Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm happy to welcome Will Grigg back to the show.
He keeps the blog FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com Pro Libertate.
And he's also the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
He does a radio show.
And man, these articles are great.
You can read them at LewRockwell.com all the time as well.
The most recent is called Support Your Local Police State.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's always a pleasure to be with you.
I'm doing very well.
Well, good.
Thanks for joining us today.
This is good stuff here.
And now, what I'd like to do, I guess, is sort of let you go on and tell your tale as you tell it in this story, Support Your Local Police State, all about the evolution of professional government police, or I don't know, quote unquote, professional government police, in Western civilization over the last couple of hundred years here.
But also, I was hoping you could mix in a little bit of the tale you tell an article or two before that about the history of the grand jury.
And kind of as an example of the amount of power that the average Joe used to be able to exercise as compared to the way it is now, and how these things kind of go together to really change, I think, the character of not just America, but I guess all of Western civilization from what we thought it was to what it is now instead.
In historical terms, as I understand it, the existence of these paramilitary organizations called police is really something of a novelty.
You didn't have professional police in the United States for most of our history until about the second or third decade of the last century.
And in the broader scope of Anglo-Saxon history, and I'm indebted to Carl Wattner from The Voluntarist for a lot of what I've learned about the subject.
You mean the 19th, right?
Yeah, forgive me.
Yeah.
Well, actually, no.
The 20th century.
It's still the 20th century.
It feels like it kind of to me.
No, the 20th century.
Exactly.
You didn't really have municipal police departments until the mid-19th century in the major municipalities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and so forth.
And it wasn't until the later part of the 19th century that some of the smaller and mid-sized cities started to have municipal police departments.
State police departments didn't emerge for the most part until the early 20th century at the time when, as Frederick Jackson Turner said, the frontier was shut down and there was a consolidation phase rather than an expansion phase going on.
There were county sheriffs and sort of free-ranging marshals.
But the interesting thing about the 19th century scheme for what were called peace officers and law enforcement at the time is that none of these officials was considered to be invested with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
And that's the essence of the modern state.
That's, of course, Lenin's formula, power without limit resting directly on force.
Unfortunately, just about every state I'm aware of subscribes to that opinion, that perspective on power.
But in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, going all the way back to before William the Conqueror, you had the idea of a constabulary that would be based upon citizen involvement, posse or what you might call militias.
They weren't called militias at the time.
But after the Norman Conquest, there was a feudalist system that was put in place in which this kinship-based system for finding and arresting, detaining thieves and other malefactors and citizen-based courts for adjudicating these disputes and trying to bring about restitution, which was the objective of the system.
That was replaced with the idea of the king's peace, in which if you had private arrangements for restitution and redress of grievances, somehow the king, who supposedly embodied this system, was being denied his proper cut of whatever restitution was arranged.
So if, for instance, you arranged for somebody to pay back the livestock he had stolen with some kind of a punitive fine to compensate those who had been involved in retrieving that property, if you didn't cut the king's shiree, or what were eventually called sheriffs, in for some part of that deal, then you were stealing from the king by taking care of your business privately.
That's sort of where that idea comes from, according to Carl Wadner's analysis, which I find compelling.
Way back in the tenebrous mists of pre-runnymead antiquity in the Anglo-Saxon culture, there were these citizen juries that evolved into the grand jury, and of course, from grand juries eventually had pettit juries, or petty juries.
And Roger Ritz has done a lot of research on this subject, and he's somebody who's a credentialed, conventional legal scholar and attorney who's taken a perspective on this subject that I find quite provocative, because he points out that the whole purpose of having juries in the first place was not to do the will of the government, but rather for citizens to take care of their business.
Once again, that's the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon tradition that Carl Wadner talked about, but also to have a standing body of citizens who would hold government officials accountable.
And that was the idea of the grand jury from which our American understanding of the institution is found in the Constitution of the United States comes.
And it was understood until very recently, we're talking the early 1940s, that a rogue quote-unquote grand jury or runaway grand jury was the only one worthwhile, that you would have these freestanding bodies that would be giving instructions to prosecutors rather than being tools to prosecutors.
That was done away with because of the centralization of the system that happened during the New Deal.
I compare it in my piece on so-called rogue grand juries to Gleichschaltung or synchronization that took place in National Socialist Germany in the 1930s when they were going through their New Deal, which of course was taking place under the reign of Mr. Hitler, where you had these formerly independent states that were consolidated into this unitary apparatus that was presided over by a totalitarian party.
We know how that turned out.
