All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Tom Woods, host of the most important libertarian podcast, The Tom Woods Show at tomwoods.com, and author of all those books, including Roll Back and Melt Down, etc., etc., and a bunch of great e-books, too, including recently that one about the Pentagon's war against the economy, and now this new one, The Problems with the Police and How to Fix Them, a libertarian perspective.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you, man?
Very glad to be here, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
You know, I like this thing where now I interview you on my show more again, like it started out back in history.
Back in history, back when originally you had the weekend interview show, and I was so jealous of everybody else in the liberty movement because they'd all been interviewed by you except me, and I thought, what does it take to get the attention of this Scott Horton?
I'm not kidding you.
That's funny.
I don't remember if we ever figured out if there was a reason for that or what.
You know, I go by the article.
I think it was just, you know, it just never happened.
I don't think there was any hostility or anything.
And then I interviewed you a hundred times, and then you quit doing the show.
You were too busy to do the show anymore.
But then you started interviewing me all the time, and then, but now I'm back in the habit of interviewing you.
I think it was partly I stopped doing anybody's show when I was working on those Ron Paul videos.
Oh, right.
The Ron Paul curriculum.
I just stopped doing any interviews.
But yeah, now we're back to normal.
We can be on each other's shows again.
Good times.
Hey, man.
So the problems with the police and how to fix them, a libertarian perspective.
Very important.
How do you get these ebooks that you give away when people join up your Facebook group?
Am I right about that?
When they join my mailing list.
Your mailing list.
Okay.
So tell us how we can do that so people can get their hands on this thing.
Well, two ways.
Problemswithpolice.com.
And the second way, if you're in the United States, if you text the word brutality to 33444, you also get the thing delivered to you.
Oh, man.
You got some high tech kids working for you and getting your act together here, huh?
It's unbelievable.
Good thing it's not just me doing all this because I'm helpless.
But yeah, I get people who make me look impressive.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
Well, you're doing a good job of keeping them around you anyway.
All right.
So, you know, I always wonder, did you subscribe to the Free Thought Project daily email?
No, I didn't.
But it sounds good.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah.
Please do that.
Or Matt Agarest, if you're listening, please sign up Tom Woods for that thing.
I think about you all the time when I read that thing.
I can just picture you growing out your Afro and marching around with a black glove fist in the air, preaching revolution from the just absolute daily onslaught of onslaught.
It's 400 dead at the hands of the police already.
More than that.
That was six weeks ago or something.
It was 400 dead already this year.
And that's under the lockdown where, you know, nationwide where essentially rates of everything were at an all time low for at least two, three months there before the big, you know, there's a spike in crime in some big cities since then.
But anyway, you know, just yesterday, there's one where they got the guy.
He's in the restraint chair.
They got his arms shackled behind the chair.
They got his legs shackled.
They got a cloth over his face and they're electroshock and torturing him for fun.
And there's 10 of them standing around.
And of course, they kill the guy to death.
And by the time they realize that they killed him, they go, oh, no.
And then they throw him on the floor and try to do some CPR.
Well, too little, too late.
And this happens every single day.
It seems like it's it's at the core of it's very near the core.
Of course, we always start the empire and the Federal Reserve third place after that.
This is at the core of the I think the social strife in America and the division in America, and especially on racial terms.
You could see why the black minority of 13 something percent might think that the white majority of 65 something percent just don't care about them at all.
If not hate them, that we're willing to, you know, it's a democracy and all that stuff.
Right.
So somebody is responsible.
They imagine that, I guess, regular white civilian citizens have more power than they do anyway.
And yet the consensus seems to be to let it keep on like this, even though it can't keep on like this.
And so that's why I think it's so interesting to see you come in with your libertarian perspective.
And in fact, I think right leaning one traditionally.
And I know that you've had it all the way up to here with all this social justice warrior garbage and and all of kind of the leftist, you know, cultural Maoism going on and whatever right now.
That doesn't mean what's right is right.
Right.
Exactly.
That doesn't mean there's no problem with the police.
That doesn't follow.
Yeah, I can.
I can completely understand people who have been victimized by this system and they see the system just continues on and it persists and there don't seem to be any changes.
And I could perfectly well understand people thinking it must just be it must be a program deliberately directed against me or or it surely it would have been stopped by now.
And the way I look at it is every horrible thing the state does just goes on and on and on and persists like you have chronicled the the foreign policy outrages for over two decades.
