police in a way that may lead to escalation of violence.

    Moreover, given the relative rarity of real crime versus mere drug offenses and other small-time violations, police would be forced to concentrate their efforts on violent crime and property instead.

    After all, given the reality of scarce resources for any endeavor, including policing, the opportunity cost of pursuing drug offenses leads to fewer police resources being devoted to recovering stolen property and pursuing violent criminals.

    Contrary to un-serious and absurd claims that the police "enforce all laws," police use their discretion all the time as to what laws to enforce and which to not enforce. Those laws that are enforced are often laws that can lead to profit for the police department — such as drug laws which leads to asset forfeiture — or laws that can make for easy arrests — such as loitering and other small time laws — which improve a police officers' arrest record.

    If we want to be serious about scaling back the degree to which police interactions with the public can lead to violent escalations, we must first scale back the number of offenses that can lead to serious fines and imprisonment for members of the public, while shifting the concentration of police efforts to violent crime and property crime. The emphasis must return to crimes that have actual victims and which are reported by citizens looking for stolen property and violent criminals. Not only will this increase the value of policing, but will also improve relations with most of the public while reducing the footprint of the state in the lives of ordinary people.

  19. #76
    Why We Get More Policing Than We Need: It's "Free"

    https://mises.org/blog/why-we-get-mo...-need-its-free

    07/13/2016 Ryan McMaken

    [This is Part Two of a three-part series on policing. See Part One and Part Three.]

    In a press conference Monday, Dallas Police Chief David Brown admitted that the American propensity for sending the police to deal with every minor social problem has failed:

    “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country” said Brown.

    “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve” said Brown. He listed mental health, drug addiction, loose dogs, failing schools as problems the public expects ‘cops to solve.’

    “Seventy percent of the African American community is being raised by single women, let’s give it to the cops to solve that as well” said Brown. “Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

    Brown is right.

    In America today, the police are used as a general agency to intervene in nearly any unpleasant situation that may arise. It has become a sign of the times to see a headline like this one: "Mom calls 911 over son's video-game habit." In this case, the police were actually dispatched to solve the woman's problem — free of charge. According to NBC news: "Two officers who responded to the house persuaded the child to obey his mother."

    Then, there was the case of the woman who called 911 because Burger King got her order wrong.

    Cases like these are extreme, of course, and largely serve as click bait for readers looking for the outrage of the day. Nevertheless, they are reminders that very little of what the police do in modern America involves the prevention and punishment of violent crime or property crime.

    This is a modern innovation, and in the past, the police, the courts, and armed law enforcement agents in general were designed to address primarily violent crime and property crime. In their book Introduction to Criminal Justice, Joseph Senna and Larry Siegel write:

    Police are expected to perform many civic duties that in earlier times were the responsibility of every citizen: keeping the peace, performing emergency medical care, and dealing with civil emergencies. Today, we leave those tasks to the police. Although most of us agree that a neighborhood brawl must be broken up, that the homeless family must be found shelter, or the drunk taken safely home, few of us want to jump personally into the fray: we'd rather "call the cops."

    John Dempsey and Linda Forst agree, noting:

    We might agree with [Senna and Siegel]. They say that the police role has become that of a social handywoman or handyman called to handle social problems that citizens wish would just go away.

    The data suggests that they are right. In research on calls to police and police activities, we find that most of what leads to calls to the police involves something other than criminal activity.

    Dempsey and Forst continue:

    "[I]n a classic study of patrol activities in a city of 400,000, John Webster found that providing social service functions and performing administrative tasks accounted for 55 percent of police officers' time and 57 percent of their calls. Activities involving crime fighting took only 17 percent of patrol time and amounted to about 16 percent of the calls to the police. Robert Lilly found that of 18,000 calls to a Kentucky police department made during a four-month period, 60 percent were for information, and 13 percent concerned traffic problems. Less than 3 percent were about violent crime, and approximately 2 percent were about theft.

