Support Your Local Police State

Heroic local police at work.

"Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?" –

Attributed to Boston physician Mather Byles, 1770.

“Do you see this soldier in this checkpoint?” Iraqi Wael al-Khafaji asked a Reuters reporter, pointing to a spot just a few feet from his Baghdad barbershop.  “He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Is this democracy?”

Before the U.S. invasion, this businessman – like millions of other Iraqis – was ruled by a distant dictator who had little direct influence on his life. Today, everything he does takes place under the shadow cast by armed men who have given themselves permission to brutalize or kill anybody who refuses to obey them.

For Mr. al-Khafaji, it makes no material difference whether the checkpoint is manned by U.S. soldiers, State Department-employed mercenaries, members of Saddam’s Republican Guard, or elements of a local sectarian militia. The problem is the presence of people who claim the right to use aggressive violence to force him to submit to their will. The problem is not one of geography or affiliation; it is a matter of institutionalized immorality. 

Americans who supported the Iraq war would be scandalized by Mr. al-Khajafi’s ingratitude. They would be wise to ponder his insight while examining the extent to which our own country is becoming a garrison state. They would also do well to emulate his habit of looking with acute suspicion – and no small measure of resentment – on the oddly dressed armed men who presume to exercise authority over us. 

 Democracy is the art of inducing victims of government power to focus on the question of who controls the government, rather than what it does. The same can be said of the perspective encapsulated in the slogan “Support Your Local Police” (SYLP). 

As sociologist David Bayley pointed out, “The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife.”  The police are an implement of coercion wielded by the political class, whether they are operationally under the control of Washington, D.C. or City Hall. 

From the SYLP perspective, the police and the “criminal justice” system they serve exist to protect life and property against criminal violence and fraud. If this were true, it would follow that most of those arrested and punished would be found guilty of crimes against person and property.

According to the most recent available statistics regarding incarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very small minority of America’s vast and growing federal prison population. As of 2009, crimes of violence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimes contributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates were convicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged for what are called “public order” offenses.

 Libertarian activist Michael Suede points out that eighty-six percent of all federal inmates were punished for what are called “victimless crimes” – that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimes at all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state and local level as well. 

There are instances in which police act in defense of persons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because rendering that service is not part of their formal job description: The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights. This helps explain why, as economist Robert Higgs pointed out roughly a decade ago, “there are three times as many private policemen as there are public ones.”

In choosing to pay for private security assistance, Americans freely spend more than twice the amount stolen from us each year to pay for the government’s armed enforcement caste. This is because the government that takes our money fails to provide the promised social good – protection of life and property.

Writing nearly a century ago, when our contemporary police state was in its infancy, the immortal H.L. Mencken protested that the government supposedly protecting him was actually the most rapacious and tenacious enemy of liberty and personal security. While it is possible for the typical American to repel the aggression of private criminals, “he can no more escape the tax-gatherer and the policemen, in all their protean and multitudinous guises, than he can escape the ultimate mortician. They beset him constantly, day in and day out…. They invade his liberty, affront his dignity, and greatly incommode his search for happiness, and every year they demand and wrest from him a larger and larger share of his worldly goods.”

 The one refinement we can make to this otherwise flawless polemical gem is to note that the terms “tax-gatherer” and “policeman” are functional synonyms. Both offices exist to extract wealth from the productive at gunpoint on behalf of the political class. The only substantive difference between them is that the latter are granted slightly wider latitude in inflicting aggressive violence, and equipped to do so. 

As Carl Watner pointed out in “Call the COPS – But Not the Police,” a seminal 2004 essay published by The Voluntaryist, gathering taxes has been a core police function since the institution was first imposed on the Anglo-Saxons following the Norman Conquest. The feudal order implemented by William the Conqueror was built upon the “frankpledge,” which was the institutional foundation for a a police system designed to collect revenue for the monarch. 

The Anglo-Saxon tribes had provided security through kinship-based groups called “tithes” and “hundreds,” who defended cattle herds and other property and acted as posses to apprehend thieves. Anglo-Saxon courts emphasized restitution, with any punitive damages being used to compensate volunteers who had tracked down the offenders. Under the frankpledge, however, the “justice” system diverted all revenues into the king’s treasury. 

Royal courts worked tirelessly to expand the king’s jurisdiction, which was enforced by royal appointees called shire-reeves (from which the term “sheriff” is derived). Eventually, royal enactments criminalized efforts by victims to seek private restitution; since such arrangements deprived the treasury of revenue, they were seen as a form of theft. This concept of the “King’s Peace” could be considered the distant but recognizable ancestor of the modern notion that the disembodied abstraction called “society” is a victim of criminal offenses – even those in which no individual has been injured. 