And yet the warfare state just goes on and you expose the torture.
You expose the the lies and the horrors and it just goes on.
There's an inertia built into it.
There are financial interests built into it that are extremely tough to crack with independent journalism and public outrage for some reason.
Now, in this day and age, it does seem like maybe the outrage has been great enough that at least in some cities we could see some fairly significant changes.
But man, it takes an awful lot for there to be any change.
Yeah, well, and so let's talk about that in this book.
You have these great interviews and I'm sorry, I just have to say this.
I feel compelled.
I am so mad at Will Gregg for being dead.
Oh, me too.
But it was so great to I need to get over that.
But anyway, it was so great to read your interview of him in this thing.
And you guys talk a bit about in the interview after him, too.
You guys talk a lot about sort of the incentive structure.
What makes this not so difficult to crack?
After all, there is outrage, as you say.
We just had the biggest riot since 68 over this.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Well, there are a lot of different things.
Well, like like one would be the drug war aspect of policing and obviously quite a bit of policing that is being done right now has to do with carrying out the war on drugs.
And that's another thing where you say, gee, this war on drugs really hasn't generated very good results.
So why is it still happening?
You know, I used to have when I was back when I was a professor, I would have students asking me if such and such program, as you've described to us, really doesn't work.
Why is it still there?
Like they were naive enough to wonder that.
Why is it still there?
It's because interest groups develop behind them.
So likewise, with the drug war, yeah, there's an incredible militarization.
The police and police chiefs can just make a wish list of things they want and they get all this stuff.
And it's all connected to the war on drugs.
There are people whose entire livelihoods depend on that thing carrying on.
There are parts of different departments.
I think even the Department of the Interior gets money for the war on drugs.
It's very hard to say, well, I was the captain of the debate team and I'm very persuasive.
So I should be able to get the drug war reversed.
When your debating skills are not really what are at issue here.
It's the same reason that any policy that benefits a minority like sugar quotas that just makes sugar more expensive for everybody else.
But maybe it makes it more expensive by $10 a year for you and me.
No point in lobbying against that.
But it's the entire livelihood of a concentrated minority.
So they're going to spend all day long making sure they grease that particular wheel.
Yeah.
And so, but now, so back to the cops then.
I mean, obviously they're government employees, so that makes them almost impossible to fire right there.
And the unions, police unions.
Let me ask you this.
What about the judges?
You know, if I was a judge, in fact, let me tell you an anecdote.
And this is a very poor example because I know that in reality it's not really like this.
But when the federal government came after Free Radio Austin, we had to go to Sam Sparks federal court, you know, it was a few friend of ours had an injunction.
The rest of us showed up to watch and all that.
And the judge sat there talking about the government, this and the government, that in this sense that he wasn't the government, the government was the executive branch.
And he has the role as a black robe judge of telling them, no, if he doesn't feel like it, that he doesn't have to, he doesn't belong to them.
And so, yeah, no, I'm not trying to be, you know, naive.
I'm a libertarian too.
I understand.
But can you explain to me a little bit about how it, it seems that the checks and balances and the separations of power thing there break down.
We don't have judges going after criminality among the police, you know, refusing to hear their cases or, you know, whatever it is that they could do from their angle since they are independent like that, sort of.
Well, I'm going to reveal something that I have never said publicly before.
I have not never mentioned on my show or anywhere else.
It has to do with my father.
Many years ago, my father's deceased now, but my father was falsely arrested for arson when I was about five years old.
They had the wrong guy and it was humiliating to him.
It was a horrible experience.
And there's no denying they had the wrong guy.
Everybody now concedes that they had the wrong guy.
And it was, you know, he descended into, he had problems with alcohol.
It just crushed him.
And we had every, so he sued them for doing this to him.
And clearly he's in the right because even they didn't deny, yeah, you're the wrong guy.
It was this other guy.
So they all knew that.
They all admitted that.
You would think he could get some damages for what he endured.
And they went before the judge, they did the whole thing.
He crossed every T, dotted every I, everybody admitted he was right and he still got nothing.
So believe me, I understand the frustration and I want to know why is that?
Why is that?
And I think it's, it's, it's no more complicated than there is a kind of camaraderie among thieves.
That they, they do think that ultimately the, these are the, these are the, this is the enforcement arm of what we're trying to do in this society.
Yeah.
And really judges usually do in effect work for the prosecutors.
