HARD TRUTH #2
In a truly totalitarian environment where the authorities cannot only kill, but have control over who finds out about it and, have control over the means to respond, the populace is helpless.
This is the world: The wolf pack tears at a caribou, slashing at hamstrings, tearing out guts. Raw, primal violence. The caribou will run if it can, but if it can’t, it will respond as best it can with violence of its own, kicking and goring the pack.
A cat toys with a mouse. The mouse may bite you if you try to save it.
Some predators stalk, some run in packs, some lie in ambush. All predators use violence as a strategy, the easiest and safest way to access a resource that they need or want.
Human predators are the same.
If a person can do so safely, it is easier to steal food than to grow it. It is easier to beat the weak into submission than to earn their respect. It is far easier to rape and abandon a woman than it is to raise children. All provided it can be done safely. Society, or someone acting on behalf of society, must make that kind of behavior unsafe.
A peaceful individual is ill-prepared to deal with a violent human being. The tactics of the courtroom, the boardroom, or the mediator simply don’t work on someone who wants something and has no problem injuring someone to take it. A peaceful society compounds this by allowing the peaceful individuals to believe that their worldview is normal. It is a beautiful ideal but for most of human history, and in many places now, and even within individuals in the most civilized of societies, it doesn’t hold true. There are people for whom violence is a natural way to get what they want.
Violence and crime will probably never disappear, for practical reasons. The rarer they become, the less experience and skill potential victims will have to combat them. The less violence and crime happens, the less it factors into planning, and the less people take care to protect themselves.
So the more rare violence is, the more profitable and safe violence becomes.
Crime and violence are usually an individual advantage, but they weaken the connections that keep society going and are a community disadvantage.
Civilized people must come to terms with the fact that only force, or the credible threat of force, could stop a Hitler, a Pol Pot, or a John Dillinger.
It’s often been said, “Violence never solved anything.” The simple truth is that when you are slammed up against the wall and the knife is at your throat, when a circle of teenagers is kicking you as you curl into a ball on the sidewalk, or when the man walks into your office building or school with a pair of guns and starts shooting—only violence, or the reasonable threat of violence, is going to save your life. In the extreme moment, only force can stop force.
HARD TRUTH #3
In the extreme moment, only force can stop force.
That’s the truth, and in it lies the first problem:
Given that only violence can stop violence, and given that a modern, affluent, egalitarian society requires a certain amount of peace and trust to operate, who will be responsible for wielding this violence-stopping violence?
In caste systems throughout the world, there is a warrior caste with the power to make war externally and visit justice internally. In European history, the nobility of the medieval period were professional fighters responsible both for war abroad and for justice on their own lands.
There were problems inherent in this model. What we consider an “abuse of power” had no meaning to the medieval mind. The lord had the power and could use it as he saw fit. Only a more powerful lord could intervene and only as far as he felt the force available to him would carry the day.
Modern societies have been forced to work with both the fact that force is sometimes necessary and the social belief that force is inherently wrong—the “last resort of the ignorant.” The modern solution has been to create professions, soldiers and police, authorized to use force in the name of and for the benefit of society as a whole.
Looked at shallowly, this seems to present a paradox. If a John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer (serial killers and rapists, and Dahmer a cannibal) handcuffs someone and takes them against their will to another place, it is kidnapping. When an officer does it, it is an arrest. When a citizen shoots another citizen, it is usually murder. When an officer shoots someone, it is closely scrutinized, but it is usually an ‘incident,’ not a crime.
The analogy doesn’t hold true all the time. Most of the time, officers are expected to act like citizens—follow traffic laws, respect other people’s property, and not randomly blaze away with their handguns.
But when law enforcement officers are being enforcement officers, it isn’t a ‘most of the time’ situation. The standard social rules, the way that life and people are expected to be, have already failed or started the downhill slide. ‘Most of the time’ people respect each other’s persons and property. ‘Most of the time’ people can be reasoned with and will do the right thing. ‘Most of the time’ you don’t need the cops.
Referees in any sport are not and cannot be held to the same standards as players. They have to do things players aren’t supposed to do, such as confront other players and sometimes eject them from the game.
When you do need officers to respond, it is because the social rules, the way most of us agree things should be, are being ignored. Someone has decided to act the way he wants to instead of the way he should. It is unlikely that the social corrections will work when people are already off the social map.
That’s the ‘why’ of the book. This is what I bring to the table:
For seventeen years, I was a corrections officer and sergeant working booking, maximum security, and mental health units. During that time, I trained corrections and enforcement officers* primarily in force-related skills, like defensive tactics (hand-to-hand fighting and arrest techniques) and force policy.
Working direct supervision corrections (and especially booking) exposes a young officer to a wide variety of ‘difficult people.’ I was told early in my career that two years in booking would result in more experience with hand-to-hand fighting than a career in enforcement. I don’t know if that is true. I do know that I have instructed a group of enforcement officers with 180 years of cumulative experience and had more force incidents than all of them combined.
In the course of my duties, I spent more than a decade on the Tactical Team, much of that as the team leader. We were the ones who got called when no one else felt confident about handling the situation. I was trained (but did not serve) as a Hostage Negotiator. I was, for a time, the sergeant designated to handle problems with mentally ill inmates.
That much exposure was a powerful incentive to understand the rules of force as well as to investigate ways to avoid it.
I have also worked as an Internal Affairs investigator and as a contract advisor for the Iraqi federal corrections service.
In an egalitarian society, the basic rules for how much force is legal are the same for officers as for civilians. The big differences come into play based on when and how force is used. A civilian who can walk away would not (should not, in most jurisdictions) use force, whereas an officer with a Duty to Act may have no choice. In cases of self-defense, citizens need to use force primarily to safely escape. Taking someone into custody requires different skills and entails different risks.
That will be covered in more detail later.
As much as possible I will put you inside the head of an