Bernie Sanders says that police departments are socialist institutions. Is he right?

Sophisticated socialists and anti-socialists rightly dunk on “socialism is when government does thing” takes. But sometimes these takes contain a grain of truth. For instance, socialists were embarrassed when Bernie Sanders called police departments socialist institutions and tried to explain why this is a mistake. But it’s not obvious to me that it is. Consider that policing is publicly provided and financed, centrally planned, subject to (indirect) democratic control, and accessible to all citizens (in principle). This strikes me as a lot closer to a socialist institution than a capitalist one by the standards of socialists themselves.

One objection alleges that socialism requires worker control and police departments don’t have that. Fair enough, but this objection deprives socialists of one of their favorite lines of defense—namely, pointing to benevolent public institutions as examples of socialism in action. For instance, Chris Maisano writes in Jacobin, “It’s one thing to identify public libraries with socialism. They operate according to democratic principles of access and distribution, providing services to all regardless of one’s ability to pay. They would be one of the most important institutions in any socialist society worthy of the name.” But public libraries don’t function as democratically-controlled, worker-run co-ops, so they shouldn’t count as socialist according to this objection.  

Another objection is that police departments don’t exemplify real socialism because they fail to operate in accordance with principles of egalitarian justice—for instance, they are often corrupt, self-serving, and benefit the few at the expense of the many. But this all-too-familiar reply is unconvincing for many reasons. I’ll just mention one: if we are judging an institutional arrangement in light of the outcomes we simply stipulate that it ought to promote, then socialist objections to capitalism instantly evaporate. The United State doesn’t exemplify real capitalism because employers often fail to treat their employees fairly, the rich obtain political favors, and so on.

Maisano writes, “If the forces responsible for killing Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd exemplify socialism in action, then no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist.” Yet these forces do exemplify socialism in action more than Maisano wants to admit, which is why no person who wants freedom and justice should be a socialist.

On Looting and Burning

Before I get going, I'd like to remind you that I was writing about police violence and systematic injustice against blacks (and others) in the criminal justice system years ago, before it was cool and on your mind. So when you see me talking about protestors' excesses, it's not because I think that's the most important issue, but because it's what I find philosophically interesting now.

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NPR recently featured a piece on a book defending looting. 

On its face, looting seems wrong. Consider the basic doctrine of defensive violence. If someone is attacking you or others, you may use defensive deceit, subterfuge, and even violence back at them, if doing so is necessary to stop them. The principle is a bit more complicated than that, of course. (I discuss the complexities in the second chapter of When All Else Fails.) There are issues about imminent and on-going general threats, how proportional the response can be, what exactly "necessary" means, and so on. (Generally, the necessity requirement is that you can't use a more harmful response when a less harmful response is as effective.)

Still, you are not in general allowed to attack innocent bystanders. If the bully picks on me daily, I can't beat up his cousin or a stranger as a way of making him stop, even if somehow beating up this innocent third person induces him to stop. I can't steal lunch money from an innocent third person to stop that the bully from stealing mine. I can't engage in racist attacks against Koreans to stop white people from engaging in racist behavior toward me. 

There may be special cases where this behavior is excusable, such as that you may break into a store to hide if that's necessary to stop someone from abducting you. 

One might try to overcome this presumption against hurting innocent third parties in two sorts of ways:

1. Argue that the third parties aren't actually innocent.

2. Argue that the good consequences of looting and riots justify the behavior. 

There are smarter and dumber versions of 1. Let's start with the dumber version. On Facebook, you can see people sharing memes that make it seem white people and all black people are part of two big, coordinated moral teams. When some white people mistreat some black people, or vice versa, that's team W attacking team B, and vice versa. 

But of course we're not on teams. There are individual people acting wrongly. There is indeed systematic injustice, as my own book on criminal justice documents and diagnoses. But even this systematic injustice is not all white people hurting all black people, but rather specific white people hurting many black people or in some cases specific black people. 

Unfortunately, both hardcore racists such as the KKK and many of today's woke folk accept the team sport mentality of ethics. But this way of thinking is a cause of our problems, not a solution. Some British people were awful to some Irish people in the past, so should an Irish person today hate all British people and hold them responsible? Not only does this attitude moral responsibility incorrectly, it leads to further conflict. On the contrary, if you could wave a magic wand that would stop people from thinking of themselves and others as part of ethnic and racial teams, you'd do the world a big favor by waving it. 

