If your parents were anything like mine, they likely raised you to respect and obey police officers – because police are there to protect us. Education systems, Hollywood and nearly all media publications seem to teach American children and adults that they ought to respect and obey these brave protectors of justice and civility. Do police really protect people, though?
The concept of protection could refer to multiple forms of ensuring that people remain safe. We will address each one of them.
Individual protection:
Nearly every human would likely agree that any given society would include at least a few people who seek to harm others physically, because psychotic and evil people do exist. We also must acknowledge that some people are not in a position to protect themselves from physical harm, including the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and young children. The public perception of police seems to be that they exist to protect civilians, especially those who cannot protect themselves. In a prior article, we busted the myth of the duty of police. We must discuss more deeply exactly why police could not possibly ‘protect civilians’.
- Simply put, violent crime could occur in any moment and in any location. Unless police officers were literally omnipresent (existing perpetually/occupying every physical space in their jurisdiction) they could not possibly protect everyone from violent crimes at all times. Assuming that a person is shot by a typical pistol, a cop would have to be closer to the victim than the attacker and/or run faster than 1200 feet per second in order to take the bullet for the civilian – which few cops would do anyway.
- Police officers also may not protect civilians because in the eyes of many of them, civilians are all guilty criminals. Many former police officers have admitted that they were trained to manipulate every single civilian into admitting that they committed a crime – any crime would suffice. The best lawyers and the most trustworthy cops would advise those they care about to never say a word to any law enforcement official ever. Perhaps the founders foresaw this and created the 5th amendment (Miranda protections) in order to guarantee that suspects could not be forced to speak to law enforcement officers.
Societal Protection:
It is common knowledge that the greatest genocides and crimes against humanity have been perpetrated by duly elected governments. Of course, politicians rarely engage in physical violence against the citizenry themselves. Rather, they instruct law enforcement and military officials to commit the violence on their behalf. And those government enforcers very rarely disobey their leaders.
When Hitler became the rightful leader of Germany in the early 1930’s and began to persecute and then murder Jews and non-aryans, the German law enforcement officers obeyed his orders and killed up to 20,000,000 innocent people. Russia’s communist movement caused over 6,000,000 people to die. 65,000,000 people died as a result of Mao Zedong making China into a communist nation. Indeed, governments in nearly every State on Earth have been and remain the greatest threat to peaceful citizens – and the most realistic reason for them to need protection. Governments in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, China, and many other nations control the economy with the use of force so strictly that people are impoverished. Citizens of the most ‘civilized’ and ‘richest’ nations, like the United States, Germany, Britain, Australia, France, Denmark, and Canada can hardly do anything other than blink or breathe without government granting them permission on a case by case basis. Many things that people wish to do are simply illegal – from keeping one’s earnings to building a shed on one’s property to consuming a plant in their own homes.
The next time that you find yourself hearing that ‘the job of police is to protect us’ while in a political debate, remind your opponent that firstly, the Supreme Court of the US and lower courts have ruled that police have no obligation to protect people and that secondly, the most common, realistic, and historical reason that citizens need protection is that the government – utilizing the police – are using force to violate them and their property. Police currently exist to commit violence on behalf of politicians. Cops do not care if you are safe and they would throw you in prison to meet their quotas without even batting an eye. If you want to protect yourself, buy a pistol to carry and buy a shotgun for your home. And buy an AR-15 for good measure, too.