They're the last step in the prosecution, the sentencing.
And they see half these people in the courtroom every other day.
Yeah.
You know, they, they, they know Fred and Joe and whatever, and they don't know you.
But if there was a bonus somehow where they got to, you're going to get kicked up to state Supreme court.
If only you put one good dirty DA in prison or something, you know, something, I don't know.
You would have to have a miracle like that, an incentive structure like that to force them to turn on each other in a way, really not just give them the opportunity to.
It just, it does go to show, and I know this is tough medicine for a lot of, let's say normies out there, the problems that you recognize with monopolies in every other aspect of society.
We, we, we know how monopolies operate.
They, they cost a lot and they, they give you a product that costs a lot and the quality tends to fall and not to mention it would be incredibly naive to say, well, this monopoly, you know, let's say a monopoly grant by the government.
Don't worry about it.
It'll enforce itself.
This is the kind of things people laugh at libertarians for supposedly believing.
We supposedly believe that business will regulate itself and so on.
But in effect, these people think that police departments can regulate themselves with a little bit of democratic oversight.
And obviously that's not true.
Yeah.
And that's where the rubber really meets the road policing in your neighborhood, where if democracy and voting and activism and mobilization about an issue that really, you know, does strike home in a way where it's not so diffused, you know, people, they, they killed my cousin and you know, stuff like that.
Not mine, but you know what I mean?
People living through that.
And they still can't do a thing about it.
Right?
Like this is nevermind this, that, and every, you know, a hundred thousand other issues that government is involved in and supposedly is interested in solving for us.
On the most important one, democracy is essentially useless.
You could get a new police chief.
What difference does that make?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, in fact, when you look at Minnesota, they had, they had a wishlist practically that they had met of everybody they could possibly want.
They had a progressive mayor, they had a progressive police chief, they had a progressive city council.
They had everything.
They had, they had done all their voting, right?
If voting is going to solve this problem, they did all that, you know, so what are we supposed to do now?
Some of it, it comes from a, um, I don't know, let's say people get into a, an inertia and they just think that the way things are is the way things, they've always, the way things have always been and the way things have to be.
And it turns out that actually a true public police force in the United States is not that old, less than 200 years old in, in the, the ebook, I quote a passage from Bruce Benson, who's written a couple of great books on, on law and order from a libertarian perspective.
And he says this after the first true public police force was established in New York in 1844, other cities followed suit shortly.
In the outset, however, these police departments were used primarily for political purposes.
Crime control was at best a secondary concern.
First of all, local elected officials use their police departments as a way to reward political supporters.
A newly elected mayor typically fired virtually the entire police department and replaced it with his own supporters.
Bribery was often necessary to obtain a position on the police force.
That practice was financially reasonable given the potential payoff from police corruption.
At any rate, mayors and their political machines then use their police departments to control the city for their own benefit.
And Benson points out that not coincidentally, this is the roughly around the same time that the modern private security industry developed apparently as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the public provision.
So this is not something that goes back 2000 years and it was, it worked great.
And then mysteriously it went wrong in the last 30 years that that is exactly not what happened.
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And now, okay, so let's talk about the war on drugs here.
This is something that's been so obvious to so many people for so long.
Even William F. Buckley came out against the war on drugs and like back when Arafat recognized Israel in 1988 or something, you know, just back in ancient history.
But the thing is you have to have some kind of real economic understanding of it and it really is a matter of the seen and unseen.
I'm not sure if, well, speaking of seeing things, if you saw today in reason magazine, there's a new poll that says 81% of blacks like the cops just fine in America and might even like more of them.
And that's because, you know, they live where there's crime and they need some kind of security force obviously, and they don't blame most violence on the cops, except that most of the violence is the cop's fault.
Just not directly with SWAT raids as horrible as they are.
It's the war on drugs.
And yet who is, you know, one of the prime cornerstones of support for the war on drugs and support for police.
It's conservative black ministers in blacks in America by and large are not leftists.
They're conservative Christians.
They're Democrats, not Republicans, obviously.
But they choose Hillary and Biden over Bernie Sanders twice in a row.
And, you know, they tend to lean right on things like gay rights and, you know, churchy type issues and things like this.
So they're not all a bunch of Marxists and this kind of deal.
And they're not at the same time.
They've never heard a libertarian explain why you would have a lot less crime and possibly even probably even a lot less drug abuse and a lot more social harmony all around if we would end the war on drugs.
