Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: None Are Safe from the State's Plundering Parasites

All aboard Amtrak -- in Germany, circa 1938. (Still from "The Mortal Storm.")

“Is anyone present carrying more than ten marks, or planning to take out of the country any foreign money, gold, jewels, or other valuables?” demanded the German customs inspector after boarding the Innsbruck-bound train. “Any violation of the law will be punished with penal servitude --special cases by death.”

Freya Roth, a single woman in her 20s traveling with her mother and younger brother, produced her passport and handed it to the inspector. After the document was stamped, the truculent bureaucrat noticed the young lady’s luggage.

“Whose suitcase is that?” he snapped, his voice colored with an implied threat. “Take it down – open it.”

“It isn’t locked,” Freya said quietly, her brows drawn together in worried puzzlement. Before she had finished the sentence the inspector had torn open the luggage and started to paw through it. A comrade noticed a large bound volume on the shelf above Freya’s seat. He retrieved it and began to pore over its handwritten pages.

“What is that – code?” the policeman inquired of Freya.

“No – it’s a physiological treatise,” she replied, proudly explaining that it had been written by her late father, Professor Victor Roth.

Radiating hostile disapproval, the inspector handed the manuscript to a Gestapo officer who had been looming in the background, a silent monolith of murderous menace.

“Why are you taking this out of the country?” the officer barked at Freya. “You intend on publishing it abroad?”

Freya tried to explain that she kept the book with her because it was her father’s last work, which was enough to implicate her as an enemy of the State.

“I can’t take the responsibility of allowing you to cross the border with this document,” sniffed the officer as if he owned Freya and everything in her possession. “This is a matter that can only be decided by my superior.”

Freya was taken to a local police station where she was detained for five days for possession of contraband – “a seditious production sustaining a theory destructive to the new ideals.”

 “You belong – in part – to the German race, but by your action you show yourself unworthy to represent that race abroad,” the police commander explained to Freya, alluding to her paternal Jewish ancestry. “You will report to the police daily. Let me warn you to be extremely careful in your conduct, and in your contacts. That is all.”

The traumatized woman was “released” to life as an inmate in an open-air prison. She had been condemned and dispossessed without a trial as the result of a warrantless search of her effects during a routine train trip.

Freya’s Nazi-era experience, depicted in the 1940 film The Mortal Storm, was a fictional parable intended to shock its American audience: Imagine what it would be like to live in a country where police could board a train, rifle through your luggage, confiscate anything of value they found, and detain you indefinitely if they found suspected contraband in your possession. 

From Republic to Reich: a "VIPR Team" on patrol.

I don’t know if Aaron Heuser, a mathematician from Eugene, Oregon, is familiar with “The Mortal Storm.” He doesn’t need to see the movie – he has lived it.

As Heuser recounted to Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic magazine, during an Amtrak trip from Eugene to Washington, D.C. last fall, he received an unwelcome visit in his sleeper compartment by a DEA agent whose comportment was indistinguishable from that of the cinematic Nazi officials who terrorized Freya Roth.

The DEA agent addressed Heuser by name and claimed that his trip had raised numerous “red flags” – specifically, that “I had a sleeper car, was traveling alone, and did not check my luggage.”

When the officious pest demanded access to the sleeper compartment and Heuser’s personal effects, the traveler refused. Undeterred, the agent informed Heuser “that he was going to bring a dog, walk it by my room, and that if it alerted, my room would be searched. He told me that I could not argue this and that I was not allowed to be present for the search.”

Like nearly everything else that emerges from the tax-devouring skull cave of a DEA official, that claim was a lie. Heuser had every right to be present during the search, but the agent insisted that he absent himself because “the dog might bite me.” In retrospect, and perhaps at the time, that statement could be seen as a threat garbed in the unpersuasive disguise of solicitude.

As Heuser strode toward the dining car, he was stalked by a second DEA operative who tried to get him to leave the train, where he would be surrounded by other law enforcement officers.