A heavy residue of Anglo-Saxon tradition endured into the 18^th Century. A French visitor to London in the mid-1700s was astounded when none of the local residents could direct him to the police – or even recognize the term. “Good Lord! How can one expect order among these people, who have no such a word as police in their language?” he exclaimed.

In fact, the term was familiar to educated 18^th Century Britons, who – as historian Leon Radzinowicz points out – considered it to be “suggestive of terror and oppression.” A 1785 Police Bill proposed by William Pitt the Younger shattered against an iron wall of opposition to what was regarded as a “dangerous innovation.” Until the second decade of the 19^th century, the British government’s ambition to create a standing police force was confined to its Irish colony, where its heavily armed Royal Constabulary field-tested methods that would later be imported to the homeland. 

The First Modern Police Chief: Fouche.

During the same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, the armed evangelist of the Jacobin revolution, created the first modern police force. Bonaparte’s ascent to power began with a brutal police action: The massacre of 13 Vendemiaire (October 5, 1795), during which the young Corsican general used artillery to slaughter Royalist protesters on the streets of Paris. 

By 1812, writes David A. Bell in his book The First Total War, large areas of Europe under Bonaparte’s rule were afflicted with “pervasive bureaucracy, particularly new agencies for tax collection and conscription…. To implement the new order, there came new police forces, often staffed largely by Frenchmen.” 

Presiding over this apparatus of regimentation, extraction, and coercion was secret police Chief Joseph Fouche, the Jacobin fanatic who prefigured Felix Dzherzhinsky.

Bonaparte’s star was in eclipse by 1814.  However, as British historian Paul Johnson observed in his book The Birth of the Modern, “the golden age of the political police” had just begun. The Congress of Vienna gave birth to what one contemporary critic called “All sorts of wild schemes of establishing a general police all over Europe.”

At the same time, Robert Peel, the military governor of Ireland, introduced the so-called Peace Preservation Police, a centrally controlled paramilitary auxiliary to the 20,000-man military force garrisoned on the island. Peel explained that the force “was not meant to meet any temporary emergency” but rather intended to become a permanent institution. In 1829, Peel was England’s Home Secretary. With Parliament’s resistance at low ebb, Peel proposed the creation of the Metropolitan Police.

“The new police institution had many supporters in government, but opposition was to be found in the wider society,” wrote Watner in The Voluntaryist. “The fundamental principles behind the force were seen as … anathema to Whig political principles, which emphasized `liberty over authority, the rights of the people against the prerogatives of the Crown, local accountability in place of centralization, and governance by the  “natural” rulers of society instead of salaried, government-appointed bureaucrats.’”

Populist parliamentarian William Cobbett, an outspoken foe of “tax-eaters,” was among the fiercest critics of the Metropolitan Police, which he saw as the vanguard of a country-wide army of occupation.

“Tyranny always comes by slow degrees,” Cobbett declared in an 1833 speech in Parliament, “and nothing could tend to illustrate that fact [better] than the history of police in this country.” Less than a generation ago, Cobbett pointed out, the very term “police” was “completely new among us.” Now, owing to Peel’s innovations, London was now overrun with “Blue Locusts” – “a police with numbered collars and embroidered cuffs, a body of men as regular as the King’s service, as fit for domestic war as the redcoats were for foreign war.”

In 1783, the last of King George’s occupation troops were evicted from New York. In 1844, New York City’s municipal government became the first in America to embrace Robert Peel’s system of paramilitary police. This amounted to exchanging Redcoats for “Blue Locusts.” Other major cities – New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1852, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in 1855 -- soon followed. State police agencies began to appear in the last decade of the 19^th century, and first decades of the 20^th. 

While those police agencies were locally controlled, they were not servants of the public; they were instruments of the political class that created them. On the western frontier, where political power was either radically decentralized or entirely theoretical, security for person and property was “protected by private policemen who were paid by – and, so, responsible to – the community where they served,” notes libertarian writer Wendy McElroy. 

Unlike the European gendarmes and royal British “shire-reeves,” McElroy points out, “Western sheriffs did protect people and property; they did rescue schoolmarms and punish cattle rustlers. Their mission was to keep the peace by preventing violence.”

Most importantly, in the Old West, sheriffs and marshals didn’t claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Thus when corrupt sheriffs like Montana’s Henry Plummer or Idaho’s David Updike used their office as cover to operate as “road agents” (horse thieves and highwaymen), they were arrested, tried, and punished by private “committees of vigilance.”

The only legitimate role for a peace officer is to interpose himself on behalf of individuals threatened by aggressive violence. That is a role that can (and should) be carried out by any law-abiding individual – including instances when the purveyor of aggressive violence is a police officer or other state official. 