    In the Police Services Study (PSS), a survey of 26,000 calls to police in 24 different police departments in 60 neighborhoods, researchers found that only 19 percent of calls involved the report of a criminal activity.
    Part of the reason we hear so little about the lack of law enforcement activities among police is because the police themselves prefer to portray themselves as spending most of their time hunting down "bad guys." This isn't the reality, but as George Kirkham observed:

    The police have historically overemphasized their role as crime fighters and played down their more common work as keepers of the peace and providers of social services, simply because our society proffers rewards for the former (crime fighting) but cares little for the latter (peacekeeping and providing services).

    Nevertheless, as research by Matthew Hickman and Brian Reaves has shown, a sizable amount of police agency time and resources goes to non-crime-related activities including animal control, search and rescue, school crossing services, emergency medical services, civil defense, fire services, "crime prevention education," and underwater recovery operations. Police are also used for parking enforcement, traffic direction, and commercial vehicle enforcement.

    Police have become a general agency for dealing with minor neighborhood disputes such as unkempt lawns, and children playing "unsupervised" on their own property. One might call the police if a family member refuses to take his medication, or if a family member is suicidal but no threat to the community. These activities have no connection to "crime fighting."

    Nevertheless, residents have become acquainted to calling the police on even the most benign activities, such as the case of a suburban man who called the police because a neighbor's father was "suspiciously" walking through the neighborhood. Too lazy (or cowardly) to approach the man — a slow-moving grandfather who gave no indication of being violent — and ask him what he was up to, the "vigilant" citizen called the police instead.

    Heavily Armed, Taxpayer-Funded Arbitrators

    Given that police services are generally fully subsidized by taxpayers, this is to be expected.

    Since calling the police requires no financial obligation on the part of the caller, calling the police on neighbors or others in the community — including non-criminals — offers a low-cost means to intimidate or hassle others at nearly-zero cost to the one calling 911.

    But, as history has shown, this is not the only way to handle disputes. As recounted by Michael Giuliano here, the use of government sanctions against a neighbor once required a demonstration in court that the offender had inflicted damages against the alleged victim. Obviously, this sort of due process could be costly and time consuming. So, why go through all that trouble when numerous calls for the police might frighten one's adversary enough to obviate the need for court action? The fact that these police services are "free" contributes to their widespread over-utilization. As with any subsidized activity, you'll get far more of it than if the service were not subsidized.

    In all of these cases, though, the problem does not necessarily lie with wishing to call in a third party that might act as a mediator or arbitrator. Calling in a third party is often prudent. The problem here lies with the fact that these services are all expected to be at someone else's expense, and handled by people with guns as the very first step in resolving the situation.

    What If Other Industries Were Like Police Services?

    Imagine if the same standards were applied to other industries. In the case of health care, for example, if the public expected the same model as employed in policing, people would be regularly calling in to demand house calls from medical personal for every broken bone or abrasion. In practice, though, rides to the hospital in an ambulance are costly, and patients are expected to bear at least some of the cost of medical services. Similar conditions apply in non-police search and rescue operations in which the victim often receives a bill in the mail after being rescued from some wilderness misadventure.

    With policing, however, there is no cost at all to demanding armed police show up to confront an elderly man walking down the street. One can do it repeatedly at no charge to the one making accusations.

    One can only guess what health care costs would look like were ambulance services performed on a similar model. Obviously, if these services were provided for free, the utilization of ambulances and paramedics would quickly outstrip the supply, thus drawing services away from more serious injuries and driving up the cost of the response to far more pressing emergencies. After all, scarcity does not disappear because policymakers have decided something should be free.

    The same is true of police services. Every minute that a police officer spends searching someone for marijuana possession is a minute not available for recovering stolen property or locating violent criminals.

    Moreover, the incessant usage of police for everything from animal control to medical services means government agents trained in armed confrontations with criminals will be continually brought into situations that do not warrant such a response. Often, an unarmed expert with actual training in dealing with the mentally ill or the homeless is a far wiser approach. When police are used they way they are, we should not be surprised if these situations then escalate into violence.

    No matter how poor a fit the police may be for a given situation, though, the fact that police services are mostly paid for by someone else provides an incentive for their continued use in a myriad of situations.