“The officer followed me, telling me that they know I am transporting drugs, and if I have any for personal use, they do not care, and it would be easier if I just told them,” Heuser told The Atlantic. “I said that was nice to know, then kept walking.” Yet another DEA operative tried to gain access by pretending that “someone was hiding in my bathroom.”

When Heuser was finally allowed to return to his compartment, “I found my backpack moved and open, and my wallet, which was set down on the room table, had $60 missing.” He was told by a dining car attendant that “Amtrak is forced to give passenger info to the Feds, that the DEA comes on every trip, usually arresting someone in the sleeping car or taking all their money.”

That Amtrak employee did not engage in hyperbole, as Joseph Rivers can testify. The 22-year-old native of Romulus, Michigan, was robbed by DEA agents when his Los Angeles-bound train was stopped and searched in Albuquerque. Rivers, who entertained ambitions of becoming a music video producer, was carrying his life savings -- $16,000 in cash – in a bank envelope.

Behaving precisely like his fictional Nazi analogues from “The Mortal Storm,” the DEA agent confiscated every penny of Rivers’ life savings without arresting him or charging him with a crime. Under the Justice Department’s civil asset forfeiture program, possession of large sums of cash or other exceptional wealth – “gold, jewels, or other valuables,” as the customs inspector put it in the film – is sufficiently suspicious to justify confiscation.

“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” gloated a DEA agent when asked about the incident by the Albuquerque Journal. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.” Sean Waite, the DEA’s Ortsgruppenleiter for Albuquerque, bragged to the Albuquerque Free Press that his he and his squalid associates have harvested about $1 million from travelers passing through that city on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.

Setting aside questions about the wisdom of carrying his entire life savings in cash, Joseph Rivers’ experience is especially poignant, given that he could just as easily have been robbed by his local police.

Between 2003 and 2007 – the years of Rivers’ adolescence – Romulus witnessed a 118 percent increase in forfeiture revenues despite the fact that there was no corresponding increase in criminal activity. A similar trend was seen on the part of law enforcement agencies throughout Wayne and Oakland counties. The forfeiture take by police in Novi went from $12,278 to $2.7 million. The Wayne County Sheriff's Office netted $8.69 million in 2007, four times the haul its banditti seized in 2001.

Sgt. Dave Schreiner, the head of Canton Township's forfeiture unit, was admirably forthright in defending civil forfeiture as his department’s chief cash conduit: "Police departments right now are looking for ways to generate revenue, and forfeiture is a way to offset the costs of doing business.... You'll find that departments are doing more forfeitures than they used to because they've got to -- they're running out of money and they've got to find it somewhere."

Bear in mind, once again, that this defense of forfeiture was offered at a time when the non-official crime rate was holding steady, and by some measurements in a modest decline. Acting with the irrepressible predatory instinct that guides all State institutions, the police responded to this state of affairs by carrying out a crime wave of their own.

For the privileged plunderers of Romulus and the surrounding towns, preying on the public was encouraged and rewarded – but holding back any of the loot from your cohorts was a grave offense. This is why former Romulus Police Chief Michael St. Andre, his wife, and several members of his Special Investigations Unit will spend time in prison.

Between 2006 and 2011, St. Andre and his underlings skimmed money from the city’s forfeiture fund and submitted fraudulent expense reports. Some of the pilfered proceeds were used by St. Andre and his wife to open a tanning salon. The Chief and his favored henchmen also used funds seized in counter-narcotics raids to purchase marijuana, alcohol, and the carnal services of prostitutes.

A year ago, St. Andre pleaded guilty to three felonies, including embezzlement and conducting a criminal enterprise. Last October he was sentenced to a term of up to 20 years in prison, a punishment forcefully underscoring the State’s determination that its plunderers act with only the purest of motives – like the ascetic, disciplined Nazi inspectors portrayed in “The Mortal Storm,” for example.