The smarter version of 1 is to say that people are complicit. Everyone is complicit in these injustices because they could have worked to stop them or perhaps could have stopped them, but they instead tolerated them or even indirectly aided them.

But this is problematic for a few reasons, too. 

For one, complicity actually means involvement, not failing to act. Yet most of the time, when people say others are complicit, what they mean is that these others could have stopped the problem but didn't, not that they contributed to the problem. 

Second, not everyone is complicit. Some people have in fact worked to stop systematic injustice, and looters and rioters have no idea whether the person whose small business they're destroying is complicit or not. Some people have or had very little power. Some people are new the country and haven't had a chance to do anything. And so on. It's not as though the rioters first document individual people's moral responsibility and then target those who have it coming. (If you do, though, please remember that by this line of argument, my neighbor's houses may be targeted but not mine. Remember, protestors, I was working on this years ago before most of you even cared. Thanks.) 

Third, the bigger problem is that if we're going to say that nearly every person in the US is complicit in various injustices, this once leads to the perverse conclusion that I am justified in looting your house and attacking your businesses. After all, you all are not merely complicit in the criminal justice system's systematic mistreatment of blacks and the poor. You are complicit in the even worse injustice of closed borders and how immigrants are treated. At any rate, the Open Borders crew and I will be passing through Cambridge, MA, this weekend to loot any house with a pro-Biden or pro-Trump sign. Any car with a Bernie sticker is gonna burn. 

Regarding 2: The consequentialist argument is weak for at least two reasons as well. First, it's far from clear that looting and rioting help produce desired consequences. The empirics are complicated, and there is strong evidence that people react to such behavior by voting for law and order candidates. If I were Trump, I might encourage such looting as a way of drawing people back to me. "Look, the Democrats will let your homes and businesses burn. I will restore civilization." It's an effective message, and there is good evidence it works. It may not be enough to get him re-elected, but it appears to be helping him already. (Can we loot the looters' houses because of their complicity in re-electing Trump?)

But, regardless of the empirics, you get the same problem as the previous argument: it proves too much. If we may riot and loot to protest police murders, why can't we riot and loot for countless other causes, including higher stakes causes, such as climate change or closed borders?

At any rate, I'm not saying all rioting and looting is wrong. Burning and looting the local police station in many cities and towns is probably justifiable. This is too simple, but in general, since the government is acting wrongly, you may attack its property, but not the property of third parties. 

Cato Unbound on *Injustice for All*: Malcolm Responds

John Malcolm responds to our lead essay here.

Excerpt:

The authors end their article by stating that our “system is broken from top to bottom.” Surely there is room for improvement, but I fundamentally disagree with this conclusion. At the outset, they state that “Only 11 U.S. states incarcerate citizens at a lower rate than the Russian Federation. 25 U.S. states, including overwhelmingly white states like Wyoming and Montana, put people in prison at a higher rate than repressive, authoritarian Cuba.” But given the choice, would anyone subject themselves to a trial in Russia or Cuba or any of the dozens of other countries that fail to provide what we consider basic procedural safeguards over a trial in any of the 50 states? I didn’t think so.

Protesting Police and Policing Protests

The  Marc Sanders Foundation recently hosted a  hosted a Zoom Panel Discussion on Protesting Police and Policing Protests featuring Ekow Yankah, Michele Moody-Adams, Brandon del Pozo, and Jason Brennan, moderated by Barry Lam and Simone Gubler. The event was co-sponsored by the The Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society, and Hi-Phi Nation.

You can watch the video here:  https://marcsandersfoundation.org/protesting-police-and-policing-protest/

 

My part draws upon Injustice for All. 

Paternalism and Policing

Drug prohibition has contributed to police brutality and racial injustice in countless ways. Here’s one: “The escalation of the War on Drugs gave police officers both motivation and excuses to engage aggressively and maliciously with black communities.” Criminalization means more encounters with the police--encounters that can turn violent and even deadly.

