The Fall of Law Enforcement

by Cantwell

I have mixed feelings about what I’m going to say to you in the following paragraphs. Something is happening which I’ve long cheered for, but it is happening for the wrong reasons, and I fear the outcome. Then again, I never imagined this would happen cleanly or without some amount of fear, so from that perspective you might say everything is going according to plan.

The phenomenon to which I refer, is a growing resentment of law enforcement. Resentment is not nearly strong enough of a word, in fact. Even the word “hate” fails to fully describe what is going on. It is literally to the point of police being gunned down while pumping gas, just for being cops.

Many times across the pages of this website I’ve reveled over the deathsand discomforts of police and other government agents. This has made a great many people quite angry with me, to the point of receiving death threats and hate mail in such volume that I couldn’t read all of them in a two hour podcast. I understand why my doing so makes them upset, because, if I am entirely honest with you, I have the same emotional reaction to what I’m saying that they do. I’ve had some very positive interactions with law enforcement as of late. They even came to my aid. On a personal level, I actually like some of these guys, and I find the conflict of interests here quite unfortunate.

Despite what an uninformed reader may come away thinking from reading some of those pieces, I despise violence. I am anti-government, because the State is the most violent institution mankind has ever conjured. Years of attempting to negotiate peacefully for that institution to cease its unending violent victimization of peaceful people have been quite fruitless, and so at some point I realized violence between free men and agents of the Statewas, for better or worse, inevitable.

For me though, I’ve attempted to keep this grounded in reason and reality.Every traffic stop is a death threat. All police officers are, by the very nature of their profession, aggressors. So using violence to deter them from their aggressions is quite sensible and decent. We would all do well to see ourselves living in a culture of resistance to aggression.

What is happening today though seems quite senseless. It more resembles a race war than a revolution, and this I can find no pleasure in. 

The law enforcer’s disconnection from the people they victimize however, is not helping matters. Take the aforementioned incident of a Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy being gunned down while pumping gas. Deputy Darren Goforth, 47, had just left an accident scene when he stopped by a gas station on Telge and West Road. As he was pumping gas, a man approached him from behind, said nothing and fired multiple shots. Once the deputy fell to the ground, the suspect fired more shots. This put an end to Goforth’s life, and in the process his drain on the taxpayers and his victimizations of the public.

“It’s an act of cowardice and brutality the likes of which I’ve never seen,” said Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson.

“I’ve been in law enforcement 45 years,” Sheriff Hickman said. “I don’t recall another incident this cold blooded and cowardly.”

Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls tweeted this message of support this morning: “Despite the cowardice attack last night, we will continue to provide professional (law enforcement) services to our communities. Be careful out there.”

The frequent use of the word “coward” here I find amusing. This is always said whenever somebody guns down a cop ambush style, as if they would have called the killer brave had he invited the officer to take ten paces with dueling pistols. Law enforcement is not in the habit of engaging in what anybody would describe as fair fights. They prey on the public for their sustenance, and they are only able to do so because they always bring overwhelming force to any conflict they might engage in. Swat teams break down doors in the middle of the night and throw explosive devices inside the homes of sleeping people. They rush in with body armor and automatic weapons when people least expect it, kill anyone who dares resist, and throw chains on the survivors.

I don’t like the idea of someone being shot in the back while pumping gas any more than anyone else. I’m quite happy to assume the person who did this was not a brave revolutionary, but rather some race obsessed criminal scum. That being said, it is important to understand that Goforth was not some innocent victim gunned down for no reason. Until police come to terms with the nature of their profession, and that nature is fundamentally altered, we can expect to see incidents like these become increasingly worse, and more frequent.

Put simply, “law enforcement” in the presence of the modern State is the act of using violence to carry out the will of politicians. Nobody has a problem with you saying that politicians are criminal scum. Everyone seems to understand that, no matter how frequently they pack themselves into voting booths and endorse their criminality.

A smaller, but still significant number of people have no problem with saying that people have the right to use violence to defend themselves against violent criminals.

So when police use overwhelming levels of violence to carry out the will of elected criminal scum, I have trouble imagining the disconnect in the minds of people who say it is wrong to kill them. Since police are not in the habit of inviting their victims to duels, but rather ambushing them while they sleep if the opportunity presents itself, or massively outnumbering and outgunning their prey, why would they expect the people who strike back against them to show any mercy whatsoever?

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck. That’s how violence works, and law enforcement knows this all too well. If the guy who shot this cop is a coward in the eyes of the police, then the police themselves are something far worse than cowards. At least the cop killer went after a criminal who had actually harmed people, and who was armed, and awake. That’s far more than we can say of the vast majority of people police kidnap and murder on a daily basis.

The hubris of Sheriff Troy Nehls to say “Despite the cowardice attack last night, we will continue to provide professional (law enforcement) services to our communities” in the wake of the attack further shows the aforementioned disconnect. Worded differently he could say “We don’t care if our actions so enrage the community that they see fit to shoot us in the back while we fuel our vehicles, we so enjoy our rampant crime and oppression that we will lay down our lives to continue it” and it would convey an identical message.

This kind of callous disregard for public sentiment is resulting in riots and arson and murder. Police purport to be very concerned about the public perception of their profession, but are fundamentally unwilling to change their actions in response. In perpetuity they say they want better relations with their communities, and in the same breath pledge to continue violently victimizing the innocent and murdering anyone who dares to resist. From what other group would we tolerate such belligerence? I would posit that one does not exist.

That belligerence is why we are witnessing the downfall of law enforcement before our very eyes, and I fear for our future as a result. It is simply impossible for this to continue much longer in the way that it has. We can certainly do without police in their modern form, but we will require security forces of some sort. Since the driving force behind this rising climate of hate is essentially a pro-government, racially motivated group – as opposed to a rejection of State violence in its entirety – what comes to replace the modern police State is terribly unlikely to take the form of market based protection services. Instead we can look forward to America coming to resemble the Baltimore and Ferguson riots, where police became so overwhelmed by the violence and disorder, that military came to replace them.

Yet, even this will not restore order because nobody is willing to address the underlying problem. They are only willing to throw ever increasing amounts of violence and deception into the equation, making matters worse. Despite what many would tell you, the problem is not racism, or privilege, or wealth inequality. It is the utter disconnect from reality giving sway to the notion that initiatory violence by State agents is capable of solving problems. In reality, it is not. We have thousands of years of history, and a ceaseless stream of present day news stories showing how catastrophically this system has not only failed to bring us the safety and security it promises, but actually perpetrates that which it purports to protect us from.

So when the tanks begin rolling down our streets, when blue uniforms are replaced by camouflage body armor, and even this fails to stem the violence, know this. The anarchists so many hated, threatened, mocked, and condemned as violent lunatics, were the only ones who lifted a finger to prevent any of it from happening.

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