Item — HN Reader

A common good like security should be socialized because the alternative is multiple independent groups enforcing property rights, and when they start to conflict, you get a civil war won by the person who spent the most on security.

The idea that police are inherently corrupt because they developed from paid security forces ignores that the very process of development is what enshrined the rule of law over power.

1 comments

I don't disagree that security should be a socialized good, it's a good idea. That doesn't change the fact that police in the United States and elsewhere were formed in the basis of law not to protect people but to protect property.

Even today courts have ruled that police are under no obligation to protect civilians from direct, inevitable harm. They are not there to protect you, they are there to protect "the peace" which can be fucking anything.

> police in the United States and elsewhere were formed in the basis of law not to protect people but to protect property.

Be as that may (and as shitty as that is), this thread is about police forces utterly failing to protect property (or even attempt to).

Well right, my point is the damaged party is in the wrong class. That's why it's not being resolved.

The mass of unpunished retail crimes that has afflicted US cities these last several years rather undermines your narrative.

They are to protect order. So you, as a victim of a crime, are only a concern to them to the degree you make your harm public enough to disrupt order. Then they might attempt to solve a crime or make an impression they are doing something to prevent similar ones, but dissuading you from complaining too publicly about it (both by taking your report and showing it was useless) works just as well.

Let's also not forget that cops also pointedly refuse to their do their job when their feelings are hurt when people complain that they don't clean up the corruption and abuse in their ranks.

See: Chelsea Boudin and the SFPD. See DeBlasio and the NYPD.

> Even today courts have ruled that police are under no obligation to protect civilians

Yeah, LAPD's "protect and serve" was dreamed up by the City's marketing arm in the 1950s.

And those rulings have come because PDs have stood up and said "We have no obligation to prevent crime or protect people" and the courts have said, "Yup, you're right."

> the fact that police in the United States and elsewhere were formed in the basis of law not to protect people but to protect property.

I've never heard this. Reference, please?

https://nleomf.org/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-p...

There was always enforcement of the law. Banditry, murder, etc., had to be dealt with. And sheriffs predated this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff_of_Nottingham_(positio...

The Code of Hammurabi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

Wouldn't that be useless without a mechanism of enforcement?

The Code of Hammurabi has more in it about protecting property than people, so...

Also, you've conflated 'enforcement of the law' with 'the law protects property more than people'. Why?

For most of history the people with the power to create and enforce laws were also the people with the most property. This isn't some big mystery.

And yet it did include protecting people. That old "eye for an eye", for example.

You seem to have some trouble keeping track of goalposts; even when people are pointing right at them.