In the recent nationally coordinated police crack-downs on “Occupy” protesters we have seen the following scenario play out numerous times: Peaceful demonstrators confront riot police; individual riot policeman commits physical aggression against protester, then immediately escalates the conflict by using potentially lethal force; when the crowd reacts, the other police officers – rather than coming to the aid of the victim – form a protective barricade (I call it a “thugscrum”) around the assailant. 

 

It is all but impossible to find an example of a police officer who interposed himself on behalf of the victim of criminal violence inflicted by a fellow officer. This isn’t surprising: A policeman can refuse to render aid to a crime victim without legal liability, and abuse innocent people without alienating his professional peers – but “going rogue” by intervening to prevent a criminal assault by another member of the punitive priesthood is a career-killer. Former Austin Police Officer Ramon Perez can supply the details.

Anytime a police officer commits an act of aggressive violence he is engaged in a criminal assault. If his fellow officers won't intervene to stop him, law-abiding citizens have the moral authority to do so. But this simply won't do, tut-tuts the program manual for the national Support Your Local Police campaign:

"The local police are not your enemy. Your committee is not here to attack them, blame them for violating the Constitution or your civil liberties because they are enforcing a measure of the Patriot Act or conducting a joint Federal and State anti-terror drill. Those are federal issues, which the local police in some cases may have already have little to no say if they are to continue receiving their additional Homeland Security funds, new equipment and weaponry.... We urge all responsible citizens in this community to work with us to ...[s]upport our local police in the performance of their duties [and] oppose all harassment or interference with law enforcement personnel as they carry out their assigned tasks.... [We must accept] our responsibilities to our local police, to defend them against unjust attacks, make them proud and secure in their vital profession, and to offer them our support in word and deed wherever possible." (Emphasis added.)

Their "assigned task": Local Police grab guns in New Orleans.

It apparently didn't occur to the author of that passage that claiming citizens have "responsibilities to our local police" is to assume that the people exist to serve the government, rather than the reverse.  Furthermore, it's pretty clear that from this perspective, the police have no reciprocal "responsibilities" to the citizenry.

Does that "responsibility" to defend the police and "make them proud" extend to supporting local police when they carry out lethal paramilitary raids, like the one that resulted in the murder of Jose Guerena? Would it include support for firearms confiscation of the sort carried out by local police (as well as National Guard personnel) in post-Katrina New Orleans? 

At the very least it would mean refusing to interfere when an armored bully carries out his "assigned task" of brutally assaulting a helpless, unarmed citizen, rather than carrying out the moral duty to do whatever is feasible to prevent the crime or end the attack.

"When law and morality are in contradiction to each other," observed Frederic Bastiat, "the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing respect for the law -- two evils of equal magnitude...." The "Support Your Local Police" perspective undermines morality by enshrining unconditional support for the police -- who are, as SYLP admits, simply local affiliates of a nationalized Homeland Security system -- as a supposed civic duty. 

No individual or institution has the moral right to use aggressive force. That principle applies not only to the Federal Leviathan, but to the loathsome little replicas of that vile beast found in every city, county, and state. Rather than helping to consolidate the existing police state, supporters of the rule of law should work to end their local government's monopoly on the police power -- with the ultimate objective of abolishing it outright. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Ave, Imperium!

Officer Dianobol, I presume? Yes, this pic (from the 2010 Super Bowl) just screams "Freedom!"

 Superbowl Sunday, the High Holy Day of our de facto state religion, has become such a brobdingnagian spectacle of militarist self-worship that Leni Riefenstahl would probably find the proceedings a bit excessive. The Caligulan feast in Dallas did offer one small source of consolation: Contrary to what compulsive mosque-baiters would have us believe, the culture on display is not haunted by the specter of impending Sharia rule. 

Hail the Empire! Superbowl Sunday, 2011

Christina Aguilera, selected to perform the role of Vestal in yesterday's Ludus Gladitorius, is in no peril of being stuffed into a burqa, much as that development would benefit the public. She may have fatally injured her career, however, by her inept recitation of the Regime's official hymn. 

Aguilera's celebrity will suffer, but she won't endure the hardships inflicted on dissidents -- many of them belonging to a sect founded in her home town of Pittsburgh -- who refused to offer ritual public submission to the State during the Holy Crusade to Save Stalin. 

During World War II, recalls Molly Worthen of The New Republic, those who refused to recognize the State as their liege attracted the eager attention of pious souls willing to correct their thinking:

Hail the Reich! Anschluss Saturday, March 12, 1938.

"Violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses [who reject oaths of allegiance to any government] erupted in hundreds of towns across the nation. In Wyoming, a mob tarred and feathered a Witness. Public officials permitted beatings in Texas and Illinois; in Nebraska, self-appointed patriots castrated another."


The Jehovah's Witnesses had a long-established and well-earned reputation for being insular, authoritarian, and confrontational. In matters of religious controversy they were strangers in the house of subtlety and given to exercise what one legal analyst called "astonishing powers of annoyance." 

What precipitated public persecution of the Witnesses, however, was not their sectarianism but their commendable loathing for the State. As Sarah Barringer Gordon of  American History magazine summarizes, Witnesses were taught to display "open disdain" toward "all forms of government," both in the United States and abroad. This included a "refusal to serve in the military or to support America's war effort in any way."

Painful to watch, more painful to hear.

In a 1940 Supreme Court ruling that upheld state laws mandating recitation of the Pledge (Minersville School District v. Gobitis), Felix Frankfurter asserted that "Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law."


"Some vigilantes interpreted the Supreme Court's decision as a signal that Jehovah's Witnesses were traitors who might be linked to a network of Nazi spies and saboteurs," notes American History. In the service of that grand deception, the Witnesses -- whose deviousness apparently knew no bounds -- arranged to have thousands of their co-religionists imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, and hundreds more executed for refusing to serve in the armed forces of the Reich. While officially sanctioned persecution of Witnesses by FDR's corporatist state wasn't nearly as intense, at least 1,500 members of the sect were assaulted in more than 300 separate attacks following the Gobitis ruling.

"In Imperial, a town outside Pittsburgh, a mob descended on a small group of Witnesses and pummeled them mercilessly," recounts Gordon. "One Witness was beaten unconscious, and those who fled were cornered by ax- and knife-wielding men riding the town's fire truck as someone yelled, `Get the ropes! Bring the flag!'"

Another patriotic mob in Kennebunk, Maine laid waste to the local Kingdom Hall. Jehovah's Witnesses in Rockville, Maryland were beaten by a mob across the street from a police station while officers looked on in contemptuous amusement.  In Litchfield, Illinois, "an angry crowd spread an American flag on the hood of a car and watched while a man repeatedly smashed the head of a Witness upon it."


"I hoped to beat up these people," one enforcer of patriotic virtue said after he and other members of the Greatest Generation took part in the Litchfield pogrom. "Why, they wouldn't even salute the flag! We almost beat one guy to death to make him kiss the flag."
Those were extreme measures, of course, but they were tragically necessary in order to make the infidel make Islam (submission) to the divine State and its sacred totem.

In 1940, shortly before the Supreme Court authorized violent enforcement of collectivist piety, the FDR administration was shamed into modifying the flag salute, which was identical to the notorious stiff-armed fascist salute. Three years later, the Court itself was shamed into revisiting its ruling in the case Barnette v. West Virginia Board of Education. 

During oral arguments, the counsel for the state Board of Education insisted that "permitting Jehovah's Witnesses to abstain from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and saluting the flag leads to more violence" from those zealous to punish the infidels, who (in the mind of this State functionary) had it coming to them.

"To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds," wrote Justice Jackson in a welcome repudiation of the earlier decision. 

Although nationalist violence against those who abstain from displays of nationalist piety fell out of fashion following Barnette ruling, there is an occasional relapse. For example, Brad Compeau-Laurion was assaulted and thrown out of Yankee Stadium by police officers during a 2008 baseball game for the supposed offense of using the restroom rather than participating in the mandatory singing of "God Bless America." 

Compeau-Laurion -- who eventually won a nominal settlement from New York City -- was not intoxicated, nor was he misbehaving in any way. Yet two tax-engorged bullies seized him, wrenched his arms behind his back, and dragged him out in humiliating fashion in front of a huge crowd. When he pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to hurt him because he was offering no resistance, one of his assailants belched something to the effect that things would get worse for him if he didn't shut up. 

“Get the hell out of my country if you don’t like it," one of the thugs sneered at Compeau-Laurion as he was kicked out of the stadium. The goons then returned to the section where Campeau-Laurion’s friend was still sitting and defamed Campeau-Laurion, informing spectators that he had been intoxicated and had told them, “This country sucks.” Compeau-Laurion said nothing of the kind, of course, but in light of the way he was treated he was certainly entitled to. 


America has never been plagued by the kind of fanaticism that led to people being harassed, beaten, mutilated, or murdered because they refused to profess allegiance to Mohammed and his religion, nor are we going to see this happen in the future. Crimes of that kind inspired by intolerant nationalism, however, are disturbingly commonplace. Any moral or material distinction between those varieties of fanaticism is too small to be measured by any instrument of which I'm aware.

