Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

"One white cop gets killed today, tomorrow we got a thousand white cops, all of them with itchy trigger fingers."
—Zeus Carver, Die Hard With a Vengeance, 1995

Recently, president Barack Obama said that police should admit their failures, and that doing so would improve the lives of people in their communities. He said these things to shirk his own personal responsibility for the hundreds of deaths annually by police killing (mostly white male suspects) in the United States while prosecuting Obama's personal wars against the American people: the drug war, the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Libya, the war in Syria, the war on undocumented working, the war on illegally crossing imaginary boundaries, and every other war that he not only gleefully prosecutes but that he has been paid to wage on us, in enormous campaign contributions and will be paid with speaking fees and other direct payments beginning in 2017 by the military contractor companies, giant pharmaceutical conglomerates, prisons for profit industry, and enormous banking and insurance companies.

Obama is a lickspittle for every corporate welfare programme for the oligarchy. He is a coward who personally shirks his own responsibility for sending men and women into combat zones to slaughter men, women, and children. He is a reprobate who dishonours the office of the presidency once held by stalwarts like Thomas Jefferson and Calvin Coolidge. Worst of all he is a Progressive in the exact way that the racists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were.

Had Obama bothered to check with the voters, he would have noticed that voters do not want to continue the war in America's streets over who gets to use, possess, manufacture, and sell “narcotics” including, laughably, marijuana which is only a prohibited drug because racist Woody Wilson and racist Harry Anslinger decided to attack minority populations that enjoyed a little pot smoking. Had Obama bothered to look at the statistics, he would know that by far the most common purpose in making a traffic stop is to use civil asset forfeiture to grab loot from Americans. And had Obama any concern for anyone but himself in his greed and his psychotic blood lust, he would have stopped the war on drugs in his first term. Or by this point in his second term. But he didn't.

Cops Are Being Killed

Now I know something of what it is to be beaten by police. I have eleven broken bones in my body, all of which were broken on one especially bad day in Houston in 2004. My crime? The ticket I was given said only, “Houston Superbowl Dragnet.”

So you can imagine my dismay when I learned that some individuals have chosen to seek out police officers and shoot them dead. You can imagine how little sympathy I have for the men and women who choose to put on costumes, load pepper spray, tasers, guns, handcuffs, and ammo on their equipment belt, inhale a few doughnuts, and go to “work” attacking their neighbours, betraying common decency, enforcing unjust laws, being bullies, and committing rape, theft, murder, and extortion with complete impunity. Nor do I have even one tear of sympathy for the men and women who work alongside the scum in blue who themselves have not yet done any awful things but who refuse to stand up to the bullies, report them, arrest them, or do anything to see they are prosecuted because those who are not bullies in the police force are cowards of the lowest order. All police are guilty of taking tax money from the public, and taxation is always theft.

But, although I lack any sympathy for any of the people who have been killed by their former victims, and do not regard their deaths as any kind of initiatory force, I do have a few thoughts on the topic.

Police Are Evil

The concept of a police force is an evil idea by racist white supremacist aristocrats in London in the early 19th Century who felt that the traditions of England should be ignored. Sir Robert Peele and others organised a metropolitan police force for the purpose of attacking all gin joints, prostitutes, whorehouses, opium dens, Irish, immigrants, vagabonds, and pickpockets, not because they had any particular opposition to drunkenness, whoring, narcotic inebriation, profiting from opium sales worldwide, enslaving Irish workers, or being loiterers and thieves in their own lives for themselves (as any review of the records of any session of parliament from their day to this would reveal) but because they wanted to “improve” and gentrify the city of London and some surrounding neighbourhoods by getting rid of what they called “undesirables.”

The fact that police have existed as a sort of government work force, a kind of modern-day plantation overseer, and the fact that television shows about rural sheriff deputies like Gomer Pyle make it seem as though nothing racist, sexist, violent, and extortionate is involved are not going to dissuade me from my assessment that the police are evil. Accordingly, every man or woman working in any capacity for a police force is either directly, personally, individually responsible for evil acts of injustice, cowardice, murder, rape, pillage, forfeiture, theft, and brutality, or is directly, personally, individually complicit in those acts. Therefore, any attack, whatsoever, at all, at any time, in any place, including in their homes in front of their children, by any of the people they have been attempting to subjugate is not unethical, is not initiating force, and is not wrong. It is most likely defensive force, and it is possibly retaliatory force after much suffering has been inflicted by those same police.