I mean, you have to admit, pretend you're a black minister and and your job is to argue that we need to legalize the scourge of heroin and cocaine in our community.
You better have a real good explanation for why that makes sense, because just like getting rid of the police altogether on the face of it sounds completely crazy, Tom.
So you teach them.
What's the deal?
Well, a couple of things.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who do abuse drugs.
But the question we have to ask ourselves is, what is the best approach to these people?
What is the best solution to that problem?
And the question is, is it always simply obvious that the best solution is to throw the person in a cage where he's going to be raped every day?
Is that the answer?
You think that solves drug abuse?
They can't keep the drugs out of the prisons.
If they can't keep the drugs out of the prisons, then even if you made your society into a prison, you still wouldn't be able to to win the war on drugs.
So number one, doing something that's futile can't ever be the right solution.
And secondly, doing something that's obviously inhumane to the users can't be the right solution.
I have a story in my 2011 book, Rollback, that to me, when I was kind of coming around on the war on drugs, because I wasn't always a libertarian, and the war on drugs with foreign policy were the two things that were the sticking points for me, because I absorbed everything I was taught about the war on drugs in elementary school.
I watched the film Strips, and I watched what happens to your brain and all that.
I'll tell you what happened to my brain.
I just became a very conventional thinker about the war on drugs.
And then this episode occurred where the whole city, in terms of the police and everybody working together, decided they were going to track down all the heroin dealers and have one big raid and bring them all in on the same day.
And they did that.
And they actually succeeded, hard to believe, but they actually succeeded.
They knew who they were, and they arrested them all, and they brought them all in.
And what was amazing was that for a couple of weeks, you really, honest and truly could not get heroin anywhere in San Diego.
But within a month, not only could you get as much heroin as you wanted, but the difference was now they had no idea who was dealing it.
So now they were even more in the dark than before.
So they had an unprecedented coordination of bringing absolutely everybody in.
They had never accomplished anything like that before, and what did it buy them?
Two weeks is what it bought them.
The thing is futile.
So if the thing is futile, it's a waste of money and resources.
What could that money be used for instead?
Where could these resources be deployed instead?
Are there ways to deal with people suffering from the effects of drug addiction where that money might be more useful, or if they were able to keep that money in the community, that they could do something with?
So that seems to me to be, that's the main thing.
And then you can go into the technical ins and outs of why, in some cases, the drug war, as Mark Thornton has argued, tends to encourage the distribution of ever more potent drugs, because obviously it's illegal, and you want to be able to transport an illegal substance undetected by the authorities, well, you want it to take up as little area as possible.
So you want as much potency as possible, so you want to be dealing in as tiny quantities as possible.
Plus you get prosecuted for the weight.
So that's another incentive on the same line there.
Yes, exactly right.
So the result is perverse and bizarre.
So there are all these perverse incentives built into the thing.
You know what I think it is, too, is if you say legalized drugs, it sounds like what you're saying is essentially legalized crime, legalized scary street corner drug dealers, and tolerate them to the nth degree and let them get away with murder, when that's not at all what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is putting every single one of those guys completely out of business overnight, because now everyone can get their cocaine and their heroin at Walgreens.
And especially, I think this is such an important point about heroin these days, is people are dropping dead of heroin overdoses.
And the reason why is because it's spiked with fentanyl.
And the reason why it's killing them is because people are misdosing.
They're used to taking this much, shooting this much, and then they do that same amount or a little bit more.
But it turns out that the potency is all skewed, but they didn't know.
And if they were just buying their drugs from Walgreens, they would know the purity.
And so yes, they would be addicted, but they already are addicted.
Only now they'd be addicted and alive instead of formerly addicted and dead.
And you've got people dropping dead by the tens of thousands.
Tens of thousands of Americans have died of heroin overdoses just in the last few years.
It's insane.
It's the fentanyl that's doing it.
There's the only solution in the world.
And people think, oh, heroin junk.
That means you just live in a back alley and have AIDS and are the world's lowest scum, and so who cares if you die anyway?
Nuh-uh.
These are brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and uncles and cousins and nephews and good people that people care about.
And that doesn't mean white people.
That means all kinds of people all over this country.
Good people are dying of this, and because they're getting it on the street.
That's why.
I don't know, given the laws in Texas, if you have actually ever been to an approved above-board legal marijuana dispensary.
Have you?
I bought weed at a store in San Diego.