War tends to destroy the critical distinctions between "country" and "government"; that's one reason why rulers are incessantly cultivating wars and similar crises. James Madison famously warned that no nation can retain its freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare. 

When the artlessly misnamed USA PATRIOT act was inflicted on our country in 2001, the legislators who enacted that measure before it was written insisted that it would be a temporary measure, subject to renewal at regular intervals. Congress is now poised to make that act as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians -- thereby formalizing the state of perpetual warfare Madison warned against.



Mubarak's Egyptian torture state, one of the Empire's most lavishly compensated regional affiliates, has operated under an "emergency powers" decree for more than three decades. 

Whatever results from the turmoil in Cairo, it is immensely significant -- and more than a little inspiring -- to see hundreds of thousands of Egyptians loudly and defiantly insist that their country doesn't belong to the government ruling it. That defiance hasn't been limited to large public displays. 

Two New York Times correspondents who covered demonstrations in Cairo’s Liberation Square were among scores of journalists arrested and detained by the regime’s secret police. 

As they were taken to a nearby secret police headquarters, one reporter asked a soldier: “Where are you taking us?” 

"My heart goes out to you," replied the soldier. "I’m sorry.”

The reporters saw dozens of people, both Egyptian and westerners, handcuffed and blindfolded. The interrogator who subjected them to the display told them: “We could be treating you a lot worse.” 

Egyptian Christians shield Muslims at prayer in Cairo.

The sounds the reporters heard during their confinement underscored that warning. From a nearby cell, they could hear a series of dull whacks -- the soft, percussive noise of human flesh being beaten --  followed by screams of pain. 

They also caught snippets of a remarkable conversation:

“You are talking to journalists?” demanded the torturer.“You are talking badly about your country?” 

The victim defiantly rebuked his tormentor: “You are committing a sin. You are committing a sin.”

How many Americans – of any religious background – would display such self-possession, such principled defiance, in similar circumstances?

On "Superbowl Sunday," as millions of Americans celebrated the unsustainable debt-fueled opulence of our consumer culture and the decaying might of an imperial Regime in steep decline, Christians and Muslims living at the periphery of the empire united in a peaceful rebellion rooted in a shared rejection of the supposed divinity of the State. While Egypt certainly isn't the land of the free, it has a far better claim than we do to call itself the home of the brave.

 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"V" for Vigilante

For months, Ada County Sheriff David Updyke had been investigating a secretive group of armed extremists living at the periphery of his southwest Idaho jurisdiction. When an informant provided him with a membership list of the armed band, Updyke wasted no time. He obtained arrest warrants, organized a large, heavily armed strike force, and made a beeline for the Payette River Valley. 


The warrants were a ruse. Updyke wasn't planning a mass arrest; he was plotting a massacre. His quarry was a group of about two dozen law-abiding citizens who had organized a private "Vigilance Committee" under the leadership of an equable local farmer named William J. McConnell. 

William J. McConnell

Some of the Vigilantes had welcomed Updyke's election as Ada County's first sheriff in 1864, only to discover in short order that he was a predator, rather than a peace officer. Historian Randy Stapilus summarizes the matter quite tidily in his slender but fascinating book Outlaw Tales of Idaho: Ada County's new sheriff "was moonlighting as a stage robber." 

Updyke's inspiration was Henry Plummer, a New England native who carved out a criminal career that spanned several states and ran up a fairly sizeable body count. Swept into northern California just as the gold rush was waning, Plummer -- who was blessed with glibness and a certain facile charm -- was elected a town marshal. 

After gunning down two men for no defensible reason, Plummer spent a few years in San Quentin before being paroled and exiled from the state. News of mining opportunities in northern Idaho sent Plummer to Lewiston, which at the time was Idaho's territorial capital. He quickly fell into the company of thieves and rustlers and did a pretty brisk business in robbery until he was forced to flee to Bannack, Montana, where he once again sought out the company of the local criminal element.

Following a brief flirtation with local politics, Plummer found more honest work as a pimp. His business partner was a prostitute posing as his wife. This was a profitable arrangement until Plummer and his "wife," while visiting a saloon, encountered a man named Cleveland who knew of the ex-convict's dealings in California. Within a few days Plummer had killed Cleveland and forced the sheriff to flee, creating a vacancy he eagerly filled. 


Plummer moved with dispatch to make the most of his new position. As sheriff he was provided with detailed information about local ex-cons and criminal suspects, whom he treated as potential recruits for his road agent syndicate. He also was able to gather intelligence on potential victims. He used those assets to great advantage in arranging the October 1863 robbery-murder of Lewiston dry goods dealer Lloyd Magruder, who was one of five members of a pack train slaughtered by a team of Plummer's road agents at a camp in the Bitteroot Mountains. 