But here in the United States as well, you have the federal rules of criminal procedure being run by a committee that was completely unaccountable to anybody with any kind of representation on the part of the public.
They created this model statute and the federal rules of criminal procedure.
And one of the things that happened is that they imposed what was called Rule 6, which essentially gelded the grand jury, put it on a leash, put it in a pen, and made it into a tool of the district attorney or whatever prosecutor had summoned it.
So now, rather than providing an indictment or what the Constitution, the Bill of Rights calls a presentment, which is an instruction to a prosecutor that he needs to investigate or prosecute, rather, a given criminal accusation, and this could be a broad indictment having to do with institutional government corruption, there were whole police departments, these embryonic police departments in the early 19th century and municipal governments that were being investigated by grand juries and being taken down by citizen grand juries that were recognized as legitimate institutions in places I believe like Minnesota and a couple of other places that started in the early 20th century.
Rather than doing that now, because of the federal rules of criminal procedure, these grand juries have become instruments of the prosecution.
So the way that it works is that the prosecution now runs the entire justice system rather than citizens trying to work out redress for grievances having to do with actual offenses against persons and property.
And law enforcement has become a state-run monopoly that is completely unaccountable to the people.
That's a revolution, if you will, a revolution within the form that occurred within about a 60 or 70 year stretch here in the United States.
And the other thing that has happened, we've talked a lot about this, Scott, just since the early 1970s really, is the militarization of this law enforcement system as a result of Nixon's War on Drugs, primarily, which interestingly enough has its roots in a 1961 United Nations document that inaugurated this worldwide push for a drug-free world as if that's actually going to happen.
That started in 1961.
The War on Drugs here in the United States really found traction in 1971 for reasons of cynical political calculation on the part of Richard Nixon.
And then about 15 years later, the War on Drugs was escalated to include the widespread use of asset forfeiture, which is highway robbery, given a more dignified title.
And that's where these supposedly local police departments have become engines, self-sustaining engines, basically able to absorb anything in the given territorial, geographic territory that they're assigned to that's considered to have a nexus to drug trafficking.
Here in Payette County, Idaho, this is a thinly populated county in rural Idaho.
The officer of the year last year was the guy who brought in the biggest haul in asset forfeiture.
The guy who had the greatest number of traffic stops was able to seize the most money.
That's pretty standard for most of the country, unfortunately.
All right, well, we're going to have to hold it right there and hear the music playing.
Got to take this break, but we'll be right back, everybody, with the great Will Grigg.
He really is the best American chronicler of our descent into total police state, if you ask me.
FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
Liberty and Eclipse is for sale at your favorite bookseller website, too.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com.
And we're talking about the rise of the history of the government police forces in this country and the difference, really, between our birthright and what we got.
And that is, as you said, well, as Bill on King of the Hill said, I've served on a jury three times and I did my duty all three times.
Conviction.
That's what the jury is for.
That's what the grand jury is for, is to be basically the public relations for the local persecutors to make it look like, gee, even the panel of citizens agreed that this trial needs to take place.
Yeah, that's unfortunately the perception that most people have of what the duty of a jury is.
The duty of the jury is to make the state prove its case, under the current premise, anyway.
Originally, the duty of the jury was just to find out if somebody was guilty of some kind of an offense against person and property, and that wasn't purely stated a government function.
It's been captured.
That's how Roger Ritz puts it, the grand jury and the jury system in general has been captured by the government.
The same thing has happened, really, with the function of providing security.
We used to have peace officers, and long before we had police or sheriffs in the modern conception or a constabulary in the modern perception, we had peace officers.
Peace officers in 18th century England were unarmed and unsalaried.
They were night watchmen.
They were the equivalent of the much derided mall cops, who might, for the most part, considered to be several steps up the social ladder from the armed forces of the state, because mall cops are actually trying to protect commerce.
They're actually looking out after person and property.
Paul Blart is a far more admirable model, I think, of what a security officer should be than your typical police officer, because he's actually protecting people who are engaging in commerce.
That's not the role of the police.
There are probably a half dozen or more significant Supreme Court precedents which state explicitly that the police do not have an enforceable responsibility, either legal or civil, to come to the aid of an individual suffering some kind of aggressive violence.
That's not their job function.
Their job description is to uphold the government's order.
They are law enforcers.
They're not peace officers.
They're not there to interpose on behalf of the innocent who are being preyed upon by people who are acting with aggressive intent.
In frontier America, when you had sheriffs, for the most part, in places like Idaho in the territorial phase and early statehood phase, they had to rely on citizen posses to go out and round up people who were accused of crimes.