The whole time I lived in L.A., I just had a guy because I didn't want to get a license and all that.
But then I went to San Diego a couple of years ago, and it was fully legal by then.
You could just go in a store and buy it.
Okay.
Well, if you go to any of these places, they're like a gleaming metropolis.
They're like a wonderland in there.
It's all packaged beautifully with all different varieties, and there are people who know everything there is to know, and they're all friendly.
They're like the people who wait on you at Chick-fil-A, like super sweet and friendly.
It is the opposite of what people are generally accustomed to.
So once that comes up, yeah, I know they have to pay taxes that your local guy doesn't, but jeez, man, look at their facility.
So you would not want to use the guy anymore once you have this amazing, extraordinary, super-duper shopping center available to you.
And you know, in California especially, and that kind of competition, just like with the prohibition, that kind of competition invites some real progress in the potency, which, you know, when you're talking about crack or something, that's dangerous, but when you're talking about weed, that's great for everyone.
So anyway.
Well, listen, the thing is, you and I get this point, but it's not, and I think it's obvious to people once you explain it to them, but you're not going to make progress on the police as long as you have this many victimless crime laws on the police.
You know what it is?
The libertarians, like you and me and Hornberger and whoever, we need to go on a, well, once they allow travel and interaction among humans again, we need to go on a tour and speak to black churches and find the most conservative black ministers that we can and show them the economics of drug prohibition and why it really would be better to change it from this to that and get, you know, real consensus built there.
Because it makes so much sense why people would just say, oh yeah, you want to take these most dangerous criminals in my neighborhood and give them even more leeway.
That's nuts.
But that's only kind of misunderstanding on the face of it.
I think if we really could get that point across real well about the economics of it and how, and just imagine knowing what you do know about the economics of it.
Imagine this society without a war on drugs.
Whereas Bill Hicks said 31 years ago that, hey, guess who helps addicts?
Former addicts, recovering addicts.
That's who helps addicts.
And everybody already knows that.
So if we have a drug czar, why isn't he a guy in recovery?
What the hell are we doing?
And just think if people had listened to him then and we'd had the last 30 years without this, how much better our society would be in so many unquantifiable ways, you know?
Yeah.
No, absolutely agree.
Well in the back of my ebook, there's a recommended resources list and one of them is a link to a video I did called the economics of the police state that I think people would, would benefit from.
And also the very last chapter is just a short piece by our mutual friend, James Riley, who wrote something that eventually appeared on the, on the Libertarian Institute site.
And he just basically went through maybe a half dozen basic things you could do even now, even without implementing every, you know, radical libertarian dream we might have.
He says, like for example, disarm all traffic patrol and restrict their interaction with the public to traffic citations and response to traffic calls.
And then he says, end patrol period.
He says, there's no evidence that just going around just randomly looking for people breaking the law does any good.
You could think that it might, but, but think about the analogy may not be perfect, but I always liked the example of Disney world, which is about 40 minutes from my door.
I've been there many times now with a place like that, the last thing that they want is for there to be some violent altercation.
But the, the second to last thing they want is guys walking around, you know, with machine guns strapped to them, right?
When you have little kids everywhere, that's the last thing they want.
So somehow they're keeping that place as safe as you can possibly imagine, but without being in your face and without feeling like they own you and they can bark orders at you.
So somehow they're making that work.
But then also things like no knock raids, uh, nonviolent crime investigations, um, you could just go on and on.
I mean, obviously we don't want any tanks and submarines.
That's that goes without saying, and believe it or not, some places do have those things, but there are things you can do.
And I do think also that Justin Amash is doing a good thing with that bill ending qualified immunity.
I think that is a good thing.
I think that's something everybody can agree on.
Ending that qualified immunity for people who don't understand.
Well, it's a little bit complicated because it's sort of like you can't go after a police officer like the prep.
You have to have some crazy precedent in each case for it to, I mean the, the real gist of it just in English is that it's a provision that basically every, um, uh, police union wants and that has been enshrined by the Supreme Court, which is why there kind of does need to be a federal response to the problem that just simply makes it much more difficult to hold the police accountable.
Uh, but you know, you and I are accountable for the things we do, but it just makes it much more difficult to get them into a court and find them guilty no matter how gross the abuse is.
Yeah.
So there are things right now that you could do.
You don't have to have competing defense agencies and a full Roth party in society.