    A Modest Proposal: Partial Privatization

    The answer to this situation is privatization. In a world where police can be used to address every minor complaint, there will be no incentive on the part of the public to limit the use of police services to true emergencies and criminal behavior. If those who use police services were expected to pay for the service, however, we would quickly find a reduction in the habit of calling the police for services unrelated to crime. Moreover, a reduction in police services in these cases would also open up markets for private firms to address these issues at lower cost and with less threat of deadly force.

    Naturally, opponents of privatization will complain that privatization will lead to only big corporations and rich people being able to benefit from crime prevention services. As Murray Rothbard and Tate Fegley have shown (see here, here, and here), this is an unconvincing argument.

    In the spirit of compromise, however, let's begin with baby steps and limit taxpayer-provided police services to criminal activities only. Even better, let's limit them to real violent crime and property crime, and not to non-crimes such as drug offenses and "crimes" such as carrying knives and selling loose cigarettes.

    For now, "crime prevention" would still remain "free." If, however, you want to call in people with guns to get your son off the Xbox, you can pay a private firm for that.
    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 07-21-2017 at 08:06 PM.

  20. #77
    The Broken Windows Theory of Policing Has Failed

    https://mises.org/blog/broken-window...ing-has-failed

    07/14/2016 Ryan McMaken

    [This is Part Three of a three-part series on policing. See Part One and Part Two.]

    One of the most successful ideological movements waged by government agencies in recent decades has been the so-called Broken Windows theory of policing. Popularized in the 1980s by George Kelling, the theory states that if minor violations are ignored — such as the breaking of a window on private property — then those small infractions will act as a signal to others in the community that more serious crimes can be committed with impunity.

    In political and policing circles, this theory became immensely popular during the 1990s and persists today, although repeated demonstrations of the forceful and deadly methods used by police to address small-time infractions has prompted many to ask if coming down hard on every little thing is really the best way to police a neighborhood.

    While Kelling successfully reinvigorated the idea, the Broken Windows theory in the 1980s, was not new or novel. It was simply the latest manifestation of what has also been termed "community policing" and "order maintenance" policing.

    At their core, these ideas taken together depend on the idea that police interactions with community members should be expanded well beyond criminal activities while giving police officers more discretion over what laws to enforce, and when.

    Two Views: Community Policing vs. Limited Policing

    Community policing and order maintenance policing have long been in tension with competing views of policing in which the police should be more limited in their role and focused more on serious and violent crime.

    Not surprisingly, as police agencies took shape for the first time in the United States in the nineteenth century, many Americans took the view that policing should be limited in scope.

    In his essay "Community Policing in the United States," Jack Greene notes that "the American police service was originally cast as a reactive force, not as a preventive of interdicting force ... America's police were to provide assistance on request, not to proactively intervene in the lives of the community." (See more from Greene on four different policing models.)

    It was recognized that more police power and more police discretion to initiate interactions with the public would lead to corruption. The coercive and monopolistic power that comes with government policing brings the ability to demand compliance and resources from the public for personal advantage, and the advantage of state institutions. The best safeguard, early skeptics of policing concluded, was to carefully limit police power.

    It did not take long for the skeptics to be proven right.

    Greene continues:

    The police of the late 19th and early 20th century were unlikely to be seen as extension of "the community." More often, they were viewed by citizens as extension fo corrupt politicians or as criminal enterprises. While charged with enforcing the laws, the early American police were not often lawful — the law was neither a means not and ends for the police. Rather, the law was often selectively invoked for political, administrative or corrupt purposes.

    Not surprisingly, many reformers attempted to reduce police corruption then by seeking "to control in detailed ways the actions of the police." Reformers suspected that police who were given discretion to enforce a wide variety of laws according to their own judgment were more prone to use the law enforcement system for personal purposes, whether for outright extortion, or to improve one's own career prospects.

    The reformers were successful, to a certain extent, at pushing through a more "professional" model of policing in the twentieth century. The new model of professionalism put distance between police officers and the community. The community was engaged for purposes of crime fighting, and police focused on emphasizing their role in combating dangerous criminals. It's not a coincidence that this new model of professionalism manifests itself by the middle of the twentieth century in popular culture through fictional characters like Joe Friday of the long-running Dragnet franchise about the Los Angeles police department. Friday is distant from the community, professional, straitlaced, efficient, and interested only in facts.

