Rare News Desk
Yesterday, an ephemeral Washington Post piece by the progressive Paul Waldman suggested libertarians have not been covering the Saturday police shooting and subsequent law enforcement crackdown on protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
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Waldman’s piece was headlined “Why aren’t libertarians talking about Ferguson?” but the body of it was actually about Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and Fox Business host John Stossel — and that’s all.
Also yesterday, more than one bitter Tweeter asked why unarmed minority protesters, most of whom have been peaceful, deserve tear gas and rubber bullets while the Bundy Ranch protesters aimed firearms at law enforcement without any kind of violent reaction earlier this year.
The question of whether black Americans have more to fear than white ones if they attempt to open or conceal carry firearms is an important one. But the liberals who are bringing up Bundy Ranch so often sound as if they wish there had been bloodshed there, instead of the feds having done the right thing and backed off.
As a general historical rule, it’s probably fair to say that lefties are more likely to be angry about local police, and conservatives are more likely to be skittish about federal law enforcement. Liberals are more likely to be optimistic that entities such as the Department of Justice and the FBI, who are now investigating the death of Michael Brown, can help. This translates to a trust in the federal government as a force for good.
Conservatives, on the other hand, may take localized police brutality as a local problem, and may brush over the Constitutional dubiousness of shutting down the right to protest and assembly.
What of the libertarians? Well, Waldman said they’ve been MIA.
Being outraged that two libertarian-leaning politicians and one libertarian host of a weekly show hadn’t yet mentioned a Saturday police shooting on Wednesday morning is being deliberately obtuse about libertarianism over the past decade.
Indeed, the only people who have more police critical cred on this issue than anyone else is radical leftists, who have been fighting cops since the dawn of cops.
But today the most prominent police reporter out there is Waldman’s Post colleague Radley Balko, author of the fantastic Rise of the Warrior Cop. To double down after the backlash, as Waldman did, on the fact that Balko hadn’t yet covered the Michael Brown shooting, even though his entire beat is police misconduct and criminal justice is missing the point.
Much of the media was on it, and Balko was on other important criminal justice topics. Does Waldman know what he was working on? Or was he just grandstanding with a flimsy foundation, because libertarians are a fun target, if Alternet, Salon, and PandoDaily’s regular Two Minutes Hate for libertarians are any way to judge?
Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown are important because an individual is dead for unknown reasons and the people of Ferguson’s right to protest has been put down by force of arms. But the issues of police militarization is a big, wide issue and Waldman’s take on it was deeply dishonest.
On Thursday, Mediaite Editor-in-Chief Andrew Kirell, my friend and himself a libertarian, published a wonderfully cranky response to Waldman’s piece. Kirell offered a list of liberty-minded folks who can be depended upon to cast a critical eye on law enforcement.
Oh, and Rep. Amash tweeted concern that Ferguson looked like a warzone as well and Sen Paul published an op-ed. So that means we’re just waiting on John Stossel now.
Kirell also noted that Waldman’s critiques, like so many of libertarians, equates them with the right, or with conservatives. Certainly there are plenty of libertarian-leaning conservatives, or personally conservative libertarians in the world. But they are not the only variation of the ideology that exists.
Yet, Waldman, near the end of his piece suddenly adds conservatives to his piece, as if they are interchangeable with libertarians.
They are not. But conservatives, too, have been coming around on this issue. Both A.J. Delgado and Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review have written fantastic pieces about police militarization in the past several weeks. Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has written about its dangers in the past, and his most recent USA Today column deals with unfair sentencing in the case of Shaneen Allen and her legal gun.
Now — isn’t critiquing mandatory minimums a sign that you are on the side of reforming criminal justice, and by extension fixing the state of American policing? This is something Paul should get credit for with his bipartisan Justice Safety Valve Act, among other positive signs.
How about if you’re skittish of federal law enforcement? Draconian gun laws? Drug laws? What if you’re worried about the treatment of the mentally ill, who are often targets of law enforcement? How about if you go after powerful public unions and lobbyists from the prison guard or police unions?
Police are not blameless simply because they do not make laws — though they seem to have invented a couple of you-can’t-film-me-reporters laws in Ferguson yesterday — but this problem is hardly confined to them. Even the now headline-making issue of local police forces that look like they belong in a warzone is both a local and federal one.
The 1033 Pentagon program offers grants on such war toys as Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles and has given out $4.3 billion dollars worth of this stuff since 1990. Federal asset forfeiture law incentivises pursuing drug crimes over real ones.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has also added to the subsidized pile-on, with terrorism terrors adding to the drug paranoia. All of this should be a target for criticizing, but going after any of it means you’re on the right track.
Instead of picking at the left, right, or the libertarian middle for not covering Ferguson in particular, people with a sincere wish for reform should realize that there are many roads towards fixing the United States’s deeply warped criminal justice system.
The key is to pick one and go. There are enough issues arising from our soft American police state that we all could make progress on getting rid of it, and eventually get back to the issues on which we truly disagree.