Unfortunately, you had sheriffs like I mentioned here in Ada County, David Updike and the notorious Henry Plummer, who fled from Lewiston over to Bannock in Montana, who were running what we would now call highway robbery rings.
They were called road agents.
They were highway robbers and horse thieves.
They were exercising the supposed authority of the sheriff while they were doing this.
What happened is that the citizens got together.
William McConnell, a future governor of Idaho who lived in Payette County, put together a committee of vigilance and went out and arrested the sheriff.
They let him go, and Updike reverted to his ways a year later.
William McConnell and his posse tracked him down and put him on trial and then hanged him.
That's the sort of thing that represents an extreme version, admittedly, of what should be a more liberty-friendly approach, an agorist approach, if you will, to providing security where you do not have a government monopoly on the supposed legitimate use of force.
That didn't exist, once again, until we had the militarization and professionalization of law enforcement in this country.
In mid-18th century England, it was a matter of some controversy that there were proposals being made for the creation of a professional police force, and they imported this from their imperial outpost in Ireland.
Robert Peel had been the military governor of Ireland in the late 1790s, and he had a bright idea.
Why don't we take this paramilitary occupation force that we've been field-testing in Ireland and import it to England for the purpose of social order?
The conservatives in Parliament went ballistic over this because they understood that that was a break with their Anglo-Saxon tradition and a dreadful innovation.
A couple of decades later, after the Equivalent of the Patriot Act went into place in occupied Ireland, habeas corpus was suspended, and collective punishment became a policy, they brought up this cadre of specially trained paramilitary police, and they were used as the model in 1829 when Peel, as Home Secretary now of England, decided that England needed his own police force.
Once again, the pushback came from the traditionalists in England, including a wonderful parliamentarian by the name of William Cobbett, who spent time in jail for violating criminal sedition laws by criticizing government corruption.
He pointed out that the blue locusts, as he referred to the metropolitan police, were just like the redcoats.
The biggest difference was that the redcoats were used for prosecuting war abroad, and the blue locusts were used for prosecuting war at home in England.
And that, unfortunately, was the model that was imported in 1844-1845 by the NYPD, and that began to proliferate from there.
And there were people in England, once again, who were unassailably conservative, but you're talking about Edmund Burke in the 1750s, or William Cobbett in the early 19th century, who understood that once the government assumes this monopoly power, and has this armed auxiliary in domestic affairs, that things will only get worse from there.
Okay, but here's the thing, Will.
Long time ago, horse and buggy, and a lot more people now, and, you know, Red Herring and Straw Man, and those kinds of things, and then, also, we need, at the end, to have time to get to where we are now with this thing, as portrayed on your blog, the crackdowns on these Occupy Wall Street protests, etc.
But first of all, I mean, really, it sounds like, I'm kind of making fun of people, but, I mean, you know, it's pretty easy to imagine that the average reaction to the kind of thing you're saying, you're kind of proposing here, that the people ought to really have a check and a balance from the bottom up, by way of, you know, prosecutorial power, you know, real checks and balances means chaos, and anarchy, and sadness, and pain, and probably things on fire, and who knows what might happen, if there were really checks and balances.
Yeah.
All the Ghostbusters scenario boards out here, where we suddenly have a tape of Marshmallow Men trampling down things on the street.
Look, chaos and anarchy, as you well know, aren't the same thing.
Anarchy means that you don't have a ruler, but you don't, under an anarchic system, have an absence of the rule of law.
There was the rule of law long before the feudalist system was inflicted on the Anglo-Saxons.
There was rule of law in anarcho-capitalist America in the western frontier in the 19th century, long before we had the regimentation that occurred.
And in the United States, it occurred as well, because of imperial politics.
Alfred W. McCoy's book, Policing America's Empire, shows how the Philippines served a similar purpose as a test laboratory that Ireland served for Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The same thing happened with the Philippines in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
So here we are now with a crackdown on Occupy Wall Street.
Take a look at the way the enforcers are garbed.
Take a look at the techniques they use.
We're living in what is essentially a prison society.
That's the conclusion of a sociologist by the name of Patrick Giltham from the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, ironically enough.
He talks about the fact that the current model for dealing with street protests is based on what he calls the new penology philosophy, where you're using the type of control techniques that you use in prisons.
Right.
The rapid reaction team, like down in Guantanamo Bay, where six guys rush the cell.
That's exactly where it's going.
The immediate reaction team, the IRT, they're dressed the same way.
They wear the same visor helmets, the same black abiliments, the same reinforced body armor.
They carry billy clubs.
They carry pepper spray.
