Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Americans are currently faced with the fact that the people who police them are willing to murder them in broad daylight. The ideas that police should be an occupying military force within the cities, that they should be a source of fear and terror among the people, and that they should enforce violently various statutes that include a dizzying array of non-violent but prohibited behaviours seem, to me and many others, to be ideas that are completely inconsistent with a free people and a free country.

Leaving aside as irrelevant all the defences that are typically mounted about how the police are a thin blue line (690,000 law enforcement in a country of 332 million) and that there is a war on the police anyway so of course they must be garbed for war and deliberately brutal, and the always flavourful "if you don't like the laws get them changed" let's look at what functions the police have been doing that we may wish to see done.

No, seriously, it is totally okay if you wish to debate the merits of police agencies shooting and killing 1,004 Americans in 2019 and killing more in other ways. You are welcome to explain all about the essentials of police brutality, and when you get done, please go on to explain why overseers whipped slaves. Also, if you wish, please go over the vast array of thousands of laws and regulations Americans are expected to obey, the need for prison sentences for non-violent crimes, and do let me know why you believe Ross Ulbricht is serving two consecutive life sentences and forty years for building a free market web site. Then you can go around to all 2.5 million Americans in prison, all 3.8 million on probation, and the million or so on parole who are all expected to be watched and pay fees and obey endless more rules. If you don't believe there is a prison and probation for profit industry, you may be beyond help.

Police Reports

If the police ceased to exist today, what functions they perform would be needed? One example is the police report that insurance companies insist must be made available to them in the event of a crime or tort. If someone hits your car or breaks into your home or in some other way does damage to you physically or economically and you plan to file a claim against your insurance, your insurance company may make the seemingly-reasonable request that the police be summoned to make a report.

Now, summoning the police has been fraught with peril for the entire time since 1829 when Sir Bobby Peel formed "the bobbies " or the Metropolitan police force in London, one of the first police agencies inflicted on contemporary society. Calling the police can mean that people you know get arrested, things you own get stolen by the police, people get beaten, men or women get raped, dogs get shot, and fairly often, someone gets murdered. Is it possible there may be another way?

Recently I was reading The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth which includes a scene of a group of skinheads beating a Russian sailor unconscious a few miles from the docks in Glasgow. Two " police constables" arrive on the scene, summon help, an ambulance takes the sailor to hospital. One constable is going through the worldly possessions of the sailor when he wakes up, sees his stuff being pawed at, makes a grab for some of it, then, perhaps disoriented from his recent concussion, runs through the hospital, upstairs, and eventually throws himself from the roof of the building. Combined with recent events in American cities, this sequence of events in the book got me thinking.

What if there were people who provided "crime recorder" services? They need not be employed by government. They would need to be trained and have some sort of mutual certification procedure. Various guilds and trades have always spoken for members of their own profession and held them to standards, so the certification need not be governmental.

The function of the crime recorder is to make a detailed record of what is reported by the victim or victims, what is reported by available witnesses, what the crime scene looks like, and collect materials that may be relevant. A crime scene investigator is a similar profession.

Of course, today's crime scene investigators work for police agencies and city governments and therefore are prone to hide exculpatory evidence when ordered to do so, and lie about what they've actually seen when it comes time to confront a police officer with wrongdoing. The process is called "testilying." Yes, police have a special word they use, "testi-lie" to describe lies told for the good of the police union, the good of the gang in blue. They like to lie about what has happened, in order to complete the process they favour: the police investigated the police and exonerated the police.

Nevertheless, you can see where a crime recorder could provide a useful service. A crime report would be akin to the police report we now obtain by taking the dangerous step of summoning the police. A crime recorder would provide a record and a written report, making available photographs, videos, audio recordings, witness statements, and perhaps collecting physical evidence where relevant. A crime recorder could also make reports on suspected torts - acts of negligence such as auto accidents.

Crime recorders would not need to be in uniform, but perhaps they would have a sigil or badge of their profession. They would not necessarily have an IQ below 105, or whatever standard is kept presently for police officers. (A recent court case showed that a police agency may discriminate against someone with an IQ of 125. Apparently the "average" is 104, so slightly above the population average of 100 IQ.) A crime recorder would not necessarily work for the government. A crime recorder might not belong to a public service union and might not be expected to support the police in all matters. It would be possible to have independent and competing crime recorders working to find the truth.

Truth Matters

It seems to me that the first victim in every war, including the ongoing wars against poverty, crime, terror, and drugs, is truth. Yet the truth is very important.

Prosecutors like Kamala Harris cannot be interested in the truth, because the truth may stand in the way of convictions. Prosecutors get more money if they get more convictions and they get higher offices if they get more convictions, so they have no interest in telling the truth, nor in presenting the truth in court. They especially don't want defence attorneys to ever know the truth. Prosecutors get a share of the profits from keeping a lot of people in prisons, forcing their relatives to pay for collect calls from prison (at absurd rates per minute for each call when flat rate "anywhere in America" calling plans are available for $25/month) and putting them on a "pay the state for years" programme. Prosecutors, in short, are evil.

Public defenders are only somewhat interested in the truth. If they are able to fumble around and discover the truth on behalf of one of their court-appointed clients, great. If not, they are quite adept at encouraging their clients to plea bargain so that the prison and probation for profit industry is fed another living victim. Public defenders are not good at locating the truth, and often are not provided much in the way of investigation time nor investigatory staff. Of course, prosecutors are provided not only with endless time to investigate - they can ask for and get a continuance quite easily from any court - but they are also provided with numerous investigators, coroners who will fake evidence or lie about findings, detectives, police officers, and bureau-rats who will either look for information or make it up out of whole cloth. So, of course the system convicts most people it arrests, or gets the public defender to plea bargain their client, or makes it very expensive for a person to prove they are not guilty. The system doesn't actually care about the truth.

But a crime recorder wouldn't be involved in all those aspects of the situation, and could be prevented from sharing in the profits of the prison and probation for profit industry. So, perhaps the concept of a crime recorder is worth considering.

Goodness knows, it would be wonderful if finding the truth were important to someone in the criminal justice industry. If the truth were sought, perhaps it would begin to resemble something like justice, and stop being so clearly a "just us" system where those in power are corrupt beneficiaries of their system, and everyone else is a potential victim.

The truth shall set you free.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, actor, and director. He is the cfo of KanehCN3.com and the vision director of HoustonSpaceSociety.net You can find him on Twitter.com/planetaryjim as well as Pocket.app and Flote.app also as planetaryjim. He appreciates any support you can provide as times are very difficult. See the Paypal link on this page. Or email your humble author to offer other choices. Visit IglooLuau.com for more information. Those seeking a multi-jurisdiction multi-hop VPN for communications privacy please visit https://secure.cryptohippie.com/houstonspacesociety.php For those seeking colloidal silver try ppmSilver.com/Jim Ask Jim about CryptoWealth.