The Nazis’ reputation for self-denial was largely unearned. Their version of totalitarianism is as dead as their Fuhrer, but their tactics are widely employed by the enforcement caste in America’s Homeland Security State – a fact that either is or soon will be apparent to anybody seeking to exercise the right to travel unmolested.

Recall the question asked by the Nazi customs inspector in “The Mortal Storm”: “Is anyone present carrying more than ten marks, or … any foreign money, gold, jewels, or other valuables?” That same question was posed – almost verbatim – by Idaho State Trooper Justin Klitch following a pretext stop of Colorado resident Darien Roseen a few miles from my home in January 2013.

“How much cash is in the vehicle?” asked Klitch after bullying the elderly man into opening the trunk of his vehicle and pretending to detect a “strong odor of marijuana” emanating from the interior. “Do you have any gold, any high-value items in this vehicle?” That question provided a good and sufficient demonstration of Klitch’s true motive in making the stop: He was looking for loot, rather than contraband.

Like the fictional Freya Roth, Roseen endured a lengthy and entirely unwarranted detention after Klitch hijacked his SUV. A thorough search of the vehicle yielded neither gold, nor jewels, nor marijuana.

A growing number of Americans who need to travel but want to avoid molestation or irradiation at airports have taken to the roads or the tracks, only to find that the TSA and its comrades will not leave them alone.

In the film, Freya and her family were interrogated and subject to detention by Nazi customs officials at a border crossing. Americans can have that experience – which can quickly escalate to threats of arrest and a life-threatening assault with a deadly weapon – up to 100 miles inside the national border.

Travelers aren't free from such potentially lethal harassment if they use routes deep within the country’s interior. Multi-jurisdictional task forces called Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams swarm bus and train stations, and even conduct highway checkpoints.

As the redoubtable James Bovard points out, the attitude of our rulers toward travelers “is best summarized by the motto posted at the headquarters of the TSA air marshal training center: `Dominate. Intimidate. Control.’”

Whatever their native tongue, totalitarians from every culture speak the same language. 

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Pity the Poor Stormtroopers: Baby Bou-Bou Ambushed Them (Updated, May 21)

The truth in black and white -- but don't believe it: Sheriff Joey insists that this is the face of a criminal.

(See the update at the bottom of the essay, or click here.)

It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib. 

Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed. 

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib. 

The detonation of a flash-bang grenade.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack. 

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless. 

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family. 

A tax-subsidized settlement was reached about a month ago in which the National Fire Insurance Company will pay $964,000 to the family -- a little more than $538,000 for medical expenses, and multiple installments of $200,000 to the infant after he turns 18 in 2033. This arrangement will leave the family facing at least a half-million dollars in current medical expenses, a figure that will be matched or eclipsed by future costs incurred by Bou-Bou's ongoing medical treatment.

In familiar fashion, nobody responsible for this crime will be compelled to make restitution, or be held accountable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on the child – and the significant but non-life-threatening injury suffered by his father -- during the 2:00 a.m. home invasion that took place nearly a year ago.

Nearly every lawsuit begets a “defendant’s reply” disputing all of the factual allegations and legal claims presented by the plaintiffs. Where the defendants are law enforcement officers, the objective is to build a case that the actions of the officers were “reasonable” and in compliance with established “policies and procedures” – and thus protected by “qualified immunity.” From this perspective, the assailants are innocent of all liability even though they did everything wrong – and the victims are fully to blame even though they did nothing wrong. The reply filed on behalf of Sheriff Joey's deranged deputies will serve as a legal clinic for other departments involved in similar Soviet-grade atrocities in the future.

No evidence of any illegal conduct was found at the home as a result of the raid. The front yard and driveway of the residence abounded in evidence that children lived there – evidence so clear and compelling that even a police officer would have recognized it. The search and arrest warrant was issued at about 2:00 in the afternoon on May 27; this offered plenty of time for the vigilant and capable personnel of the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office to conduct surveillance of the targeted residence and even to arrest the suspect in more conventional fashion, assuming that this was necessary and justified. 