And they create these little thug swarms, where they first incapacitate somebody with the use of a baton of pepper spray, and then they swarm the person and subdue him.
That's exactly what we're seeing on the streets with respect to this reaction to the OWS protests, which are, by and large, spectacularly peaceful undertakings.
Well, this is really a new kind of invention.
I mean, we've had professional police forces in America for a long, long time, but at least on TV when I was a kid, their job was to protect people's rights, the suspect even, the bad guy.
They're, you know, presumably there to protect them, and they're supposed to use the minimal amount of force in any given case in order to apprehend that suspect and begin protecting their rights.
We're no longer talking about suspects, we're talking about people as, once again, this paper by Patrick Gilliam points out, Securitizing America is the name of the paper.
The model here is to deal with disruptive elements, not criminal suspects, the same way that prison guards deal with disruptive elements.
And the IRT and Gitmo, of course, was deployed to deal with people who displayed so much as tremor of unauthorized individual initiative or disrespect for the institution.
And they had carte blanche, basically, to inflict non-lethal, and often, as you pointed out and you've documented in your program, often lethal summary punishment for people who are seen as misbehaving.
I mean, what's going on with the police reaction to OWS is the Gitmo-ization of American security policy in general.
This is something, once again, in this paper, that you can trace back before 9-11, you can go back to 1999-2000 with mass protests as sort of the genesis of this dreadful innovation.
And the Miami model in 2003 at the FDA protest was sort of the grand debut for this.
We saw the same thing in Pittsburgh in 2009.
And now it's just becoming the standard model for dealing with any kind of public demonstration, where you have summary attack with chemical agents or with batons or less quote-unquote lethal rounds, such as rubber and wooden bullets and beanbag rounds that can be perfectly lethal, of course, not because people are posing a threat to personal property, not because they're suspected of actually creating crimes, but to enforce order.
And that, of course, is the garrison state mentality that one associates with the prison society rather than with what used to be a nominally free constitutional republic.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if anybody ever proved this, but at least it was suspected that Homeland Security had arranged all the different mayors cracking down at the same time, that kind of thing.
It won't be long at all before it's just known as the National Police, right?
Yeah, well, in form and function, they're a nationalized police force already.
But each of these nominally local police agencies really has been trained and equipped and subsidized by the general government, and they've been turned into von Neumann machines.
That's a science fiction concept of a machine that will make use of the local environment and devour everything in its course to replicate itself.
And that's how the war on drugs operates, with the asset forfeiture programs.
You let these people loose, give them license to go out and steal everything within a geographic region in the name of the war on drugs, they're no longer accountable to the taxpayers.
Whether or not they're actually under central control from Washington, they've been given license from Washington to subsist through violence and extortion and highway robbery, and so it doesn't really matter what the local people say in terms of whether they're going to vote in appropriation or withhold funds through their municipal governments.
And most of these municipal governments, of course, are perfectly willing to let police departments do more or less what they think they want, because they're tax gatherers for the local political cast.
So when you're talking about supporting your local police in opposition to the effort to nationalize the police, the problem is you're dealing with one undifferentiated political cast.
It's just you're dealing with the 3,000 tyrants who are one mile away, rather than the single tyrant who's 3,000 miles away.
Well, Bajov, I think you've found the Powell Doctrine.
I wondered what happened with it when the neocons took over and took over Afghanistan and Iraq, but here it is, overwhelming force in all cases.
You whoop them so bad, they don't even have a day to resist, shocking all the way through.
Yep, that's from a 2001 essay in Police Chief Magazine by a fellow named Leach, appropriately enough, who had been a SWAT commander in Chicago way back in 1991, and he was training his SWAT team to deal with potential terrorist reprisals from the first Iraq war.
The idea that there would be these Iraqi agents of influence would be attacking shopping malls and so forth.
Basically, he's talking about the Golden Globus vision of counterterrorism from the terrible Chuck Norris films of the 1980s.
But he ended up migrating to northern Idaho and teaching SWAT team tactics in my fair gem state here, which is why I took particular offense over the idea that you would have, as the operative doctrine of police departments in this country, the PAL doctrine, which is the Military Doctrine of Overwhelming Force, and the conspicuous presence of people who are equipped to carry out overwhelming force by way of deterring people from resisting.
They're not talking about protecting life, liberty, and property, but they're talking about intimidating the rest of us into silence.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we're already way over time.
I thank you very much for your time, Will, as always.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
That's the great William Norman Grigg.
His blog is called ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The latest piece probably is running at Lou Rockwell, I'm just guessing, or already did.
Support your local police state.
Great stuff.
We'll be right back after this.
