Topic: The private sector can NOT provide a benevolent police/security service [proof] - page 3. (Read 3156 times)

Are you asking who we want for a roof?
I'll take the mafia any day over the uniformed gang members.

You've hit it on the nail. To answers your 1st and 2nd question, we need to set an example of a better life that those people content to be consumer slaves will want to strive for. I mean isn't this how most open dictatorships are toppled? Those people looking towards freer people and wanting to have the same thing?

And yeah, I do think it's not possible to change a society, we'd need to build it from the ground up. And there is still one frontier that has plenty of unoccupied space available - the digital world.

I agree that decentralization is the road to liberty. I suppose my fear is not that information and discussions will not be readily available to people, but that they will:

1. Be too comfortable with a lifestyle of dependence to even want freedom or personal control over their lives / society.
2. Be psychologically used to the constant single-servings of bliss/pleasure that comes with a consumerist society, and as a result will not want to put forth the laborious and sometimes insipid effort required to educate themselves.
3. Not have any experiences with calm or rational discussion and subsequently will regress to the "My group is right, you're group is wrong, and anybody who disagrees with me is an idiot" mentality that seems to dominate most debates.

It's not that I don't think we can make a better society, I just have doubts about our ability to change the ones we currently have. It may be necessary for similarly-minded people to create a new society from the foundation up. Of course in a world without a frontier, all the habitable land is controlled by one faction or another...

We only need a critical mass, 3-5% of the population, that has a working knowledge of the dynamics of economic and political power and how they affect human liberty to effect a change from the .01% of the sociopaths that currently run the show. The decentralizing effect of TCP/IP has only been in play for a generation. My optimism is based on my life's experience of watching the effect of decentralization since the 1980's, when I first got on the net.

From the days of Usenet, I've watched this avalanche proceed. In the 90's, I had messages plonked, tanked, filtered and removed from groups for questioning the overarching control of the Federal Reserve and banking powers in general. I was still learning what was what back then, so my questions were more along the lines of uninformed suspicions rather than anything that could be mistaken for helpful information. But in the passing generation, 20 years, my uninformed suspicions are now common knowledge amongst a wide range of people.

I have great hope that the smartest kids now in their teens and 20's will easily pick up the information that was hard to come by for us 20-25 years ago.


From the man who taught the tactic of non-violent non-resistance to Gandhi:

"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us." -Tolstoy

Agreed. I think a solid knowledge of, and open-discussions on, history, psychology, and other cultures would form a great foundation for an anarchist education system. These things, more than anything else, tend to show the fallacies of hate-mongering, aggressive foreign policies, masked politicians, and other tools of the state.


You are way more optimistic than me, my friend. When I look at the world, I see a vast, escalating, and ever-growing system of dumbed-down education, authoritarian indoctrination, debt slavery, blind collectivism, media-based psychological moulding, and an over-indulged sense that our actions provide only short-term benefits and no long-term consequences. Even the very purveyors of the modern mass mentality seem to be succumbing to it; puppets controlling puppets. Money has replaced military-might and divine-right as the basis of power, and money is fed from consumers. Everything that is happening to the mass populace is an unconscious but collective effort by those who have money to make those who don't have money into better consumers.


It amazes me how many people think the state is actually there to help and protect them (or how many people think that different political parties enact anything but slightly different policies). Politicians and autocrats alike were bought out by corporations a long time ago. Now government is just a way for corporations with political power to serve their own interests, screw over their competitors, manipulate public opinion, direct blame towards foreign entities, and manage the populace via division and misinformation.

The first weapon is knowledge. We're at least a generation away from a critical mass people being able to handle that gun.

There are still too many fatasses in my generation and the one before it looking for freebies and protection from the State. The trade-off is that they remain ignorant of the depravity of the State that feeds them.

If multiple private security firms with similar consumer pools were to open in the same area, competition would inevitably occur. One of the most basic ways to defeat your competitors is to offer lower prices. Let's assume (as is most often the case) that this price reduction has a compounding effect and all security firms in the area subsequently charge less. What happens when the profit margin becomes too low, and the various firms can no longer sustain their pro bono work?

Additionally, organizations such as the one in the video are examples of institutionalized power. The problem with institutionalized power, is that who is in control of it changes over the decades. It is not far-fetched to wonder what will happen when men of less moral caliber come into control of the organization. It cannot be expected that the populace will be able to see corrupt men for what they are (just look at what the smiling faces and silver tongues are able to get away with in Washington), and it cannot be expected that they will be able to do anything about it even if they did see behind the masks. As was said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men".


