Okay, welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, filling in for the real host, Scott Horton.
And I can't even begin to tell you how pleased I am to welcome our next guest, Mr. William Norman Grigg.
Mr. William Norman Grigg writes for the Republic Magazine and is the author of Liberty in Eclipse.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Welcome to the show, Mr. Grigg.
Zoe, you're very kind.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Oh, no problem.
And at the risk of sounding like I'm blowing smoke, I just want to say that I cherish your judicious diction, your sagacious use of words.
You're one of my favorite writers that they link to on lewrockwell.com.
Again, you're extravagantly kind.
Thank you so much.
Well, I mean it.
So anyway, let's talk about your latest article that they're linking to on antiwar.com.
The Resistance Rises, Restoring the Castle Doctrine.
Now, I know better, Will Grigg, but maybe someone in the audience doesn't.
Maybe someone in the audience is thinking moats and broadswords and dragons when they hear the word castle doctrine.
Why don't you set them straight?
Castle doctrine is an expression that we've inherited from the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and from the Anglo-Saxon heritage of common law.
And it refers to the centuries-old recognition of the innate right of a property owner to treat his home and its appurtenances as if they were a castle.
He is sovereign over that realm and that in any interaction involving a representative of the king or a representative of the state, however constituted, the homeowner is the sovereign and the state representative is the supplicant.
And in the American tradition, the only exceptions here to that principle, actually it's not an exception to the principle, it's an application thereof, involve the issuance of a warrant or the existence of probable cause, particularly exigent circumstances.
This is all summarized, of course, in the familiar cliche that a man's home is his castle.
Unfortunately, the castle doctrine has been an eclipse for many decades, if not longer.
And most recently, a little less than a year ago in the state of Indiana, there was a perfectly abhorrent decision by the state supreme court involving a patently unconstitutional invasion by police into a home in which the homeowner ordered the police to leave, which of course is a lawful order.
He's the sovereign, they're the supplicant, they have to retreat if there are no exigent circumstances, and there weren't, and if there's not a lawful warrant.
They refused to obey that lawful order, so he enforced it by trying to shove them out of the home.
He was found guilty of the non-crime, it's considered a violation of the statute, but once again in the common law, resisting or obstructing a police officer is not a crime, it's the exercise of one's right.
And on appeal to the state supreme court, they held that in what is described as an altercation with police involving unlawful entry by the police officer, that the unlawful entry does not justify resistance by the citizen.
And about 71 members of the Indiana state legislature, much to their credit, petitioned the court to review that case and to overturn its holding because they understood that this essentially nullified the fourth amendment and the cognate provision of the state constitution of Indiana.
And the state supreme court refused to do so, but they made note of the fact that this is a statutory matter and that the state of Indiana could, in effect, overturn that ruling by enacting a statute explicitly recognizing and reifying the Castle Doctrine.
So that's what's going on right now with SB1, Senate Bill 1 in the Indiana legislature.
And naturally, of course, this has the police unions in a lather because in the words of one legislature who's a member of the police union, a former police officer, a woman by the name of Linda Lawson, if the Castle Doctrine is reiterated through the statute, it would constitute what she calls open season on law enforcement.
That, of course, is another serviceable and familiar cliche, but when used in this context, it's very telling because what she is saying is that your home is part of the natural habitat of police officers.
In other words, you don't have any property or effects or a buffer zone, if you will, that belongs to you, that at any time of their choosing, those who are wearing the habiliments of the state's coercive priesthood can intrude upon your property and do what they please to do to you, and you have no right to resist.
As a matter of fact, that's a phrase that has popped up on more than a few occasions in the course of this debate, and it falls from the lips of police union officials saying that there is never an appropriate circumstance in which a citizen can resist police.
That assumes, of course, that anything that a police officer does is self-evidently correct or at least self-ratifying in terms of legal matters.
Whatever a police officer sees fit to do is lawful by that definition.
The other group that's opposing this is what I refer to as the rent-seekers in the domestic violence industry.