Magruder, who had made the trek from Lewiston to Bannack in order to sell goods to miners in Montana, made the fatal mistake of hiring some local help for the return trip. Plummer, who was aware that Magruder was headed back to Idaho with a large quantity of money, arranged for several of his thugs to hire on with the merchant. The robbers made off with an estimated $18,000 in gold dust. 

A few months later, a well-respected young rancher named Nicholas Thiebalt was murdered during another robbery carried out by a road agent gang. Puzzled and infuriated by the sheriff's apparent indifference to the onslaught, local ranchers created a Vigilance Committee and set out to find and punish the robbers. One of the perpetrators, a man named Erastus Yeager, informed the Vigilantes that Sheriff Plummer was actually the kingpin of the criminal syndicate. 


In January 1864 -- seven months after the road agent gang had begun its depredations --- Sheriff Plummer was marched up the steps of a scaffold he had built himself. Just before the noose was put around his neck, Plummer reportedly made a desperate final offer to the Vigilantes: "Give me two hours and a horse. I can bring back my weight in gold." He wasn't given the opportunity.


Sheriff Plummer's history is worth reviewing, since it eerily prefigured the career of Sheriff Updyke. While Plummer was busy organizing a criminal syndicate in Montana, his former colleagues in Lewiston drifted south. Once it had oozed its way into Boise, Plummer's old gang quickly congealed into a political elite.

Boise City, as it was called, was a fair approximation of Mos Isley Spaceport. In their book Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, historians Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes describe the town as being in thrall to "a splendid assortment of murderers, robbers and tinhorn gamblers ... the offscourings of all the abandoned and worn-out mining camps in the Territory...." In other words, it had all the necessary ingredients to create the engine of misery called a "government."

Henry Plummer

As Augustine pointed out long ago, a "government" is simply a gang that "acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples," and then obtains supposed respectability  "not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity." 

In 1864, Plummer's old criminal syndicate followed that time-honored formula with admirable fidelity by taking control of Boise's Democratic Party apparatus and electing David Updyke to be Ada County's first Sheriff. 

Prior to the advent of state-imposed "civilization" in southwestern Idaho, crimes against persons and property were an occasional problem. The arrival of government law enforcement resulted in a tsunami-magnitude crime wave. 

Armed robbers, operating out of Updyke's livery stable and under his protection, preyed on stage coaches and plundered local farms. The syndicate also defrauded local merchants and businessmen by passing bogus gold dust -- lead shavings covered with a thin layer of gold. This racket was, in some ways, a frontier-era foreshadowing of the officially sanctioned counterfeiting carried on today by the Federal Reserve System: The gold dust fraud ring enjoyed the protection of the "legitimate" government, which profited from its crimes. 


William McConnell was among those who initially welcomed the arrival of "legitimate" law enforcement. His opinion changed abruptly after a horse that was stolen from his materialized in Updyke's stable. McConnell was forced to hire an attorney and spend two days in court to retrieve his stolen property, spending more in legal fees than the market value of his horse. 

As a weary and frustrated McConnell departed the courtroom, a gang of Updyke's "Roughs" taunted the mild-mannered farmer. His patience finally exhausted, McConnell confronted the gangsters and warned them that the next time one of his horses went missing, he would track down the thief and "there will be no lawsuit about it."


A few days later, McConnell and two neighbors discovered that five horses and four mules -- livestock worth more than two thousand pre-Federal Reserve dollars -- were missing. McConnell and his neighbors took off in pursuit of the rustlers, returning two weeks later with the missing animals and a few honorably earned battle scars. This was, for all intents and purposes, the Payette Vigilance Committee's first campaign. 

Updyke continued to abet armed robbery and shelter criminals. He refused to investigate crimes plausibly suspected to be the work of his political confederates. Practically the only attention law-abiding people received from their local sheriff was when he or his deputies would pay a visit to collect taxes -- a form of "legal" theft used to underwrite the local government's clandestine crimes.  

As Albert Jay Nock pointed out in his definitive work Our Enemy, the State, government doesn't seek to abolish or suppress crime, but rather "claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime .... [and] it makes this monopoly as strict as it can." In principle, this means that the government must also claim a monopoly on the use of force, and treat as criminals anyone who would undermine that monopoly. This is why the most urgent priority for the Ada County Sheriff's Department was to eliminate McConnell's Vigilance Committee, once the identity of its leader became known. 