IMO if an anarchistic society is to work, each citizen would need to have the ability to defend themselves and have access to a multitude of weapons. Contrary to popular belief, all citizens having power does not necessarily mean that all citizens will abuse power. In my experience, people only abuse power over others if they think that they are above the consequences of their actions or if they think that their actions will not be discovered. History has shown time after time that when power is held only by one small group of people, that group becomes increasingly corrupt as their power masses. A society in which each citizen is powerful is the only way I can see anarchy working.

Did you watch the video?

Rich have always hired private protection, got to have something to keep those slaves under control.

But what about regular people?

Yes, celebrities and rich people never hire private protection because they do not work.

I said nothing of that act itself being legal or illegal, only that the evidence collected is still admissible in court.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/search-seizure-criminal-law-30183.html

"Restrictions on Private Security Personnel

Private security personnel currently outnumber police officers in the United States by three to one. As a result, whether you're shopping in a supermarket or a pharmacy, working in an office building, or visiting a friend in a housing project, you may be more likely to be confronted by a security guard than by a police officer. At the present time, the Fourth Amendment does not apply to searches carried out by non-governmental employees like private security guards.

For example, assume that a shopping mall security guard acting on a pure hunch searches a teenager's backpack. Inside the backpack the guard finds a baggie containing an illegal drug. The guard can detain the teenager, call the police, and turn the drug over to a police officer. The drug is admissible in evidence, because the search was conducted by a private security guard. As private security guards increasingly exercise traditional police functions, courts may one day apply Fourth Amendment guidelines to their conduct."

Other related: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-06-26/local/35234388_1_conservators-police-powers-private-security

You have to remember, a private security business aims to appease its customers and future customers by showing that it can handle the various problems it is presented without resorting to the use of force, as this would be the most obvious red flag as to which business not to use (assuming a society which believes non-violence is good thing is funding the business.)  It is the customer which ultimately decides the fate of a business, and it is the customer which can make the business owner wealthy or broke.  It is therefor in one's best interest to support peaceful security businesses whose sole purpose is to protect, not enforce.  As with any business, one should scrutinize every move a business makes, from the quality of service to every complaint, and make vocal (easily, nowadays, thanks to the Internet) the terrible or terrific things any given company will do.  Just as with publicly funded security, if you don't call them out for what they do, they'll keep doing it.  It's no different there; what is different is whether or not you can do something about it, which you can't when publicly funded security is compulsory and if those officers do a terrible job they can, at best, be fired, but you can never stop funding the uniform system which produced them, whereas in a free society, it's as simple as a phone call saying "I'd like to cancel my service" and then another phone call to a security business which has proven it does better.

To anyone interested, check this vid out, it's part one of a series which explains how law as we know it would work in a free society.  I forget which vid exactly (there's three of them I think) explains how private security would work, but it should be somewhere in there.

No, a private goon squad can not enter my home and take stuff with them because this would constitute an armed robbery and then the next buildings they would "enter" would be a court room and a prison.

A private police force is just that, private, as opposed to public, which is what classical police forces are, under public infrastructure and funding. Some times public funding is used to fund private police forces. How these private police forces are administrated is 100% up to whomever funds it, be it Hitler reincarnated to mall security guards. As far as what I personally feel, I would appreciate it if you leave elaboration of my own opinions up to me and not assume and try to interpret them.

You and I have a different definition of "private". I define it owned and provided privately on a voluntary basis. You apparently define it as owned privately and you don't care if it's provided through public or private funding or if it's mandated by public(coercive) or private(voluntary) laws.

The state in many cases has sponsored private police force and used them to replace a classic policing system. As with many choices made by the state, you don't have a say in it. Yes police already routinely violate law, but every time they do that they put themselves under criminal and civil liability which could in fact be prosecuted. Private police have no more liability than any other private individual.

P.S. Way to be a dick and not read my whole comment. Also since when do I have to watch a video to have an opinion on a subject I am already well versed in?

Who would pay for such a private police force? I know I wouldn't.


They already do that routinely, just look around. And guess what, nothing happens. Meanwhile if a private police/security service did that they'd go out of business fast.

p.s.: Way to be a dick and comment without watching the video which is my main point of this thread.

I did not watch this video, but having researched this subject previously I can tell you private for profit police force is NOT the answer.  People assume there will be more oversight, but there is actually LESS oversight because private police are not restricted by the same rules, procedures, and restrictions of traditional police. Don't get me wrong, traditional police style systems here in the US are extremely corrupt, but they are still limited by the law to some degree. To give you an example, a private police force can enter your home without a warrant and collect evidence that is admissible in court. If traditional police did this the evidence would be ruled irrelevant because collecting it would be violating the warrant requirement before search and seizure. This is just one small example of how a private police force can actually strip you of even more rights.

EDIT: After watching the video I see this organization is centered on community rather than profits like most private police force examples I have seen. I approve of this kind of private police force structure, heavily moderated by the community, and dependent upon results, not fines.

Proof!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onWC8nNpIco


Discuss.