Should the Police be Privatised?
by Sean Gabb
21st September 2015
Lister Hospital, which is somewhere in the Midlands, has employed private security staff, whose powers include the right to demand names and addresses and to issue fixed penalty fines. Early in the morning on Monday the 21st September 2015, I was called by BBC Three Counties Radio to comment on this.
I will begin by observing that the on-air discussion is about the worst I have ever done. Iain Lee, the Presenter, looks like a rabbit and behaves like the sort of person who gets extra time in school examinations. I had a cold, and was trying hard not to sneeze. The result was a slurred performance in which I make no effort to hide either boredom or contempt. I have, during the past year, refused most invitations to go on the radio. After this morning, I may refuse all invitations whatever.
I turn, though, to the substantive issues. Should private security guards have the power to demand names and address and to issue fines?
Whether anarchists or conservatives or classical liberals, those of us who identify as libertarians agree that the British State is larger than it ought to be. Many of its functions should be abolished. Many others should be privatised. When I was a boy, the State owned the Thomas Cook travel agency. When I was a young man, it still owned all the steel factories and coal mines. Selling these made obvious sense. It reduced the size of the State, and it enabled more rational patterns of investment and employment. I will say nothing about the details of what was done, but also agree with principle of selling the telephone network and the railways and the water boards, and so on.
This being said, privatising the police, or contracting out certain functions of the police, is a different matter. I agree that, in an entirely natural order – that is, a society without any state – the detection and punishment of crime would necessarily be private concerns. I will add that, before the nineteenth century, there were no state police in England, and most prosecutions were brought by the victims of crime or their representatives. But none of this validates the transfer, at present, of actual policing functions to the voluntary sector.
Police officers nowadays have many more powers than they had in the past. They are no longer persons hired and given uniforms to do what any other citizen might care to do. They have enhanced powers of stop and search, and of entry into private property. They have the power to issue fines without conviction by any due process of law. These powers should not exist. While they do exist, they should not be contracted out to the employees of private corporations.
No doubt, the police are frequently incompetent. They are corrupt. They are oppressive. They are increasingly armed, and their ranks are filling with unprosecuted murderers. But they are fully accountable in theory, and mostly accountable in practice. They are answerable to their chief constables, and to Members of Parliament, and to the Home Secretary. We know who they are, and for whom they act. Knowing who our masters are is almost as essential to living in a free country as rules limiting what our masters can do.
The employees of a private corporation are accountable before the civil courts – they and, by the rules of vicarious liability, the corporations. But the difficulty with private legal action is its present cost and complexity. Also, as anyone will agree who has experience of the building trade, liability can often be subcontracted out of existence. These might not be difficulties that applied in a natural order. But they do apply in the present order of things.
I say, then, that whoever exercises the powers of the State should be accountable via the State. This is not an argument against privatisation in general. I have said that, in a fully natural order, there would be no state policing; and, in any movement to a natural order, increasingly core activities of the State will be shed into the voluntary sector. But we are where we are. There are libertarians – I will not say for whom they work, or by whom they have been influenced – whose objection to the Soviet Gulag would be lessened by a spot of contracting out, or who would think better of Auschwitz had the inmates been called customers. Before we agree to any scheme of privatisation, we really need to know what is being privatised.
This is an argument against privatising the coercive powers of the State. I will briefly add that I doubt the propriety of contracting out the non-coercive ancillary functions of the State. It may be that roads would be cheaper and better if their building was contracted out. It may be that DNA testing and storage would be cheaper and better if contracted out. Most things done by the State are done badly.
On the other hand, private business is not some realm of angels. My local baker is a human being. His present interest is to supply me with bread at prices and a quality no worse than I could find it anywhere else in my area. Give him a contract to supply bread to every prison in England, and he might soon learn how and whom to bribe, and how to import his flour from the neighbourhood of a Romanian nuclear power station. He might also try blocking reforms that would reduce the prison population. All considered, it might be better to let prisons bake their own bread.
The point I am making is that mixing private enterprise with state activity raises up interest groups that may slow or wholly frustrate any progress towards a natural order.
But I have said enough. The above would make an interesting podcast. If you listen to the recording of this morning’s performance, you may agree that the BBC is no longer a fit institution for hosting an intelligent discussion.