    Reformers sought to professionalize the police as part of an effort to distance the police from the political machinery of the time, thinking this would reduce police corruption. This may have been helpful, although the corrupting nature of law enforcement monopolies continued, as one might expect.

    The problem of police corruption was hardly solved in the decades following these initial reforms. Greene continues:

    Early studies of the American police in the 1950s and 1960s did not necessarily support a benign biew of the public law enforcement or of its agents. More often, the police were found: to use excessive violence toward personal ends; to punish non-respect with arrest; to be socially and politically cynical; and to be rooted in local customs and traditions, despite years of reform efforts. Later studies in the 1970s suggested that the preventive capacity of the police was largely mythical, that rapid response was largely ineffective, and that detective work was largely overrated, generally by detectives themselves."

    Calls for a more explicit return to "community policing" came in the 1960s and 1970s with significant increases in street crime and social unrest in the United States. It was thought that if the police would engage the community in a variety of ways beyond mere crime fighting, then this would defuse racial tensions and other socio-economic conflicts apparent within urban communities.

    Thus, by the early 1980s, when Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote this influential essay in The Atlantic explaining the basics of the Broken Windows theory, they were able to portray community policing as something new that might address the failures of older models of policing.

    Broken Windows Theory Has Often Been Abused and Misapplied

    It's important to note, though, that the vision of Kelling and Wilson was not the crude model of policing that is used today under the label or the Broken Windows theory. (What is used today is often a hybrid of the Broken Windows model and the "zero-tolerance" model.)

    Kelling had always advocated a soft approach to policing in which arrests and summonses were only one tool of many employed by the police. In Kelling's vision, effective community policing had to be done on foot, and the police officer relied largely on his personality and his relationships with the community to maintain order. The officer was in no position to use overwhelming force against community members or retreat into an armored vehicle. Kelling writes:

    An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can help him manage whatever is about to happen. And he can never be certain what that will be — a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation, a teasing remark, a confused babble, a threatening gesture.

    The philosophy of order maintenance employed by Kelling rested on the idea that frequent use of violence on the part of the officer (i.e., tasing and arresting members of the community) would be counter to the entire point of community policing and order maintenance.

    Modern policing done in the name of the Broken Windows theory, however, relies largely on summonses, citations, arrests, and physical violence to enforce laws against any number of minor infractions including carrying knives, selling loose cigarettes, smoking a joint, jaywalking, and other "offenses" that should be regarded as completely non-criminal.

    In spite of Kelling's original intentions, Broken-Windows-style policing has come to mean rigid and aggressive enforcement of small-time violations.

    What Kelling might consider "abuse" is now often the norm, when it comes to the practical application of the theory. In fact, the Broken Windows theory in many communities has been used to justify legal regimes built largely on extracting large amounts of resources from working class and lower class neighborhoods in the form of fines, court fees, and other legal costs.

    In Ferguson, Missouri, for example, where a jaywalking intervention led to the shooting death of Michael Brown, it was revealed that the city of Ferguson was in the habit of issuing unusually large numbers of citations and fines for non-violent violations. The city then arrested citizens who did not pay the fines, putting them in what are effectively debtors prisons.

    This tactic has been used elsewhere as well. In a recent Frontline analysis, the author noted similar practices have been employed in Newark, New Jersey where so-called "blue summonses" have been liberally issued throughout the community.

    Broken-Windows Theory As an Excuse for More Heavy-Handed Policing

    This, however, is what we would expect from a police force that enjoys immunity, monopoly powers, and is far more heavily armed than the general population. Why engage in the Kelling model of community policing when it is far more lucrative — and requires far less patience and risk — to simply arrest or open fire upon anyone who shows "disrespect"?

    In both the Ferguson and Newark cases, the Broken Windows model was been used to justify more citations and arrests, but, as the Frontline report notes: "the frequent stops and citations made people mistrust the police, and much less likely to cooperate when officers were investigating serious crimes."