Every man, woman, and child in the world has the right to be free. And if that requires the killing of every single person oppressing them, it is the right of every single man, woman, and child to do just exactly as much killing of oppressors as is necessary to GET THEM TO STOP.

Bigotry? Not At All

Is this position bigoted against police? No, of course not. I have nothing against the human beings who happen to be police. I don't ask them to change their skin colour, adopt a new religion, speak in a different accent or language, obtain travel papers or other government permits, all I ask is that they stop oppressing other people. Quit. Get a job in the real economy. Get a job protecting people by working private security, say. Drive for Uber or Lyft. Do something useful. Stop sucking the government teat.

It is not anything peculiar to the individuals who have chosen to be police that they are evil, nor is it anything about their heritage. They were not born bullies and thieves and costumed creeps. They chose that profession, they can choose another. They chose to be evil, they can choose to stop. It is the job they are doing which is wrong, and they don't have to do that job. Nobody has to do that job.

Bad Strategy

Given that I don't think it is initiatory force for anyone, at any time, to shoot any police officer and given that I don't think it is unethical for slaves to rebel, for indentured servants to beat to death the man holding the whip, it may surprise you to learn that I don't think it is a good idea. It is not a logical approach to ending oppression.

For one thing, there are a great many really stupid people who are determined to support the police. There are even some not-terribly- stupid people who think the police are a desirable source of security. The killing of a few cops here and there is clearly making these people very angry, very intent on attacking those who attack the police. Moreover, it makes politicians, who are almost entirely of the same calibre as lickspittle Obama eager to spend more money on police forces. So, it is poor strategy. The way to get more doors kicked in, more SWAT teams slaughtering families, more family pets gunned down, more warrantless searches, more invasions of privacy, more attacks by the evil bully scum who police the country is to shoot a few of them.

So, please don't. Please don't shoot the cops, even though they are clearly evil, horrid, poorly educated, unconstitutional law enforcing thugs, bullies, and scum. Nor do I encourage strong drink, because it may cause you to shoot at police and miss.

Build Better

Instead, I would encourage you to build a better world. Build a safer community for yourself and your children. In some cities, admittedly, that won't be possible. Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baton Rouge, and Houston come to mind as examples of cities run into the ground by corruption, over policing, and violent criminal gangs of murderous scum (but I repeat myself). So, I would encourage you to consider moving to some place better, probably more rural.

Keep and bear arms. The statistics are clear:

As I pointed out in my last essay, a sort of peak of American culture was reached during the period from roughly 1880 to 1910. You can see from the graphic I've included above that the first gun control laws began spoiling things, causing the obvious rise in the homicide rate that any fool could predict would result from making it harder for people to defend themselves.

Of course, a lot of other idiocies began about then. The banking gangsters met at Jekyll Island in 1910 and formed their plan for a powerful central to finance endless war. President Wilson segregated the civil service, bringing Jim Crow to Washington, DC. Wilson also deliberately lied the country into World War One, having lied about keeping the country at peace. Wilson created a brownshirt brigade, a Black Chamber to spy on American telephone and telegraph communications, more spies to open mail, the FBI to raid all groups advocating for peace and freedom (“the Palmer raids”), began to impose conditions on immigration, pushed for Prohibition, and was just a really horrid guy. His successors, such as Herbert Hoover, tried to ruin the economy with considerable success by imposing all kinds of stupid regulations and creating new agencies so a lot of educated men and women could have easy jobs indoors making life miserable for others—agencies like the FAA, FCC, SEC, and so forth.

