Rare News Desk
On Wednesday night, police in Ferguson, Missouri, responded to protests over the killing of Michael Brown with all the subtlety of a Caribbean coup d’état, firing rubber bullets and arresting journalists.
Videos by Rare
After widespread criticism, local police were replaced by the state Highway Patrol and gun barrels were replaced with outstretched arms. Two days later, rioters were once again throwing Molotov cocktails and looting stores. “There are no police,” one store owner told a local Fox affiliate.
Now Governor Jay Nixon has called in the National Guard. From militarized police to demilitarized police to actual military in only four days.
Two popular narratives have emerged from turbulent Ferguson. The first and most prevalent is that Ferguson was a sleepy hamlet that’s been besieged by its own police force hell-bent on snuffing out tranquil kumbaya protests using weapons of war. The second, popular with some conservatives, is that Ferguson has fallen into the clutches of an unwashed mob and the only thing protecting it from total immolation is its heavy-handed but necessary police force.
Neither of those portrayals is completely accurate, and yet both contain some truth (the first more than the second). Police have behaved coercively and outrageously, but protesters have also warranted a tougher-than-usual response. Michael Brown wasn’t a saint, but he didn’t deserve to be shot. “The nature of man is intricate,” wrote Edmund Burke—too intricate, in the case of Ferguson, for easy partisan narratives. If you’re looking for a showdown of heroes and villains, go read a comic book.
The clearest message the media has extracted from Ferguson is that our police have too much firepower. Previously limited to Reason magazine and musty radical journals, police militarization has now been recognized as a national issue that affects us all. If you live in West Springfield, Massachusetts, you could be confronted by a police officer with a grenade launcher. If you live in Doraville, Georgia, you could see a SWAT team rolling around in an armored personnel carrier. It’s high time these stories made it over the newspaper fold.
The commentators who scoffed when Robert Draper predicted a “libertarian moment” earlier this month aren’t scoffing anymore. The newfound outrage over militarized police will likely redound to the benefit of libertarians and liberty-minded conservatives who fret over excessive government power.
But if libertarians are going to produce real change, they should proceed cautiously. Contrary to recent sloganeering, and despite the abhorrent behavior of some officers in Ferguson, running against cops isn’t a good political strategy. People don’t dislike police; in fact, they don’t always dislike militarized police.
When two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, police put the city on lockdown, invaded homes without warrants, and rode around in armored vehicles. Once Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested—notably after the curfew had already been lifted—there was a vast outpouring of public support for law enforcement. “Tonight, our nation is in debt to the people of Boston,” said former constitutional law professor Barack Obama. The phrase “Boston strong” became shorthand for the mettle of city cops.
To be sure, the Boston bombing was an act of terrorism and authorities rightly judged it as a possible threat to the homeland. And yet, according to American public opinion, it was an act of courage when cops drove armored vehicles through Boston and an abuse of power when they drove armored vehicles through Ferguson. The line between terrorism and violent unrest can’t possibly be that thick.
Or skip across the pond to Britain. Prime Minister David Cameron was elected promising to be a friendlier type of conservative, and his justice secretary promptly set to work on a more lenient sentencing system. Then the shooting of a black man in London in 2011 triggered riots across the country. After video was released showing police retreating from a mob, Cameron was widely criticized for being too weak on crime, and the police response was toughened.
The public, then, is fickle when it comes to their police departments. They hate the idea of militarized cops, but they’re willing to tolerate a lot to be kept safe. There’s also a generational gap. As Ross Douthat notes, if you have fresh memories of the unrest of 1968, or even the more recent Rodney King riots, you’re more likely to support the cops. But if you came of age during or after the sharp decline in crime that happened in the 1990s, chances are you’re more skeptical of the police.
All this means libertarians must play their hand carefully. They shouldn’t turn Ferguson into a cops versus victims morality play, as the media has, or resort to anti-police sloganeering. Instead they should take a lesson from the cops themselves. Any competent police officer is going to be far more interested in arresting a big-league arms dealer than a small-time arms purchaser. Likewise libertarians should go after the supply of military weapons: the federal government.
It was the shortsighted, paranoid, reckless federal bureaucracy that co-opted police as a tool to fight drugs and preserve homeland security. Libertarians and conservatives should make that case, and ally with the millions of local cops who have never hurt anyone and are caught in the partisan crossfire.
If they do that, they can win this debate.
This piece initially referred to the vehicle in Doraville as a “military-style tank.” The vehicle is in fact an “armored personnel carrier” and we’ve changed it accordingly.