    Enforcement of small-times crimes thus may harm police efforts to catch serious criminals. Nor does enforcement of low-level offenses mean that people likely to commit serious crime are even being targeted. In the case of Newark, for example, large percentages of summonses were going to people who were "in their 50s or 60s or maybe even older."

    People over fifty are not the people committing serious crimes. But, older residents have been easy targets for police, so it is they who receive the citations.

    This disconnect between real crime and petty offenses is not sufficient to dissuade police officers and police departments from continuing to crack down on small-time offenders. After all, there are career incentives for making large numbers of arrests and issuing large numbers of citations. In the case of Newark, "officers who racked up summonses were chosen for plum assignments" while officers also targeted the easier-to-victimize populations such as the elderly, disabled, and mentally ill.

    Trends like these have long been shaped by police department policy which rewards police officers who take a harsh stance against minor offenses, while police to focus on more serious crime are less often rewarded. Police Historian David Simon writes:

    How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That's what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you're going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who's burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he's going to court one day and he's out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work.

    Naturally, local governments also have a lot to gain from demanding fines and payments for court costs from defendants.

    Does It Reduce Serious Crime?

    Politicians have long embraced the Broken Windows theory and assumed that order-maintenance policing reduces all types of crime. The evidence does not warrant such an assumption.

    In Policing in America, Larry Gaines and Victor Kappeler conclude flatly "there is little proof that order maintenance policing impacts serious violent crime," although there is evidence that it reduces the incidence of lesser offenses.

    The theory nevertheless remains popular. The poster child for the Broken Windows theory is usually presented as New York City where many have noted a significant improvement in crime during the 1990s. This is then credited to the aggressive enforcement of laws against a variety of minor offenses. Ignored, of course, is the fact that New York experienced historic levels of economic growth during this period and that crime nationwide declined significantly over the same period. Numerous large cities throughout the United States during this period experienced similar trends in the absence of similar police policies.

    In an article in the American Journal of Sociology, Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush deny there is a proven link between "public disorder" and crime. ("Public disorder" includes activities such as vagrancy, prostitution, drinking in public, and drug selling.) The authors conclude socio-demographic issues and physical neighborhood characteristics are far more important to the equation: "Attacking public disorder through tough police tactics may thus be a politically popular but perhaps analytically weak strategy to reduce crime."

    Some of the confusion over the effectiveness of community policing stems from inexact use of definitions of crime. If one defines drug selling and prostitution as "crimes" then harsh penalties against those "crimes" will tend to lessen them. On the other hand, if one limits the definition of "crime" to violence, theft, destruction of property and other acts with a specific identifiable victim — as one should — then we find it much more difficult to connect public disorder to real crime.

    In evaluating the success of community policing, one must also evaluate the side effects of more aggressive enforcement. Police shootings, violent confrontations and civil unrest must all also be factored into claims that community policing has improved conditions within a community. There is also evidence that incarcerating people for small infractions makes them more likely to commit crimes later. Because incarceration can have long term affects on one's ability to earn a living through legal means, researcher Michael Mueller-Smith concluded "incarceration led to increased criminality for inmates after re-entry."

    Community Policing Is More About Politics than Crime Reduction

    By mentioning politics in their conclusions, Sampson and Raudenbush may have hit on the true reason for the popularity of the Broken Windows theory. Although it has not been shown to reduce serious crime, the theory remains politically popular and allows politicians to claim they are being active in punishing and preventing crime.

    Even Kelling admitted that order maintenance policing often cannot be shown to reduce crime, but it remains valuable, in Kelling's view, for other reasons. The key, Kelling notes, lies in the fact that a neighborhood can be "'safer' when the crime rate has not gone down." This is because when the Broken Windows theory is employed, people will often feel safer in spite of the reality. Now, feeling safer is not the same thing as being safer, but the claim is that order maintenance policing is important because it improves "quality of life" and perceptions of the community.

    At this point then, Kelling — and backers of the Broken Windows theory in general — have been reduced to admitting that when used for order maintenance, police are really quality-of-life agents and not crime fighters at all.