Updyke's crack-down was "to be conducted in legal form," observed Nathaniel P. Longford in his 1890 account Vigilante Days and Ways. However, "in making the arrest, Updyke and his posse proposed to shoot the leaders of the Vigilantes and screen themselves under the plea that they had resisted."

Thus it was that Updyke gathered a posse composed of "fifteen of the worst men in the Territory" and headed to Horseshoe Bend, where they were to join with another group similar in size and identical in composition before heading to the Payette River settlement. 


Sheriff Updyke's plan may have succeeded were it not for two critical developments. First, a Boise resident sympathetic to the Vigilantes learned of the plot: While Updyke's posse took a longer route to join up with reinforcements at Horseshoe Bend, the Vigilante sympathizer raced ahead to warn McConnell.  Secondly, Updyke's would-be allies in Horseshoe Bend failed to materialize. 

Thus when the Sheriff and his gang arrived at Payette River, they had lost the advantage of surprise and were outnumbered at least two-to-one. The surprised and frustrated sheriff was forced to parley with McConnell, and "was obliged to comply with all the terms prescribed by the Vigilantes," records Longford. 

"City of Rocks," near the scene of the Portneuf massacre.

McConnell and his men agreed to travel to Boise to answer the warrants, but they refused to surrender their weapons or be taken into Updyke's custody. With the help of legal counsel the Vigilantes were able to get the criminal complaints dismissed, leaving Updyke humiliated and vulnerable. 


A few months after the debacle in Payette River, a stagecoach bound from Montana to Utah was ambushed by a gang of "road agents" in southeast Idaho's Portneuf Canyon. Five passengers were murdered, and $86,000 in gold was taken from the coach. Stage driver Charlie Parks and a passenger who survived the attack made their way to Boise, where they another positively identified Updyke and a "Rough" named Brockie Jack as two of the robbers. Neither was ever prosecuted for the crime, and the gold -- which was marked and numbered -- was never found.

The Portneuf heist was Updyke's swan song as a career criminal. The same County Commission that had appointed Updyke moved to expel him. While they were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to placate an infuriated public, the commissioners -- who belonged to the same criminal band -- were probably more enraged that Updyke had been skimming from their take by keeping roughly $11,000 in tax revenues for himself. 

Updyke soon found himself behind bars, in the custody of the newly elected sheriff, John Duvall. After Updyke bailed himself out, allies on the County Commission arranged for one of his criminal cronies, a deputy named William West, to be appointed interim sheriff until the end of the year.


In February 1866, a conflict with local Indian tribes presented Updyke with another career opportunity: His old road agent network re-constituted itself as a "militia" and elected Updyke its "captain." Backed by the "full faith and credit" of the local government, Updyke's militia purchased horses and supplies on credit. By April, the crisis had passed without this valiant band of heroes seeing action.



"The expedition ran its course, and, like all expeditions of the kind, was barren of any marked results," reports Langford's history. Just as he had been reticent to remit the taxes he had collected as Ada County Sheriff, Updyke wasn't eager to return the supplies he had requisitioned for his militia; accordingly, he "cached a large portion of the stores on the Snake River for future use of his road agent band." 

One of the men who had sold horses to Updyke sued him for non-payment. During the trial, one of Updyke's lieutenants, a young man named Ruben Raymond, admitted under oath that the "militia" was simply a front for Updyke's criminal band. Within a few hours Raymond was murdered by one of Updyke's loyal henchmen, a man named John Clark.  

Unfortunately for Updyke, the sheriff's office was no longer occupied by his erstwhile comrade William West: John Duvall had begun his term a few weeks earlier, and since he owed no loyalty to the Updyke gang he couldn't see any reason not to keep Clark behind bars until he could be tried for murder. Things were going very badly for Updyke, who couldn't resist making matters just a bit worse by openly threatening to go on a murderous rampage if Clark wasn't released.


Rather than being freed, Clark -- or what was left of him -- was soon seen dangling from a gibbet constructed on the future site of the Idaho State Capitol Building. Worried about what Clark might have disclosed to Sheriff Duvall before being dispatched to eternity, Updyke fled Boise in the company of an ally named Jake Dixon.


For several weeks Updyke and Dixon were pursued by the Payette Vigilantes, who eventually overtook them in a cabin near Syrup Creek on the western slope of the Sawtooth Mountains. The following day their bodies were found swinging from a makeshift gallows.


A notice pinned to Updyke's clothing announced that the Vigilance Committee had tried the former sheriff and found him guilty of being an accessory and accomplice to numerous murders and robberies (including the Portneuf stage robbery) and of "aiding and assisting" murderers and other criminals while serving as Ada County Sheriff.

