Reblogged:Don’t Like the Police? Then Change the Laws!

[Michael J. Hurd Ph.D.]

Imagine if someone had proposed the following at the Constitutional Convention when the United States was founded:

“Let’s nationalize the police. Let’s have the federal government equip and regulate state and local police forces to take care of the nation’s defense. While we’re at it, let’s use these federally controlled, local police to control people’s personal behaviors, whether it’s alcohol or other substances they take. And let’s use these police to control the sale and exchange of these substances, too.”

What do you think the response of Madison, Jefferson, John Adams and others would have been?

Yet that’s precisely what we have today.

The problem with police is that we’re asking them to do things they have no business doing. Instead of blaming that on our laws — which can be repealed, or changed — we blame it on the police. We don’t just blame it on the occasional “bad apple” police officer; we blame it on the police, as such.

Obama, Hillary Clinton and rigid progressives who dominate the media and federal government claim the problem with police is “racism.” But they make that claim about virtually everything. Terrorism is due to racism; economic stagnation is due to racism; crime is due to racism; and corrupt or overbearing police officers are due to racism.

Hillary Clinton, of all people, could not care less about racism. She just parrots what has worked for 50 years or more to justify more federal control over the states, more government control over individual rights and more federal spending and debt. Given that power and control are her only concerns, you can’t blame her for using the race card. It works every time it’s used. If you don’t believe me, look at our $20 trillion national debt.

Police are no more racist today than ever before. In fact, police officers — just like the rest of American society — are far, far less racist than people were during the time of mandated segregation, Jim Crow laws, and slavery before that. While subtle and sometimes ugly pockets of racism may, regrettably, always exist, America in 2016 is nothing like America in 1850, 1916 or even 1960. For God’s sake, pick up a history book!

The problem with police today are the laws we’re telling police they must enforce. If we stopped expecting state and local police forces to do things they have no Constitutional business doing, then there would not be nearly as much of a problem with police as many claim we have now. The most glaring example are laws which make drug use — even marijuana abuse — against the law. And then the federal mandate, imposed on state and local police, to make sure nobody sells or trades drugs, either. In order to enforce these laws, police must investigate, arrest, intimidate, harass and otherwise throttle citizens who — whatever the status of their health or character due to drug use — are not violating anyone else’s rights.

People have this idea that by legalizing drug use, we’re condoning it. No such thing is true. I don’t condone the ideas of Karl Marx or Adolf Hitler. But I would never, for one moment, support outlawing their books. Freedom of thought and speech matters way more to me than my distaste and disgust for the ideas of those men. Ditto for drug abuse. I want nothing to do with drug abuse, and I view it as a terrible problem, at least when drug use or abuse gets out of control. But making these behaviors illegal does not do anything to alter or change them. Anyone who thinks they do clearly does not understand the mind and psyche of an addict. An addict, by definition, wants what he or she wants. Laws are of no relevance in the quest to quench the desire. You’ll do what you have to do. When you want what you want, you’ll go underground to get it, even if you’re otherwise law-abiding and would (even while a drug addict) never harm a fly.

The war on drugs makes about as much sense as the war on poverty, or the war on terrorism (which, as it has been conducted, has totally failed). You can’t control what you can’t control. Government should not try. By trying to control things no government has any realistic possibility or moral justification for trying to control, the people we hire to enforce those controls will respond in kind.

Don’t like the police? Then change the laws.

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