Of course, this takes in people in the helping professions, as they rightly style themselves, social workers, feminists, academics, and so forth, who insist that under the Castle Doctrine, an incident involving domestic abuse would not be subject to police intervention.
A woman could be beaten or raped or otherwise abused by an offender, by a violent offender, and a police officer under the Castle Doctrine wouldn't have the ability to intervene on behalf of the victim, which, of course, is patent nonsense.
Well, of course that's nonsense.
Why don't you explain exactly how that's nonsense, Will Grigg?
That's nonsense because that's a case in which there is probable cause and there are exigent circumstances that would fall under the long-recognized constitutional principle here that a peace officer, which is what we should have, we shouldn't have law enforcers, we should have peace officers.
I agree.
People who protect life, liberty, and property and who are not enforcing the edicts of the political class.
People of the former description of peace officers, people of the latter description of law enforcers, law enforcers belong entirely in the realm of pure statism, and peace officers can exist in a free society, at least in principle.
But under the well-recognized and long-existing constitutional principles governing the protection of privacy through the Fourth Amendment, there's a recognition of the fact that a peace officer can intervene in order to protect somebody who's on the receiving end of aggressive violence.
And the thing that I find staggeringly perverse about that argument is the fact that police officers, taken as a whole, I don't mean to say that every police officer meets this description, obviously, but taken as a subpopulation, police officers are more likely to be those who commit domestic abuse than people who are not part of that profession.
They have a higher rate of domestic abuse, domestic violence, when taken as a subpopulation.
And so you're granting that subpopulation a qualified license here to invade the homes of people who may or may not be involved in situations of that kind.
And there are two instances I cite, specific examples in recent history in Indiana, Danville, Indiana, which is a very troubled police department, involving police officers who have committed aggressive violence in the form of domestic abuse.
And in one instance, simply a strong-arm invasion of a home to beat the paramour of the estranged wife of an assistant chief of police in Danville.
They've done so in the serene confidence that they're not going to face significant consequences, I believe, because they understand that they've been granted a plenary license to invade people's homes.
And that would include the homes of disaffected spouses or former spouses, or the homes of boyfriends of disaffected spouses or soon-to-be ex-spouses.
And both of these individuals are still on the payroll of the Danville Police Department, despite of the fact that they're domestic abusers.
One of them is plainly psychotic.
Well, that's reprehensible, of course.
And we do have a break coming up in a couple of minutes.
I don't want to ask you a complicated question and then the music starts playing.
But you mentioned that the Castle Doctrine has been under constant, steady decline.
I'm curious about the history of the Castle Doctrine and specifically the history of the decline of it.
I'm guessing that it has something to do with the federal training and the federal funding that happened in the 1990s and then exploded with the Department of Homeland Security in the 2000s.
What do you think, Will Grigg?
That definitely, I think, is a strong correlation.
And I would say that the real assault began in this instance, as in some of the others, when the Nix administration declared war on drug use for reasons of cynical political advantage about 40 years ago.
Suddenly, exigent circumstances consisted of the fear on the part of the police officer that unless they kicked down the door without a warrant, if they didn't avoid announcing themselves, as required under previously existing protocols, that the evidence of illicit drug use would disappear down the toilet.
And that, of course, is the nature of prohibition.
That's one really good example of how enforcing prohibition has undermined the Fourth Amendment and the Castle Doctrine.
Well, here's the music, just like I was afraid of.
Hopefully we can follow up on this point on the other side of the break with the great Will Grigg here on Anti-War Radio.
OK, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and we're talking with one of my favorites, William Norman Grigg.
Before we were interrupted by the break, I asked Will about the history of the decline of the Castle Doctrine.
And, Will, you mentioned that you say it started some 40 years ago with Nixon and the war on drugs, where all of a sudden every circumstance became a, what was it, an exigent circumstance?
Is that what you're saying?
Sure.
Every time you have police involved in some kind of a drug enforcement raid, they're dealing with perishable evidence.
And that's the nature of prohibition.