Franklin Roosevelt lied us into another war, a bigger one, and instituted war production boards and other psychotic ideas. He was involved with, allied with, or complicit in the deaths of tens of millions in Nazi Germany, tens of millions in the Soviet Union, about a hundred million in China, and the sixty million deaths of combat soldiers and civilians in the Second World War. He probably takes the prize from Lincoln for being the very worst president in terms of economic disruption and global deaths, though he didn't kill quite as many Americans as Lincoln.

What I'm saying is: it would not be hard to build better things than the culture and civilisation that you were born into, any time in the last 80 years. It would not be hard to find ways to make a community with people you care about, use privacy technologies that have been designed by friends of mine in the hacker community, and generally withdraw from a system that not only oppresses you, but hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of people worldwide.

Killing cops, as satisfying as it might seem to people who seek blood vengeance for the tens of thousands of Americans killed by police since 1900, is a poor choice. It is illogical, not strategic, and unlikely to bring about an end to police brutality, police killings of ordinary Americans, or lessen the bullying and raping by police of anyone they can. So I recommend against it.

Instead, I recommend you spend your time doing useful things. Build up your home. Meet others in your community. Help people who need help. Engage in trade and commerce. Learn how to shoot. Buy survival supplies. Outfit a home shelter. Make a lot of money, buy land somewhere, and grow your own food. Work with others to make better things, more efficient tools, or more effective companies.

Armed revolution has a certain lustre, a popularity with the same children who love pirate films, single person shooter video games, and adventure stories. But, in addition to getting a great many people killed, causing a vast effusion of blood and suffering, armed revolution is very unlikely to overthrow a system that thrives on carnage. It ends, typically, with a new set of bosses doing the same wicked stuff.

If you want to get rid of oppression, if you want a world without police, you are going to have to work harder. Just shooting a bunch of people in uniform isn't going to get you there. And, in fact, is very likely to make things much worse before they can even begin to get better.

Humans

You are welcome to hate the police. I do. Hate the work they do. Hate the bullying, the raping, the murdering, the stealing that the police do. I hate these things. I spit on the idea of these things. But the police are human beings. If they would quit their jobs being evil scum, they would probably turn out to be reasonably decent folks, for the most part.

After all, only about 1.8% of the population ever commits a violent criminal act (as the FBI defines such things) and only about 4.5% ever commit any sort of property crime. So your odds of encountering a police officer who is not a killer, rapist, or thief are fairly good — though almost certainly worse than in the general population. Getting away with things makes it more likely that the perpetrator will do them again, of course.

Encourage these men and women to quit their jobs doing bad things. Encourage them to get other kinds of work. And remember, no matter how frustrating things get, the police, while not your friends, are human beings. Dividing and conquering people is how the oligarchy rules.

If you want some good advice from someone else, read up on the techniques the oligarchy are using against you. Read Machiavelli's The Prince. Read Etienne de la Boetie's On Voluntary Servitude.

Build a community, read a book, write an essay, code software, fix cars, build guns, re-load ammo, stock supplies, prep for disaster, talk to your neighbours. But don't kill the police. Please.

Jim Davidson is a sovereign individual, entrepreneur, and author. He spent 2012 to 2014 withdrawn from world affairs, then joined the Digital Cash Alliance where he serves in an unpaid, voluntary capacity. He teaches classes in computer technology, communications privacy, science, mathematics, and history at Individual Sovereign University.

As a sovereign individual, Jim knows that it is resolution and determination which separate sovereign from servant. In the words of Etienne de la Boetie, "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."

As an entrepreneur, Jim has been involved in dozens of start-up ventures in industries ranging from banking, aerospace, real estate, software, and e-commerce to space travel, data havens, and longevity research. He has worked in companies founded by others and in companies of his own creation. Entrepreneurs know that many companies end in failure. It is the fear of failure which prevents a great many people from ever being entrepreneurs or sovereign.

As an author, Jim has written essays, articles, poetry, fiction, and is developing a book on the new country trend. Words about him have appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other major publications. Words by him have appeared in The Libertarian Enterprise, Final Frontier magazine, Space News, The Houston Post, The Houston Chronicle, and other publications. The Atlantis Papers was published in 1994 and is available from After Dark Publications. His essays Being Sovereign are on Amazon.com and his collection Being Libertarian is available on Lulu.com.