But what I would favor though, as an interim measure would be, and maybe there's some reason Scott that this doesn't work and you can tell me, but why couldn't we say that a part of a city, even a neighborhood, but maybe a part of a city or a whole city could contract out to a security company and that company persists as the security provider as long as a majority are happy.
But if they're not happy, they lose the contract and that would at least introduce some level of competition into the picture.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder about that because the great Adam of Adam and Jennifer, uh, I was complaining that the word privatization means two completely different concepts.
One is the market taking care of it and the other is the government hiring a private business to carry out a government function.
These are entirely different things.
So maybe one should be spelled with a Z and one with an S I don't know.
And then Adam says, no, just contracting.
That's what it is.
Contracting.
Totally different than privatization is contracting.
And in many cases, a public private partnership like that ends up just being fascism.
It ends up being the worst incentives on both sides.
You have the police power and impunity of the state mixed with the profit motive of a private company who also gets to diffuse their responsibility onto the state as well and um, come with their own immunities in their contract and that kind of thing.
But yeah, and this is, this is the problem.
Very similar problem with so-called private prisons because if the government is still in charge of making all the laws and most of these laws are against things that aren't harming anybody, then the, you've got private, the, you have the private sector doing the dirty work of, of the state and it would be like privatizing the TSA, but still having the government in charge of dictating what the rules are.
Yeah.
In fact, Jeffrey Tucker told me that he had supported the privatization of the prisons back in the nineties because, Hey, what's more efficient than business and stuff.
And that he really regretted that, that he didn't really understand that this isn't libertarianism.
This is much more like the worst kind of conservatism.
This is not what we want.
Well, I still feel like there's gotta be a way that in a neighborhood there could just simply be an allowance for people to make their own arrangements.
Yeah.
You know what's funny?
I think we all reacted to that same way of that clip from CNN of the lady saying, well, somebody breaks my house in the middle of the night, who do I call?
And the girl goes, Oh, well you just have privilege where, and we all just laughed at that.
And I went back and watched that again.
And if you watch it carefully, what she actually says is, you know, a leftist version of something that I have actually said myself, which is what right does the rich side of town have to insist on having this County police force and city police force that they are essentially inflicting on the poor side of town who don't really have a say in the matter and consider them much more like an occupying army of really, you know, powerful bullies at least rather than their security force.
And so that was actually what she was trying to say was not that, Oh, it's your privilege to think that you deserve to have a security force at all, but it's been your privilege up to this time to consider your local County sheriffs to be nothing but your heroes when in fact they're really bad guys.
If you just traveled 10 miles east of here.
Yeah.
But honestly, Scott, it wouldn't have taken that much effort to say that, to say that she didn't articulate it very well, but then again, neither did I, but you know what I mean?
That's actually a real point though.
But to say, I understand there are people who look at the police and they think it's like a Lea, a Danny Griffith show and everybody's friendly and nice.
And maybe that is the experience you guys have had, but what we're here to say is that's not the universal experience.
And we want other people to feel as secure with the police as you feel with them.
That's fine.
But, but, but not having an answer to, and by the way, I asked Dale Brown that who runs the Detroit threat management center and his basic quick answer, and I know we're, we're low on time, but his quick answer was, look, the number of times that the police are going to be stopping an attack in progress is essentially zero.
That never, that happens on crime shows, he says, but television is distorting everybody's view of this.
That is not how it happens.
After the fact they show up and take some notes, but it's not like right now there's somebody who's coming to your house when you're being attacked.
That's just not how it works.
And the courts have ruled over and over and over again, they have no obligation to protect you.
Even if they're standing right there while you're being murdered, they don't have the obligation to intervene.
Right.
And that's been said numerous times, not just once, numerous times in the courts.
Man, I'm so sorry that we're out of time and I rambled too much when I should have been asking you more questions and stuff, but this has been great.
There's so much great stuff in here, including a great interview of Will Grigg, where he talks all about Waco and its role in, you know, kicking open the door for this kind of militarization and just so much great stuff.
I really hope people take a look at it.
It's called the problems with the police and how to fix them, a libertarian perspective.
And tell us again, the URLs, Tom.
Problems with police.com.
Or you could text the word brutality to 33444 if you're super sophisticated.
That's great.
Well, because you guys running your team are.
All right.
And of course, tomwoods.com for Tom Woods blogs and his great show and his email list and all those great things.
Thank you again, Tom.
Appreciate it, bud.
Thank you, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