Of course, during alcohol prohibition that vaunted a noble experiment of about a century ago, you had similar things taking place, it's just technologically the state of law enforcement was substantially more primitive than it was in the 1970s, 80s, or today.
But whenever you're dealing here with an effort to prohibit consumption of a substance that can end up being disposed of in any of a number of ways, then obviously securing the evidence is time-sensitive.
And if you have a situation where the police are required to knock and announce and deliver an authentic warrant issued by an independent judge, then the evidence is likely to be disposed of.
And that is part of the nature of the beast.
It's, of course, an exercise in futility.
Trying to use law enforcement to arrest or reverse drug consumption is like taking a thimble to the ocean, but that doesn't stop them.
In the meanwhile, of course, you've got all these multifarious exceptions carved out of what remains the Bill of Rights, not only with respect to the Castle Doctrine and the Fourth Amendment, but also with respect to such indispensable principles as posse comitatus, which is dead letter now that you have a literal war being waged within the borders of the United States in the interest of drug prohibition.
Or, of course, today this has been melded into the so-called War on Terror, but this is quite literally a war.
And the way that police operations are carried out in the name of drug enforcement partakes of a military sensibility.
There's always this emphasis, for instance, on force protection or the domestic equivalent, which is officer safety.
That's the paramount consideration.
That's why you have SWAT teams conducting midnight raids or dawn raids here in the United States, using rules of engagement that are perhaps a little more emancipated than those governing special forces teams conducting very similar night raids in places like Afghanistan.
From what I understand, many of the SWAT raids that take place every day in this country are conducted by people with military training, usually military background or training provided by Delta Force or other commandos, other military operators who train local law enforcement teams.
When did all that start, Will Grigg?
When did it go from Andy Griffith talking Otis the Drunk into coming into the jail to now we have ninjas, SWAT teams everywhere?
What happened?
Well, SWAT teams themselves are a very dire innovation.
And we have our good friend Daryl Gates, the late and lamented, I guess, in some circles, Daryl Gates, who created the first SWAT team back in 1968.
And he also created the DARE program, the so-called Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program.
That operates a little bit like the Young Pioneers in communist Cuba or someplace of that kind.
Daryl Gates, when he created the SWAT team back in 1968, used the pretext of the rationale of fear over urban insurrectionary violence.
The first time they were used was, I believe, in Compton.
Not in Compton.
They were used in California someplace in and around Los Angeles against a group of Black Panthers.
And this all, as in so many other cases of this kind, arose out of a situation where a police officer was pushing things a little bit too hard for the circumstances.
You were dealing with a noise complaint, and this gave a police officer an opportunity to get in the grill of a gangbanger.
Back in the 1960s, of course, the Black Panthers were considered to be some kind of a Maoist insurrectionary movement.
They might have been.
Many of their operations were, I think, in some sense at least in principle justified by concerns over police violence.
But there were agendas and criminal activities going on.
Not a particularly pleasant group of people, but we weren't dealing with the fifth column that was going to take over the country.
But this particular instance involved a police officer who was dealing with a noise complaint, and it escalated from there.
And soon the SWAT teams were called in, the inaugural SWAT team.
This is a 1968 remembrance, so they didn't arrive in a Bearcat.
They weren't wearing body armor, but they did have snipers.
They had to send a message to the White House to ask for permission to use a rocket launcher provided by a Marine base.
They actually had to get presidential permission to use one.
And thankfully, the standoff was resolved before resorting to weaponry of that caliber.
But that happened in 1968, and within two or three years, you had SWAT teams beginning to blossom in just about every major municipal police department.
And by now, I'm living in a very small community in Idaho, a town of about 7,000 people called Payette.
Payette is just across the river from Ontario, Oregon, which is a town slightly larger.
Payette and Ontario were part of a multi-jurisdictional narcotics enforcement team called the High Desert Enforcement Team.
They have a SWAT team, and I've actually had personal encounters with a SWAT team when I've gone to the park to exercise, and they've been conducting maneuvers.
Most of what they do consists of armed horticulture.
