OSD 351: Demud the police
This has been floating around the internet for a while:
Now, we’d be the last people to be accused of being fond of police power. We’ve written more than a few newsletters on the topic. Here’s a small sampling:
But in being skeptical of police power, it’s important to be fair to individuals. Police power can be an extraordinary threat while the following is also true: as an individual police officer, strangers call you to run into danger on their behalf. And you answer that call willingly, even enthusiastically. It’s a basic expectation of the job that you’ll run towards danger. That takes a special mentality.
It’s easy to think, “Well sure. But we need to weed out the bad apples and the bad incentives.” That’s certainly true. Ideas on how to do that range from defunding the police to massively increasing police funding, and everything in between. Better training, sharding the job into subtypes (mental health expert, rough-and-tumble arresting officer, social worker, traffic enforcement, etc.), and so on.
But whatever you do, if you do it in a ham-fisted way you’ll create bad incentives of your own. Great police officers — the many who take their responsibility to protect people and their rights seriously — will not just sit there year after year being resented. We all seek purpose, and if you’re being told every day that your job is worthless, you’ll start looking for another job.
The worst police officers, conversely, feed off of the resentment, and will enjoy staying in the job as a way to stick it to all the people calling them out.
That’s textbook adverse selection. Critiquing the police in the wrong ways creates more of exactly the kind of cops you don’t want, and it drives away the ones you do want.
This is good for gun owners and gun rights people in particular to be sensitive to. As a subculture, we’ve always been at the intersection of openness and hostility towards the state. In any tactical shooting course you go to, the vibe is an unlikely combo of “Come back with a warrant” doormats and thin blue line stickers. Often those vibes are both wrapped up in a single person, depending on what topic you ask him about.
That makes the gun rights community the ideal one to keep police in check while also keeping them in mind.
This week’s links
It’s a felony to be right about the NFA when the prosecutor and judge are wrong
More details on the case of Patrick Adamiak.
deserves a huge shoutout here. He has been doing tireless work to shine light on this injustice. Adamiak is in federal prison, where he will spend the next 17 years unless he is pardoned or wins an appeal.About Open Source Defense
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I have what I think is a healthy skepticism of the cops, though the absurdities of 2020 pushed me towards their corner. During a time when we could’ve made progress on checking civil asset forfeiture and making qualified immunity into something reasonable, those claiming to champion justice blasted past all that to the leftist utopia of prison & police abolishment. This was to all of our detriments, but at least they felt good about themselves for a while.