The subject of the warrant, Wanis Thonetheva, was not at the residence when the stormtroopers arrived. He was arrested on narcotics charges several hours later, in broad daylight and in unremarkable fashion, “at his actual place of residence, without any resistance and without the use of a flashbang stun grenade,” the lawsuit recalls.

At the time that arrest was being made, Bou-Bou’s parents were just absorbing the horror of what had been done to the infant by the assailants who had broken into their temporary home without cause and kidnapped the gravely wounded child. 

Bou-Bou’s father -- in agony from a torn rotator cuff that resulted from being assaulted, thrown to the floor, and shackled by one of the invaders -- noticed some blood in the empty crib. The screaming child had been seized by the berserkers and taken away. The frantic parents were not allowed access to the traumatized and bleeding child—“officer safety” uber alles, you know. To cover the abduction, one of the officers on the scene did what comes naturally to highly trained police officers: he hastily improvised a self-serving lie. 

“The parents were told by officers on the search team that their son had a tooth dislodged as a result of the search and that the blood that the parents saw in or about the area of the crib was due to the alleged tooth issue,” recounts the lawsuit. The parents “did not know the extent of their son’s injuries (and were not provided truthful information about them by the Defendants) until they were told at the Hospital where their son was taken that he was in a coma.”

Yes, it is possible that one of the infant’s newly-cut teeth had been “dislodged” by the stun grenade. What the people responsible for that act of abhorrent criminal violence did not mention was that the toddler also suffered “severe blast burn injuries to the face and chest; a complex laceration of the nose, upper lip and face, twenty percent of the right upper lip [was] missing; the external nose [was] separated from the underlying bone; and a large avulsion burn into the chest with a resulting left pulmonary contusion and sepsis.”

Sheriff Joey’s underlings told Bou-Bou’s parents that they had knocked out one of the baby’s teeth. They actually blew off his face and gouged a hole in his chest. Exhibit B in the lawsuit is an unbearable hospital photograph of the child in a medically induced coma immediately after the attack. The Defendant’s reply to that piece of evidence is a denial that the photograph “accurately depicts the injuries allegedly sustained” by the infant.

Even if that photograph is a reliable depiction of those injuries, the baby only had himself to blame, according to Sheriff Joey and his band of privileged cretins. 

Bounkham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavanh is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, with his parents listed as co-plaintiffs. When the defendants claim that the damages caused to the child, “if any,” were “directly and proximately caused by the contributory and comparative negligence of plaintiffs and their failure to exercise ordinary care,” they are blaming the baby for not foreseeing the possibility that he would be attacked by a SWAT team at 2:00 a.m. and burned alive in his crib.

When the defendants seek to deflect blame by claiming that “the deliberate, criminal conduct of [the] plaintiffs … supersedes any and all negligence or liability, if any, on the part of these defendants,” they are pretending to believe that the 19-month-old child was part of a criminal conspiracy. 

In its “eleventh defense,” Sheriff Joey and his Brownshirts let everything fly, invoking the doctrines of “assumption of the risk, failure to avoid consequences, laches, failure to mitigate damages, last clear chance, and sudden emergency.” 

Reduced to its putrid essence, this compound defense amounts to a single claim: If you live anywhere within the claimed jurisdiction of a federally subsidized einsatzgruppe like the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team, then you are fair game for an after-midnight military raid, and you have only yourself to blame once it happens. 

It doesn’t matter that the raid is the product of a dishonestly obtained search warrant issued on the basis of an anonymous tip from a petty criminal, or that no evidence of illegal activity was ever discovered. If your home is torn apart and your infant is nearly killed, you alone are responsible, and the gallant agents of public order cannot be held liable. This is true even in cases like that of the Phonesavankh family, who sought a temporary home with a relative in Georgia after their house in Wisconsin was claimed by a fire. 

This is all covered by the “Sucks to be you” provision of the “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people” doctrine.

Looking for other babies to burn, deputy?