They're sent out into the hinterlands in Central Treasure Valley or in Oregon, in the vast wasteland of Malheur County, looking for marijuana grows, which they dispose of.
That's, for the most part, what they're involved in.
But there's always, of course, the fact that they are looking to do something.
They are the proverbial idle hands of the devil's workshop.
If you have a SWAT team, a use will be found for them, whether you're talking about delivering routine warrants, which is a very common use for SWAT teams, or conducting some kind of enforcement operations where you're not dealing with a barricaded gunman or a hostage situation or a bank robbery, which, of course, were the scenarios that Daryl Gates talked about in 1968 to justify this dreadful invasion.
SWAT teams are military teams.
They're not paramilitary.
They're flat-out military.
They're clothed like military personnel.
They use military tactics, and they approach targeted suspects, not as suspects, but as enemy combatants.
And that attitude leeches into everything that contemporary law enforcement does.
Sounds like a standing army to me, Will Grigg.
Well, the police have always been a standing army, unlike sheriff's departments, which, in the American tradition, unlike the Anglo-American tradition, the Anglo part of the Anglo-American tradition, sheriffs were supposed to be elected representatives who were subject to recall by the local population.
Police departments, on the other hand, grew out of Robert Peel's model of using the Irish Occupation Force as a standing body for law enforcement, law and order, public order in England.
And, unfortunately, the United States imported that model in the mid-19th century, and instantly police departments became the enforcement arm of Tammany Hall and other corrupt municipal political machines.
And they've been domesticated somewhat, and at various times there's been an ebb and flow of institutional corruption, but in terms of their origins and their purposes, police departments have never been compatible with the constitutional scheme of locally accountable, peace officer-based police work.
Here in Idaho, back when we were a truly civilized place in our territorial era, we didn't have law enforcement.
We had vigilantes, and the vigilantes had gotten a bum rap.
I don't, of course, subscribe to the idea of vigilante violence or mob violence of any kind, but the vigilance committees were essentially citizens' juries that were convened for the purpose of trying people for actual offenses against persons or property, and in most instances the sanctions that they imposed involved banishment rather than imprisonment because they didn't want to be maintaining prisons.
Unfortunately, Idaho, having been civilized under our anarcho-capitalist period, became politicized, and so we ended up with all the apparatus of law enforcement.
William McConnell, who was a Payette County resident back in the late 19th century, was the head of the Payette Vigilantes.
They actually arrested a thoroughly corrupt sheriff from Ada County and put him on trial, and he was allowed to leave.
He was running a highway robbery ring, a stagecoach robbery ring, and after he reverted to his old ways, William McConnell put together a posse, went off after the sheriff arrested him, put him on trial, and he ended up being hung by his neck until he was dead.
That was when McConnell was a vigilante.
Unfortunately, he decided to go into institutionalized crime.
He went on to become a governor and a senator.
But back in the halcyon days of Idaho's territorial era, we didn't have police departments.
There were sheriffs, and occasionally when the sheriffs got corrupt, the sovereign people rose up to put things right.
Now, I don't, once again, want to endorse the idea of aggressive violence against anybody, but the problem here is that when police can violate the Castle Doctrine, they're claiming an unqualified license to commit aggression, just as military forces in the service of the empire do abroad.
They're also claiming an indivisible claim of impunity, which is to say there's never a circumstance in which they can be held liable, civilly or criminally or professionally, for anything they do in the course of an aggressive enforcement action or the invasion of a person's home that is not justified by the law or by the statute or by the Constitution.
And we've seen pushback in Indiana.
I hope the Castle Doctrine bill in Indiana passes.
In Minnesota, there was a very similar measure that was passed by the legislature and vetoed by the governor under pressure from the police officers' union.
But hopefully, once again, these are straws in the wind of what's going to become a hurricane force outburst of outrage on the part of the American public.
Can I keep you for one more segment, please, Will?
I've got so many questions.
Is that okay?
That would be fine.
Oh, you're so good.
Thank you very much.
We're going to continue with Will Grigg on the other side of this break, Anti-War Radio.