Unlike a government agency, the Vigilance Committee didn't seek out new rationales for its continued existence. Updyke's demise had a chastening effect on the criminal oligarchy that had propelled him into office. Once government-sponsored crime abated, the Vigilantes disbanded. After Idaho became a state in 1890, McConnell was chosen to represent the Gem State in the U.S. Senate. He was later elected the state's third governor. In 1895, McConnell's daughter Mamie married future senator William Borah. 

For those who understand the moral superiority of society's non-coercive sector, McConnell's political career is a bittersweet coda. His most valuable public service came as a nominal outlaw who employed defensive violence in order to protect life, liberty, and property from the criminal onslaught of the territory's "legitimate" government.

Like its counterparts in Montana and elsewhere, the Payette Vigilance Committee was  representative of the private "protective agencies" created by settlers, miners, and ranchers during the westward expansion to protect property rights and settle disputes. 


Admittedly, vigilante action, like any kind of applied violence, is problematic. As Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out in a recent essay for The Independent Review, one advantage of private protective agencies is that, unlike government entities, they don't claim "a legal monopoly on keeping order." Most frontier-era groups of this kind -- McConnell's Payette Vigilantes among them -- were created to confront criminal gangs who had been granted a limited franchise within that government monopoly.

"One of the most pejorative terms one can use in reference to law and self-defense is `vigilante," notes Dr. William L. Anderson, who teaches economics at Maryland's Frostburg State University. "Indeed, if one is called a vigilante, it is tantamount to being declared a criminal. Public officials, newscasters, and those in law enforcement solemnly tell us `there is no room in this country for vigilante justice.' Instead, we must wait for the `justice system' to work, and if it doesn't, well, that is simply a price we pay for having a free society."

However, continues Dr. Anderson, "the so-called threat from vigilante justice is like the threat we face from private companies delivering the mail or from home schooling: it undermines an established government monopoly." 

The innate danger posed by vigilantism is the temptation to dispense with the non-aggression principle and engage in "preemptive" action. This is why some Vigilante groups -- among them elements of Montana's Vigilance Committee -- ended up being assimilated into the the state's apparatus of official coercion. 

The November 1879 murder of Helena shopkeeper John Denn inspired the creation of a subterranean Vigilante group. Its identifying sign was the cryptic inscription "3-7-77," which began to appear on fences and walls around the city. 

Unlike the Vigilantes of 1864, those who organized in 1879 didn't focus on redressing officially sanctioned crimes; instead, they harassed and intimidated people suspected of being "bad elements," often using their enigmatic signature as a notice of banishment. 


Given that this latter vigilante group was little more than a gang of sanctimonious, opportunistic bullies, it's entirely appropriate that the legend "3-7-77" has been incorporated into the insignia of the Montana Highway Patrol. 


Honorable and peaceful men like William McConnell were driven to vigilante action by the besetting corruption and criminal aggression of the government that presumed to rule them.  Henry Plummer and David Updyke each ruled over a criminal fiefdom that was in many ways a microcosm of the malignant Robber State afflicting us today. To cite merely the most obvious example: The "road agents" employed by those "rogue sheriffs" are unmistakably the ancestors of the paramilitary "forfeiture gangs" employed by police agencies to plunder motorists and property owners today.


Many of the State's agents of wealth extraction are dispensing with any pretense that they are involved in protecting and serving the public. Modern analogues of Henry Plummer and David Updyke abound. It's not difficult to imagine circumstances in which the heirs of William McConnell would make their presence known as well.

Update: As If To Illustrate My Point ....

Police in Aurora, Illinois "forfeited" -- that is, stole under the supposed authority of "law" -- a total of $190,000 from residents Jose and Jesus Martinez on the pretext of a narcotics investigation. Neither of the brothers has a criminal record of any kind, and there is no evidence that they were involved in drug trafficking or possession. 

Officers working with a "road agent" syndicate called the North Central Narcotics Task Force had tapped the brothers' home telephone, and were keeping them under surveillance as drug suspects. The actual robbery took place when Jesus, during a traffic stop, made the mistake of consenting to a search of his vehicle. No drugs were found, but the police seized the cash and gave Jesus a worthless receipt. Within hours the stolen money had been turned over to the task force, which in turn delivered it into the hands of the Cheka (aka the Department of Homeland Security). 

Laundering the money in this fashion allows the police -- which will get a large cut, thanks to the federal "equitable sharing" racket -- to defy a court order demanding that it be returned to its owners.

The victims claim that the money was family savings earned from a remodeling business -- but that detail is inconsequential: This was a literal, undisguised act of highway robbery that differs not one whit from the crimes committed by Henry Plummer, David Updyke, and their minions. (H/T The Agitator.)

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