    Faced with this, then, we must ask ourselves if the same people who are trained to capture rapists and murders with deadly weapons need to be the same people who shoo away aging drunks who engage in public drinking.

    There is good reason to suspect the private sector could easily provide these services. As Murray Rothbard has noted, order maintenance at the street level is low-hanging fruit as far as private-sector security goes, with merchants and other community members highly motivated to pool private resources to keep the streets clear of people who impede commerce and restrict use of public spaces. Indeed, this sort of order maintenance can be — and has been — accomplished quite easily in privately-owned public spaces such as common areas of housing developments and multifamily housing complexes, shopping malls, parking lots, amusement parks, downtown plazas, outdoor food courts, and similar areas. This sort of security is carried out daily by private security worldwide. (See Tate Fegley on this topic, as well.) Moreover, these neighborhood-controlled agents would be answerable to the local owners and residents, and not to centralized political machines, police chiefs, or other government agents who stand to benefit personally from aggressive enforcement.

    The reason we see so little of this in practice, though, is the fact that the public sector has already crowded out the private sector in matters of order maintenance. Since one can easily access (at least in theory) taxpayer-subsidized police services via 911, there is an enormous incentive to rely on "free" police services, even if those services are more likely to bring the possibility of violence, abuse, or unreliable service. Why employ private agents to tell drug dealers to find some other street corner when the police will show up (eventually) and do it for free?

    Community Policing Expands State Power and Discretion

    Early critics of police agencies were right when they immediately identified the downside of active community policing: It gives police agents wide discretion to take action against the general population, while increasing opportunities for coercive intervention in the lives of private citizens. A police force that is encouraged and empowered to intervene in any number of non-violent activities by citizens is also a police force that has wide leeway to extort, threaten, arrest, and assault private citizens over any number of small-time "transgressions" that don't rise to the level of crime.

    Many "fixes" have been offered for the problem of police corruption and abuse. As early reformers knew, though, the only truly reliable way to reduce corruption and needlessly violent police interactions is to reduce police discretion and to reduce the number and scope of laws that police are called upon to enforce. "Community policing" or "order maintenance" are really just another way of describing a large expansion of police power.

    So long as police forces enjoy monopoly powers, and are subject to political, rather than market control, the only way to minimize the potential for police abuse is to minimize their legal reach. If Americans as a society want government police who will be tasked with finding murderers and rapists, they also need to understand that these tasks do not necessitate a police force that spends its days citing local residents for broken tail lights and drinking a beer in public. Giving police wide latitude to be aggressive against the population in the name of order maintenance, on the other hand, is likely to breed resentment, suspicion, and obstacles to enforcing laws against more serious crimes. It's time to admit that the Broken Windows theory is failed and the answer lies in limiting police powers, not in expanding them.
    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 07-21-2017 at 08:22 PM.

  21. #78
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    It hasn't.

    Why should I believe things'll be different now?

    What's changed?
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    You could quote me several hundred times stating;

    "Everything government gets involved in it $#@!s up"

    Which I hold out to be an unequivocal truth.

    In this thread the discussion revolves around "Law-n-Order Republicans", a specific area of government and a specific party in government who have consistently failed in the area being discussed....Thus bolstering my claim.
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    Chicken$#@! dismissals with unsubstantiated claims of allegiance to any one philosophy to justify false superiority is "fightin' words"...

    I like to think I get along quite well with the anarchists who post here, I can think of two in-particular who are extremely intelligent and well spoken...

    Same with the libertarian faction....

    I have never been dismissed by them or vice-versa...

    Holier than thou gets my goat every time..........
    You say there is nothing government should do, therefore you are an Anarchist, if you believe you are right then you should be proud, instead you take insult when I call you what you are and try to weasel out of admitting what you believe.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  22. #79
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    It hasn't.

    Why should I believe things'll be different now?

    What's changed?
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    Can it?

    Can you name anything that government and central planning has accomplished that was not:

    A - Wildly overpriced.

    B - Superfluous.

    C - Badly managed.

    D - Mandated that the people comply with, at the barrel of a cop's gun.