Bobbing like feculent flotsam in the puddle of sewage that is the defendants’ “eleventh defense” is the term “laches,” which refers to an impermissible delay by a plaintiff in bringing forward a claim for damages.

This obviously doesn’t apply to the conduct of the Phonesavankh family in this case. They filed a timely notice of tort claim, and then proceeded to file the lawsuit after the Habersham County grand jury refused to hold the Sheriff and his minions accountable – and after the county government broke its promise to pay for Bou-Bou’s medical treatment.

The origins and usage of that obscure and archaic legal term do offer some insight about the way Bou-Bou’s would-be murderers see themselves, and their victim.

“Laches” is a term embodying the ancient legal maxim that “Equity favors the vigilant, and not those who have slumbered on their rights.” Defendants who appeal to this oft-cited and little-applied concept are accusing plaintiffs of subjecting them to a form of “legal ambush.”

 What Sheriff Joey and his cornpone chekists are claiming, in effect, is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed them.

(This post has been updated to include details of the settlement.)

Update, May 21

Some commenters have asked for specific quotes from the "Defendants' Reply" blaming Bou-Bou for the injuries he suffered, and accusing him of negligence or "criminal" conduct. For those interested in reading full text of that reply, the document is found in a Scribd archive, which is accessible through links in the essay above.

Under the "Four Corners" doctrine, which applies to wills, contracts, and other legal instruments, the author's intention in composing such a document is defined by the plain meaning of the text. If a claim or assertion isn't found within the four corners of that document, it can't be considered. The "Defendants' Reply" made several accusations about the supposed conduct of the "plaintiffs"; nowhere within that text is an effort made to distinguish Bou-Bou from the other defendants. 

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is the infant, Bounkham Phonesavanh. The Defendants' Reply imputes "deliberate, criminal conduct" to all of the plaintiffs without exception; it is an assertion of joint and several liability on the part of the infant and his parents (described as his "Natural Guardians as Next Friends").

With this in mind, read the "Seventh Defense" on page 34, in which the defendants assert that "plaintiffs' damages, if any, were directly and proximately caused by the contributory and comparative negligence of plaintiffs and their failure to exercise ordinary care."

They did not exempt Bou-Bou from that charge. They couldn't -- he is the chief plaintiff.

The same applies to the claims made in the Tenth Defense (see page 35) that the injuries and damges "were caused by the deliberate, criminal conduct of plaintiffs."

Omission of the definite article from those statements is a failed attempt at a semantic dodge: If the intent were to exempt Bou-Bou, the author of this scabrous brief would have specified which of the plaintiffs had supposedly engaged in "criminal conduct." Absent that specification, the defense mounted on behalf of Sheriff Joey and his minions focused squarely on the lead plaintiff, the infant who was nearly murdered in his sleep.

(My sincere thanks to the heroic Rev. John Pittman Hey for sharing his PACER research on this case.) 

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Support Your Local Private Peace Officer: He Has A Dangerous Job

Peace Officer Down: The aftermath of the fatal shooting of Alvin Kinney in Houston.

At the end of every shift, police officers call their loved ones to assure them that they “made it through another day without injury,” observes a recently published paean to the police. “From 2000 until 2014, over 700 officers were unable to make that call because they did not survive their tour of duty on that last day.”

Alvin Kinney didn’t make it home at the end of his shift on February 12. The 60-year-old officer, who had served in a very dangerous job for more than 20 years, was fatally shot trying to prevent an armed robbery in Houston. His death was mourned by his family and loved ones but did not precipitate an outpouring of officially mandated grief. This is because
Mr. Kinney was not a member of the State’s enforcement caste. He was a private peace officer employed by the Brinks armored truck company, where he faced far greater risks defending private property than are confronted by government-employed police who enforce the edicts of the political class.

While law enforcement is statistically much safer than depicted by police unions and related pressure groups, police officers are sometimes killed or severely injured in the line of duty, and occasionally some of them do so in genuinely heroic defense of innocent people threatened by criminal violence. The same is true of private peace officers who provide security services through market mechanisms, rather than a state-imposed monopoly. 