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You were both annoying in my opinion.
Sean, I fully agree. And what’s more, I would dispute the legal right of these private guards to levy fines. If the Bill of Rights 1688 denies the state the right to levy fines without a judicial process, how much less than a private nobody do so.
Sean, people like that interviewer are the killer propagandists for the state. They achieve everything they aim to achieve via sneering — which is a far more profitable line for them than tedious point-by-point argumentation.
That man is a cunt. I don’t use the word very often, but it’s called for here.
There is a moment a couple of minutes in when the “interviewer” says something like, “Oh, I remember you”. Clearly, Sean had given the poor chap a proper verbal duffing up on some prior occassion. From that moment onwards, he attempts to replicate Sean’s (shall we say) characteristically direct manner, but being an educationally sub-normal half-wit, the fella has no means available to him other than raising his voice and sympathy sneering.
Thanks, but poorlie Dr G really should have stayed in bed…..
I like the phrase “natural society” that you used, Sean. I haven’t heard you use that one before.
And what the presenter said and did (or failed to do) after the end of the interview, will be usable as evidence in court after the Revolution.
But all I will say right now is, get well soon.
I think it’s an HHHism
The police need to reigned in instead of being allowed to become a standing army. Here’s my submission to the Law Commission consultation on firearms law:
28/08/2015
To: firearms@lawcommission.gsi.gov.uk
This consultation is all about carrying on with the existing status quo, merely regularising the law to simplify enforcement. As such it is totally unfit for purpose. It fails to address key issues that should be addressed as a matter of urgency:
* The natural right to self defence. The Home Office made an arbitrary decision just after World War 2 that keeping and using a firearm for self defence was no longer “a good reason.” This is entirely unacceptable, particularly in the modern world with the increased threat of terrorism;
* An individuals natural and property rights are held at the whim not of due legal process but by bureaucrats and functionaries. This is achieved by a combination of the vagueness and mutability of the “good reason” requirement and the arbitrary nature of conditions that may be imposed, often by people with no credible qualifications, on firearms ownership and use;
* Restrictions on firearms types, components, and accessories are completely arbitrary and increasingly ridiculous in the face of developments in technology;
* No credible cost benefit analysis of restrictions on firearms ownership and the exercise of rights to defence of property and self have been undertaken that could justify current or proposed laws;
* Costs should not be borne by the individual for the unwarranted and arbitrary restrictions imposed and such fines and forfeitures before any conviction or judgment against the person should be recognised as illegal (this is a much wider problem with Statute Law).
The most important thing to take away from my objections are that there must be no “good reason” requirement that is not properly defined in law and/or decided by due legal process before a jury of peers, taking into account individual circumstance, for otherwise is fundamentally unjust and abhorrent to common law. Such “good reason” requirements must recognise an individuals inalienable natural rights and recognise the universal principle that there must be equality for individuals before the law – for instance policemen have no more right to carry and use weapons of self defence than a private citizen does.
I look forward to your reply and attempts from the Law Society to address these very real issues.
Regards,
John Pate
Edinburgh, August 2015.
The presenter is infuriatingly childish.
Sean’s seething with contempt was refreshingly honest.
Iain Lee is a rude and uncivilised young man.
Sean, I don’t think you gave a bad performance at all. In fact I think, in the circumstances, you did remarkable well. This idiot of a radio presenter is so typical of the sort of creature who presides over radio phone-in programmes these days – particularly on local radio. I think we can call it the ‘Jon Gaunt Syndrome’, where self-importance and stupidity is inversely proportional to intelligence.
Thanks, though I will be more selective still in future.
I think this is one of those cases of ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’. The interviewer was irritating, but he’s a comedian by trade, I think, so he isn’t going to conduct a serious discussion.
In fairness, I think he made a valid point about the realities of what might happen in a hospital late at night, but I think Dr Gabb addressed this. Unfortunately, the interviewer seemed not to grasp the point, either because he couldn’t generally take the interview seriously, or he just lacks the mentla nuance to understand.
All in all, I just think listening to this sort of stuff is a waste of time. We only have so long on this planet, and I don’t want to waste it with stupid or frivolous people.