Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Every year in December I go out to Southern California. My brother and sister-in-law like having the whole family around at Christmas, and since I’m all alone in the world, they invite me out. I enjoy myself and have a good time.

The last time I was out, though, I noticed that something had changed. There’ve always been homeless around out there, thanks to the mild climate and mild laws, but this last time, they were almost ubiquitous. And my sister-in-law’s nephew, a policeman, says that he and his comrades are not supposed to bother with “minor” crimes—shoplifting, begging, petty theft, sleeping in public, and things like that. They’ve become a general nuisance, and I have heard that things are even worse up around the San Francisco Bay area.

Why the authorities have decided to give “minor” crimes a pass escapes me. One explanation I have heard is that dealing with them results in “too many black (and brown) bodies in prison.” Apparently, this is an unacceptable outcome, no matter how disproportionately such people get involved in crime. Many “good thinkers” would rather be accused of treason or cannibalism than racism.

Another possibility is that the “War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs” soaks up so much police and judicial-system resources, there just isn’t enough left for these crimes. This hypothesis is perfectly plausible. Police resources, and those of the “justice” system, are limited by their nature. But the kind of crime I’m discussing affects more people, and does far more harm, than illicit drug use does in and of itself.

Many of the victims of the kind of small-time crime committed by vagrants and the “homeless” are, themselves, far from rich. Repeated thefts can drive a small, struggling business under, and loss of, for example, a bicycle can represent a catastrophic blow to a poor person’s finances. This doesn’t address the sense of violation felt by those victimized by crime.

The original San Francisco Committees of Vigilance formed because the “forces of law and order” either were not doing their jobs, or were actively in league with the very criminals they were supposed to be suppressing. Many police were incompetent or lazy, while others were often corrupt on a scale that would shock Boss Hogg.

Do-it-yourself justice was far from uncommon in nineteenth-century America, including in the “civilized” East. In upstate New York, after decades of unpunished crime, the Loomis family gang received an epic comeuppance in 1865. Fifteen years earlier, their outraged neighbors had tried staging a raid on the Loomis farm, but uncertainty about who owned the stolen goods they found prevented any Loomis from being convicted. In 1865, many of their neighbors were returned Civil War combat veterans. They had become inured to violence, and they were tired of the Loomis’ thefts, arsons and intimidation. They killed George “Wash” Loomis, the leader of the gang, nearly lynched one of his brothers, and burned down the family’s home. After that, the Loomis family’s power was broken and their reign of crime was pretty much over.

These things happened because there was no other way to deal with these situations. Law enforcement, in those days, was primitive, especially outside of the major cities. Large corporations often had their own private police simply because of this fact.

The “social contract” is supposed to read something like “renounce personally avenging your wrongs, and society will do it for you.” But what can one do, when society is visibly abrogating the contract? Take it to court?

This is the sort of situation that leads to death squads. A friend of mine, familiar with Central America, tells about how things were in Guatemala. When people in a neighborhood were sick of rampant petty crime, beggars, and other undesirables, they would contract with one of the death squads to take care of business. 

Ojo por Ojo was fairly mild—they would “disappear” a few of the most blatant offenders, beat up others, and suggest to the rest that elsewhere was a good place for them to be. La Mano Blanca, on the other hand, was considerably more hardcore. They would get a list from householders of poor and lower-class people who were permitted to be in that area: servants, garbage men, and other support personnel, with pictures. Poor people who showed up and were not on the list disappeared.

I am not, for one second, suggesting that this is a good thing. Outfits like Ojo por Ojo and La Mano Blanca have a tendency to get out of control. However, in the absence of police, what are people to do? The Sicilian Mafia started out as self-help for people who couldn’t turn to the law to protect them, after all.

Perhaps in Libertopia, this wouldn’t be a problem. Until we achieve Libertopia, thugh, we’ve got to deal with things the way they are. I don’t think that allowing “minor” crimes to go unpunished is a good thing. People who get away with these minor offenses often start thinking that they’re invulnerable, and graduate to bigger crimes. And even when they don’t, the cost of dealing with them is a burden that the rest of us shouldn’t bear.