    E - All of the above.
    Nothing in life has ever been done perfectly, ALL systems succumb to corruption, civilization does better with government than without.
    This is the last I will say about this because you can't debate Anarchists, they are to committed to their fantasy that they can solve all problems by converting everyone to their philosophical religion.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  23. #80
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You say there is nothing government should do, therefore you are an Anarchist, if you believe you are right then you should be proud, instead you take insult when I call you what you are and try to weasel out of admitting what you believe.
    Once again $#@! you!

    DO NOT try to tell me what I am you useless piece of $#@!.

    And stop putting words in my mouth! I'll type exactly what I mean there's no need for you to try and interpret.



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  25. #81
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    Could you just name something specific? Post office? Design the flag?
    How 'bout sticking to the topic of this thread?

    Law-n-Order..... I do not want to subject other communities/counties or states to the Law-n-Order of my community, nor do I want their Law-n-Order imposed on my community....



    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    I feel very strongly that the biggest problem in almost all democracies/republics is allowing parasites to vote. Only people that pay more in taxes than they get in benefits should be allowed to vote.
    I could agree with this IF government 'employees' contractors and pensioners would be barred from voting too...

    Existing off government largess is all the same to me.....A federal judge or a welfare crack-whore are both suckin' up tax dollars.

  26. #82
    I'm amazed that @NorthCarolinaLiberty isn't calling out @Swordsmyth out for a troll at his point!

    This forum is entertaining.

  27. #83
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You say there is nothing government should do, therefore you are an Anarchist, if you believe you are right then you should be proud, instead you take insult when I call you what you are and try to weasel out of admitting what you believe.
    Mirror?

    Stop with the names and insults- only shows that you have no argument.
    There is no spoon.

  28. #84
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Nothing in life has ever been done perfectly, ALL systems succumb to corruption, civilization does better with government than without.
    Then why on earth would you think it was good idea to put phalanxes of heavily armed enforcers of same in every town, boro and neighborhood across the country?

    And I was just looking for one, just one, example.

    This is the last I will say about this because you can't debate Anarchists, they are to committed to their fantasy that they can solve all problems by converting everyone to their philosophical religion.
    My position is quite clear and consistent for over ten years now.

    You can look to my voluminous past posting history to see where I stand on this.

    If that makes me an anarchist, so be it...but there's no reason to leave, I'm just asking questions.

    Here's another: Is the United States, in 2017, a police state?

  29. #85
    Quote Originally Posted by Ender View Post
    Mirror?

    Stop with the names and insults- only shows that you have no argument.
    Words have meaning, someone who believes government should not do anything is an Anarchist look it up.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  30. #86
    Quote Originally Posted by Madison320 View Post
    I feel very strongly that the biggest problem in almost all democracies/republics is allowing parasites to vote. Only people that pay more in taxes than they get in benefits should be allowed to vote.
    And yet there is a campaign to red bar Zippy. LMAO.

  31. #87
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Words have meaning, someone who believes government should not do anything is an Anarchist look it up.
    I know exactly what an anarchist is.

    Someone who thinks gov should take care of government created problems while acting like it's not a government problem, is a neocon- look it up.
    There is no spoon.

  32. #88
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    Then why on earth would you think it was good idea to put phalanxes of heavily armed enforcers of same in every town, boro and neighborhood across the country?

    And I was just looking for one, just one, example.



    My position is quite clear and consistent for over ten years now.

    You can look to my voluminous past posting history to see where I stand on this.

    If that makes me an anarchist, so be it...but there's no reason to leave, I'm just asking questions.

    Here's another: Is the United States, in 2017, a police state?
    If you read the rest of this thread you will see that I want less police and less laws, but some people run around demanding that we should have none.

    The answer to your question depends on your exact location in this continent wide nation, some places are others are not.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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  34. #89
    Quote Originally Posted by Ender View Post
    I know exactly what an anarchist is.

    Someone who thinks gov should take care of government created problems while acting like it's not a government problem, is a neocon- look it up.
    Not when the problem was that government failed to do something it should.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  35. #90
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    And yet there is a campaign to red bar Zippy. LMAO.
    Ya think?
    There is no spoon.

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