Tag Archive: law-enforcement: Social Memory Complex

Against the Police
They don't create oppression; they just make it possible

What I'm about to say may surprise you, but I assure you it's the honest truth: in my personal experience, cops are overwhelmingly decent folks. They almost always conduct themselves "professionally" and have generally treated me with respect. I'm not saying stories of law enforcement abuse haven't affected me--they absolutely have, and I'll get into that. I'm not saying my arsenal of privileges haven't colored my experiences. But as far as my personal dealings, I've encountered very few who were anything but by-the-book and courteous.

Because they are so frequently decent, I'm sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I'm loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.

But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.

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Written on Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Tags: police, law-enforcement, libertarianism, anarchism, self-government
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Power of Numbers

What an astounding video; can you imagine something like this ever happening in our country?

Note also that the bad cop who was striking the victim gets away. Meanwhile, the good cop who was trying to stop the bad cop gets beat down. The lesson here is that it's not enough to be a good cop yourself; the blue wall of silence that protects so-called "bad apples" also endangers "good apples". However high and thick that wall is, there will always more of us than them.

Written on Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Tags: video, law-enforcement, police-brutality
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