Why I am not sure about the police
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| Author: Patrick Crozier |
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Perhaps that should read: why I am not sure whether the state should run the police or not. Anyway, here goes. I am not sure whether the state should run the police or not because there seem to be good arguments on both sides:
Contents |
Why it shouldn't
- the police are funded out of taxation which I am against
- they are useless
- they are a relatively new phenomenon (the first UK police force was formed in 1822)
- there have been alternatives.
- the police bear all the hallmarks of yet another failing state industry, so failing that it seems to be beyond all reform bar outright privatisation
Why it should
- there has always been something similar to the police
- if there were no state police I suspect that something pretty similar would emerge pretty quickly, perhaps initially, in the guise of a mafia.
- it's not the fault of the individual policemen. What Copper's Blog indicates is that there are policemen out there (I presume the vast majority) who would only be too happy to catch criminals. It's just the other elements of the criminal justice system and their own procedures that prevent them
- it seems to me that when the state is small the few things it does do tend to be done reasonably well. As policing is one of the last things you'd ever get rid of there is every chance that by the time you did it would already be a lot better.
- I am not aware of any examples of a successful privately-owned police force
Questions
But isn't it the case that crime is at historically low levels?
- No, they're not. This has been gone into pretty well by Civitas. The Copper has blogged about a book by one of his predecessors. In the 1920s policemen worried about finding a case. The fact that in the 1920s and 1930s crime simply wasn't a political issue. The lack of graffiti and vandalism in old photographs. The testimony of my grandparents' generation. James Bartholomew in The Welfare State we're in states that crime has risen over the last century by some 13,000%.
What makes you think they are useless?
- Reading the Policeman's Blog.
- Crime seems to be going up.
- Mind you, I should say it's not just the police. It's also the laws that make it difficult to investigate, difficult to prosecute, difficult to convict and difficult to punish.
What alternatives have been tried?
- Steve Davis, writing in The Voluntary City1, outlined a few that existed before the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Mind you, even he doesn't think they were particularly successful. He argues that they were "getting there" a phrase which sets alarm bells ringing when I hear it from my opponents and should do the same when I hear it from my friends.
References
1. Tabbarok, Gordon and ? (2003?). Voluntary City. Independent Institute. ISBN?.
Comments
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