In 1927, General John McAuley Palmer said that professional armies
threaten government by the people, not because they consciously seek to pervert liberty, but because they relieve the people themselves of the duty of self-defense. A people accustomed to let a special class defend them must sooner or later become unfit for liberty.
I believe that if he were alive today, he would say that same thing about modern professional police forces; and I think that that recent events are showing that he was right.
Although Hollywood would have us believe otherwise, it is not the job of the police to protect anyone, or to prevent crimes from happening, or even to stop crimes that are in progress. It’s been settled law for decades that the police are only required to protect people they’ve taken into custody. And decades of experience have shown that the police are primarily interested in protecting themselves.
The police are there mostly to show up after a crime has been committed — to collect evidence, and to make arrests where the evidence indicates that this should be done.
But the widespread erroneous belief that ‘the police will protect you’ (or more generally, that ‘the government will protect you’) has led to the widespread corollary belief that it’s not your job to be ready to protect yourself. And people who rely on others to protect them leave themselves vulnerable — not just to those who would harm them, but to the protectors themselves.
Sir Robert Peel, the father of the modern professional police force, said that
the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.
That is, the police can’t (and shouldn’t) do anything that any individual citizen can’t (or shouldn’t) do.
They’re just supposed to be better at a certain skill set (examining a crime scene, collecting evidence, maintaining a chain of custody, making arrests, and so on) than the typical member of the public, in the same way that a plumber or an electrician is better at his job than most people are.
Of course, being better at some skill set doesn’t magically give you a monopoly on exercising it.
But when a delegated power (‘the government can do x‘) is mistaken for a grant of monopoly (‘only the government can do x‘), it eventually leads to what psychologist Martin Seligman called learned helplessness (‘I have to wait for the government to do x‘)¹.
Or, as General Palmer (and before him, John Stuart Mill²) called it: being unfit for liberty.
¹ This applies whether x is re-opening one’s business, or protecting that business from rioters and looters, or defending one’s family, or educating one’s children, or making one’s own medical decisions, and so on.
² ‘A people may prefer a free government but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.’