But it’s worth recognizing that other, innocuous-seeming paternalistic prohibitions also provide the police with “motivation and excuses to engage aggressively and maliciously with black communities.” For instance, Jess has noted that mandatory seatbelt laws provide the police with an excuse to stop drivers--stops that can turn violent and even deadly. The police are also more likely to pull over black drivers than white drivers, and more likely to use force during an interaction with a black person than a white person. 

Or consider the increasingly popular proposal to ban cigarettes outright. While this ban might appear benign at first blush, it too creates new occasions for the police to abuse their power. Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter says, “On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.” Carter specifically mentions the case of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York City Police officer. His alleged crime? Illegally selling cigarettes. Any law, no matter how beneficial it seems in principle, can be violently abused in practice. So we would do well to heed Carter’s advice: “Don’t ever fight to make something illegal unless you’re willing to risk the lives of your fellow citizens to get your way.”

Public Choice Explains Our Criminal Justice Crisis

The US has an unusually violent and harsh criminal justice system. Chris Surprenant and I wrote Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Corrupted and Can Fix the US Criminal Justice System to investigate why, and what to do about it.

Early in the book, we say that the most popular explanations offered by the soi-disant progressive left, the right, and even libertarians don't quite work, even though they are partly right. For instance, the Left likes to say the problems are racism and poverty. But racism and poverty have generally been declining, while the criminal justice system has become progressively more punitive and violent. The trendlines go in opposite directions. While racism can explain why blacks are treated worse than whites, it doesn't explain why white Americans are treated so badly compared to whites in other countries. Conservatives say it has to do with the decline of the family leading to increased crime, and that higher-than-normal US criminality explains higher-than-normal harshness. But, again, the trendlines don't match up. Family instability and crime went up, while punitiveness went up much faster, and then instability and crime went down, but then the US system kept getting more punitive, violent, and harsh. Finally, libertarians like to blame the drug war. They're right that the drug war led to certain perversions, such as civil assert forfeiture and the preponderance of SWAT raids. But, as John Pfaff points out, even if all drug and drug-related convictions disappeared, the US would still have an unusually violent and harsh system. 

Instead, Surprenant and I argue that the US are a wide range of unusual rules which create bad incentives, including rules about how prosecutors, DAs, and judges are elected, about how prisons and police are funded, about how taxes are shared, about police unions, and so on, which explain why the US is an outlier. Yes, external shocks such as the war on drugs and rising crime pushed these along (for instance, by inducing misinformed voters to always vote for whoever is toughest on crime), but it's these unique features that best explain what's wrong with the US system.

Here's a recent op-ed at Marketwatch/Yahoo outlining a small portion of the book.

Here's an excerpt:

There are other perverse incentives. Prisons are usually located in rural towns, where they serve as a source of employment for blighted white communities. These towns and their voters lobby states to build more prisons. The prison system is a workfare program employing poor, unskilled white people to guard poor black people.

The U.S. Census counts incarcerated persons as residents of town where they are imprisoned, not the town they lived in before incarceration. In Connecticut, this is responsible for creating nine (majority white) state representative districts that would not meet minimum population requirements but for their prison populations.

As an aside, you'd think that the progressive left would be more congenial to public choice theory. After all, all public choice--despite dishonest nonsense to the contrary from Nancy MacLean or incompetent nonsense from Henry Farrell--is simply the application of economic tools to collective/group action, including in political and non-profit domains. One of its big insights is that when we create structures of power or organizations charged with the goal of promoting some noble good, we  often create perverse or bad incentives which induce normal people to act badly and undermine that good. You would think, given the progressive left's professed values (such as equality), that they would be in love with public choice approaches. After all, it's horrifying if, say, the public school system which is supposed to help promote equal opportunity instead gets hijacked by special interests groups and then perpetuates and enhances inequality. As a progressive, you'd want to carefully measure and eliminate any possible sources of corruption, and you'd want to guard against your threats to your treasured goals. But, no, in general, progressives simply yawn and dismiss the ample empirical evidence that their favored structures aren't working. If I had to speculate, it may be because progressivism is in practice fundamentally an ideology of power--an ideology whose purpose is to justify a technocratic elite reigning over others--and public choice theory speaks truth to power. For instance, as we've seen in Minneapolis and other blue cities and states, the police are largely a client class of Democratic Party, which has enabled and supported their horrible behavior for decades.