Okay, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif.
And thanks again to Will Grigg for staying over that long break and having another segment with us on the show.
Will was just talking about what we've been discussing, the decline of the Castle Doctrine, the rise of the police state, Daryl Gates' odious contributions, federal intervention and whatnot.
And you were last saying that you hope this SB1 in Indiana passes, and I certainly do, too.
It would be a wonderful development, and I think that it would be a tonic for the country, because there are a number of states where Castle Doctrine laws have been enacted.
I believe Michigan and Pennsylvania have both enacted Castle Doctrine laws, but neither of them expressly recognized that the primary threat that has to be addressed here is the threat of armed incursions by state agents, meaning, of course, police officers for the most part.
The Castle Doctrine, as promoted by the National Rifle Association and some other gun rights organizations, talks about the fact that you don't have the duty to retreat if you're confronted in your home by an armed intruder, by somebody who's conducting a home invasion, a burglar, a potential rapist.
You don't have the duty to retreat and call the police, which means, of course, that you would find yourself either dead or otherwise victimized.
What are you going to retreat to in your own home?
Exactly.
You can't retreat.
You've got your back up against your wall.
You have the right to fight back using purely defensive violence justified by the threat to your own life.
That's the Castle Doctrine in a nutshell.
Some states, I believe Pennsylvania might fit this category, have expanded this to include instances outside the home, if you're in your car or if you're in a public conveyance or in a public location.
You don't have the duty to retreat if you are facing the immediate threat of violence upon your person.
The thing is, only in Indiana and Minnesota, to the best of my knowledge, I'm going to look into this a little bit more deeply and hopefully there are other examples.
I certainly hope that they're out there.
Only those two states have placed the Castle Doctrine in its proper historical context, which recognizes that the most dangerous threat posed to innocent people is that embodied in an armed official who's the emissary of a state that claims a monopoly on the use of force.
And that concept of the monopoly on force is something that is directly undermined by that application of the Castle Doctrine.
For heaven's sake, it's undermined by the very existence of the Second Amendment, which, whatever one thinks about the wisdom of personal gun ownership, embodies the idea, articulates the idea, that government does not have a monopoly on the use of armed force for defensive purposes.
And that's what sets really the constitutional concept of the American Republic, however flawed it might be, apart from just about every other political system in history, is that this system was created by people who did not seek to create a government monopoly on the use of force.
It's completely contradictory to the 20th century post-Lenin doctrine that governments have to exercise power without limit, unrestrained by laws.
The standard political science definition of government begins with Lenin's definition of what government should be.
And in the decision in the state of Indiana, the Barnes decision, you had this recognition by the state Supreme Court that contemporary Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, contemporary Fourth Amendment policy, is based on the idea that the idea of an innate right to defend oneself against state violence is somehow an archaism, that we've moved beyond that.
That's something which has been revised out of existence because of policy preferences.
The same thing occurs when you're looking at rulings and legislative initiatives with respect to recognition of the right to resist unlawful arrest.
I've written about that subject before, and there's a whole string of legal precedents going back from the Bad Elk decision versus U.S. in 1900 in the Supreme Court, which recognized that a police officer who is using force and trying to effect an arrest without legal justification is a kidnapper and can be dealt with as such by a citizen, up to and including the use of legal force.
There is another case of John DeRee in the 1940s, I think 1947, that recognized that.
So that's existing Supreme Court jurisprudence on that subject.
But going back to the British courts in the late 1600s and early 1700s, it was recognized that the right to resist unlawful arrest by constables or other government officials was protected by the Magna Carta and that bystanders actually had the authority and perhaps the moral duty to come to the aid of somebody who was subject to unlawful arrest.
And since the 1960s, actually since I believe the model statute, the uniform model criminal statute was emitted in the 1950s by one of these anonymous synods of experts, it's just been assumed that we have to move away from that by way of policy preference without recognizing, of course, that by doing so you're saying that there is no situation in which an individual has rights that a police officer has to respect.