Fallen hero: Alvin Kinney.

During the same fifteen-year-period in which roughly 700 police officers weren’t able to make the end-of-shift phone call, at least 1863 private security officers were killed while carrying out a contractual commitment to protect others against criminal violence. 

Rick McCann, founder and CEO of Matthews, North Carolina-based Private Officer International (POI), explains that the toll might be considerably higher: Prior to the founding of his organization about a decade ago, nobody bothered keeping track of on-duty deaths of private peace officers.

“What we found in the first year is that the Department of Labor wasn’t listing those incidents as on-duty deaths of security officers, but was including them as workplace fatalities involving `laborers,’” McCann commented in a telephone interview. “Many employers don’t describe them as `on-duty’ deaths, or report how they occurred. They’re simply reported as `employee deaths.’ And media coverage of those incidents tends to be inconsistent. For example, we’ll often find a report of an incident in which a security guard is wounded, but have to do our own follow-up to find out if he survived.” 

Every police department keeps careful records of on-duty deaths, each of which is prominently reported in the media and included in the FBI’s annual report. Thus far, McCann’s organization is the only one seeking to compile a definitive record of on-duty deaths of private security personnel, chiefly by data-mining media coverage and collecting first-hand accounts from people in the security industry. Their research, which – for whatever this may be worth -- is considered authoritative by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicates that violent on-duty deaths involving private security personnel happen much more frequently than similar incidents involving government law enforcement officers. 

On May 11, as part of “National Law Enforcement Week,” the FBI released its preliminary findings regarding line-of-duty deaths by police officers in 2015. Headlines generated by the report focused on the fact that “felonious killings” of police officers increased by nearly 89 percent from 2013-2014. Less attention was given to the fact that 27 police officers died violently in 2013 – the lowest figure in 35 years. Last year’s figure -- 51 violent line-of-duty deaths – is slightly higher than the number killed in accidents (44). Interestingly, last year more police officers died in automobile accidents (28) than were feloniously killed during the previous year.   According to POI, so far this year there have been 21 confirmed on-duty deaths of private security officers.

“It’s true that an on-duty police officer dies, on average, every 53 hours in this country,” allows McCann, who retains his certification as a law enforcement officer in Virginia and North Carolina. “Most of those deaths happen as a result of traffic accidents, or issues arising from training and physical conditioning” – such as self-inflicted injuries, heart attacks, or strokes. In the private security field, by way of contrast, more than eighty percent of the on-duty fatalities are “a result of traumatic, confrontational injury” inflicted by someone committing an act of criminal violence. 

Not all of those on-the-job deaths came about in circumstances calling to mind Horatius at the bridge. Some of them did, however—and yet few, if any, of these privately employed peace officers, whose sole mission is to protect persons and property, rather than to enforce the will of the political class, was publicly commended for acting in defense of the innocent.

Those deaths were not treated as occasions of public mourning, or marked with pious editorials demanding that we prostrate ourselves in reverent grief over the sacrifice of a hero, even though few things are more genuinely heroic or honorable than keeping a solemn promise to defend another person, even at the risk of one’s life. 

Police officers occasionally act in protection of persons and property, despite the fact that they have no enforceable duty to provide that service. This is true even when they see an innocent man being hacked to death by a knife-wielding psychopath a few feet away -- as Joseph Lozito discovered when he was nearly killed while subduing a murderer on a New York subway while an armed NYPD officer cowered behind a partition.

Wounded while subduing a murderer: Joseph Lozito.

Private security personnel, and the organizations that employ them, have no purpose other than providing that protection on behalf of paying customers. Police departments, on the other hand, exist to serve the interests of those who extract taxes, rather than those forced to surrender them. 

This role is vividly demonstrated whenever riots coalesce. As mobs loot and burn private property, grim-faced, armor-clad police form phalanxes to protect their own headquarters, City Hall, and other outposts of the tax-devouring class.

