Sunday, November 14, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: What do police departments really do?

Back in August, I reported an incident out of Wisconsin that may -- or may not -- help us answer the question: What should you do if police ask permission to search your home?

The daily Oshkosh Northwestern reported back on July 20: "Local police still have no culprit in custody following a Saturday night shooting that left an officer wounded in a south-side Oshkosh neighborhood. ...

"The ongoing search for a perpetrator continues to prove frustrating for residents of the otherwise quiet neighborhood. ... Residents ... had mixed things to say about the methods police used in searching homes Sunday morning in the aftermath of the shooting," the local daily reported.

Resident Terry Wesner told reporters "a couple of shotguns and a rifle" were removed from his home by SWAT team members after he consented to a search, though officers did not tell him they removed the firearms.

Of special concern to the local ACLU was a report that residents of the house that became the focus of the police investigation refused to consent to a search without a warrant. "(A police officer) declined to say whether officers pursued the warrant because the residents refused a consent search," the newspaper reported.

And here we thought the courts had ruled that refusal to give consent to a search could not be used as grounds to acquire a search warrant. For how can we really be said to retain any right to privacy if we can lose this right merely for invoking it?

I've gotten some feedback on this topic over the months. A lot of it, sadly, confirms my suspicion that many of our countrymen these days are all too willing to embrace the notion that police shouldn't be restrained by such archaic notions as any "right to privacy," so long as they're pursuing "lawbreakers" in good faith.

I went to grade school in the 1950s, and remember our school reader including a tale of Officer Brown -- I seem to recall him as a beaming, somewhat portly figure twirling an innocuous nightstick as he strolled down the sidewalk, tipping his hat to one and all -- helping little Suzy rescue her cat from a tree.

Does anyone still believe this is what policemen actually do?

Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.

The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.

Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?

Of course not. He's hurting no one.

But now let us return to a present era in which we maintain large, professional police forces. Earlier this day, unbeknownst to you or your neighbor, officers busted one of your neighbor's friends for driving a car with an out-of-date registration. (Oh, the horror.) Searching the car without a warrant, the "officers" found marijuana. Bargaining to stay out of jail, the young man tells the officers he got it from your neighbor.

As we speak, do you suppose Officer Friendly and Officer Brown are down at the station house, playing cards and waiting to see if anyone will call in any armed robberies tonight?

Of course not. Clad in full SWAT gear, with machine pistols and bulletproof vests, they are currently lurking in your neighbor's bushes, trying to peek in his windows. Before dawn they will break down his front door with a battering ram, drag him out half-naked and in handcuffs and proceed to send him to prison for decades for 1) possessions of unregistered handguns without a license; 2) "manufacturing for purposes of sale a deadly narcotic," that is to say, his backyard marijuana; and 3) "statutory rape" of his fiancee, regardless of whether or not their planned union has the blessing of her family.

The reported "crime rate" in your neighborhood just skyrocketed. Is this because your neighbor has hurt anyone, or has been caught doing anything that normal people have not been doing for thousands of years?

Of course not. Our great-grandparents would be astonished to learn that such "crimes" are even on the books.

The only thing that has changed is that our land is now occupied by large, professional, overlapping paramilitary "police forces" that have to keep busy, ginning up manufactured "crime waves" and filling the prisons (we now have the highest incarceration rate in the world -- and many of those inmates have never hurt anyone), in order to justify their ever-burgeoning budgets.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."