If you simply have to submit to criminal aggressive violence by somebody in a government-issued costume, you don't have any rights.
It's that simple.
And so I'm glad to see there's a rebellion, a very rational and peaceful rebellion working through legislatures primarily on behalf of the Castle Doctrine.
And hopefully there are going to be a few states that are going to reexamine the whole question of the right to resist unlawful arrest.
There's a measure – actually two measures before the New Hampshire legislature this year dealing with that.
And I'm glad to see that.
I'm trying to promote something akin to that here in the state of Idaho.
Well, good luck to you, Will Gregg.
I hope it succeeds.
I do too.
I've actually written a model statute in – posted that model statute a couple of places and put it in the hands of state legislators here.
So hopefully somebody's going to pick this up and run with it.
I certainly hope so.
I've got two other questions I'd really like to ask you.
We may not be able to get to both of them, so let me just ask them both and you can answer whichever one or ones that you want to.
First is how dangerous specifically, statistically is police work versus other professions like truck driving and crab fishing and whatnot?
And the second one is where is PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the blood throwers on the fur coat wearers?
Where are they with regard to cops murdering people's dogs as a matter of habit?
When they enter homes on these raids and these other activities?
So those are my two questions, Will Gregg, that I've always wanted to ask you.
I appreciate that.
And the second question, of course, is a very good one that should be posed to a representative of PETA.
I've wondered the same thing.
And that's a military tactic.
Once again, that's something that is begotten by the paramilitary or actually the military training that SWAT teams and police officers receive now.
You have to neutralize any potential threat in the interest of force protection or officer safety.
And so I would like to see PETA make that an issue, but I'm not going to wait with bated breath for that to happen.
I mean, dogs bark, Will, when armed guys with their adrenaline flowing and guns drawn break in.
Dogs bark.
Dogs bark.
That's what happens.
Dogs bark and children scream.
I mean, if you're going to deal with the use of lethal force, the latter would be justified on the same construction.
With respect to the relative danger of police work, this is something that statistically changes within a very narrow range of variation from year to year.
But to the best of my knowledge, it's not currently among the top ten most dangerous occupations.
The first four or five on that list, as calibrated by federal agencies looking to the question of workforce safety, would be logging and farming and truck driving.
And then commercial aviation or private aviation would also be on that list.
People who are involved in that by way of profession face much more acute danger than police officers.
The leading cause of death on duty for police officers is traffic accidents, if I remember correctly.
Work-related mortality for police officers has more to do with the sedentary nature of the occupation and the bad diet that many people have written about.
Of course, the standard trope is that you're dealing with people who are donut grazers.
That's not, of course, true in the case of the paramilitary operators.
They tend to be very fit, although not fit in terms of their mental disposition for that kind of work.
But police work, law enforcement, is not a particularly dangerous occupation.
And, of course, every time a police officer dies in any duty-related way, we have a state funeral worthy of the interment of Leonid Brezhnev that takes place, when you have these response groups from local police unions who exist for the purpose of going to police funerals, gathering the solemn procession, and the public is instructed to mourn the death of one of our supposed betters.
But that's in large measure because it is such a rare thing for a police officer to die that way.
Yeah, and what makes them our betters anyway?
I mean, I know that there's this dichotomy with regard to the law and accountability.
So in that sense, they can get away with hurting us more than we can get away with hurting them.
But I don't see how that's morally equivalent to better.
No, it's not.
And, of course, the whole concept of the rule of law means that nobody is entitled to hurt anybody else, period.
That aggressive violence committed by anybody is innately wrong.
It doesn't matter what occupation you're pursuing or how you're dressed, what costume jewelry you wear, or what permission slip you've received from a government agency.
There is no legitimate use for aggressive violence by anybody, including police officers.
Well said, Will Grigg.
We've got to leave it there.
Thanks again for your time and your extra time.
That's the great Will Grigg.
Check him out at prolibertatefreedominourtime.blogspot.com.
The great Will Grigg.
Thanks again.
Thanks, Ari.
My pleasure.