Beginning in New York City more than three decades ago, many urban police agencies adopted the “Broken Windows” theory of law enforcement. This approach emphasizes aggressive enforcement of “quality of life” ordinances – such as the cigarette taxes that provided a rationale for the fatal arrest of Eric Garner -- as a way of establishing “order” and deterring violent crime. 

“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” asserted James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in their seminal March 1982 essay on the subject. “Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who would probably consider themselves law-abiding.” On that same principle, the authors continued, “`untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls.”

Most public officials who invoke (and, to some extent, misrepresent) the “Broken Windows” concept seek to beguile the public into believing that liberty is the product of order, when the reverse is true: Order exists where property rights are secure. Wilson and Kelling admit that this objective is best pursued by applying “the standards of the neighborhood” – that is, the informal consensus among peaceful property owners -- rather than “the rules of the state” – the pronouncements of people who claim a monopoly on aggressive force.
When dealing with “disorderly” elements, Wilson and Kelling continue, “citizen action without substantial police involvement” is not only practical, but preferable.

“Until well into the nineteenth century, volunteer watchmen, not policemen, patrolled their communities to keep order,” explain the authors. “They did so, by and large, without taking the law into their hands – without, that is, punishing persons or using force. Their presence deterred disorder or alerted the community to disorder that could not be deterred.” 

In what we are all but required by law to call the “Post-9/11 Era,” law enforcement, acting for the supposed purpose of maintaining order,  has become unabashedly militarized and conspicuous to the point of ubiquity. The totems of regimentation and state “authority” are, to invoke Bastiat’s dichotomy, what can be seen. However, civilized order, meaning the protection of property, is actually maintained through the all but unseen efforts of private security officers. They play that dangerous role unprotected by institutional privileges, and fully encumbered with personal liability for negligent or criminal acts.

Dale Brown of Detroit's very successful Threat Management Center.

To offer one small but significant illustration: Last year, according to “loss prevention” data compiled by the Florida-based Hayes International security firm, there were more than two million incidents in which private security officers intervened to prevent theft. McCann estimates that this led to the recovery of more than $1 billion in property. 

As is the case in any other industry, there are some unreliable and irresponsible people in the private security field. Many security operatives who meet that description are off-duty police officers who can’t overcome the privileged mindset that comes with a state-granted license to commit aggressive violence.  

McCann points out that there is a growing tendency for private security organizations to assume a “law enforcement role,” a trend that should be reversed immediately. While specialists who investigate crimes against property and apprehend people suspected of committing them will always be needed, law enforcement – as distinct from protection of property rights – is a practice that is unsuited to a free society. Rather than encouraging private peace officers to mimic the behavior of cops, we should demand that government-employed police – to the extent we countenance their continued existence – behave like their betters in the private sector. 

When private security operatives fail to perform their contracted services, the market will punish them and reward their competitors. When they commit an act of criminal violence, they can’t take refuge in “qualified immunity,” invoke their “Garrity” privileges, or wrap themselves in a special, union-composed, occupation-specific “bill of rights.” They’re liable to prosecution on the same terms as any other citizen. The companies that employ corrupt or abusive security operatives can’t deflect inquiries into their conduct by describing the question as a “personnel matter,” then carrying out an internal investigation designed to exonerate the officers. 

Private security agencies cannot claim or exercise the ability to retaliate against their critics. They can’t force the public at large to pay for their services, or impose fines, imprisonment, or physical injury on those who want to un-subscribe from them. They cannot detain or abuse people on the basis of suspicion. They can't inflict summary punishment for "contempt of cop."

To provide the service for which they are paid, private security personnel must put their client’s interests ahead of their own safety, and avoid violating the rights of the innocent. And when they fail, they go out of business. Government law enforcement agencies, by way of contrast, aren't subject to market discipline. Those who preside over them react to failure by demanding more money, power, and privileges until they bankrupt the municipal corporation that employs them.


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