Police And Criminals: When To Pull For No One
Have you ever watched a sports game between two teams that are bitter rivals of your favorite team? You probably wanted to see both teams exhaust themselves and accomplish nothing of importance. If you are a jerk, you might have wanted to see both teams lose important players to injuries as well. The reason, of course, is that your team will have a better chance of defeating both of them if this happens. If your team is liberty-loving people, then something like this occurred on May 2 in Queens, N.Y.
At about 6:00 p.m. that evening, NYPD officers Brian Moore and Erik Jansen were in an unmarked police car near 212th Street and 104th Avenue, and they were not wearing their uniforms. They spotted a man who was walking and adjusting an object in his waistband. They recognized him as Demetrius Blackwell, 35, a man with an extensive criminal record. Thinking that he may be illegally carrying a firearm, they moved their vehicle to approach him. “Do you have something in your waist?’’ Moore asked Blackwell. “Yeah, I got something,” Blackwell responded, then he pulled out a gun and shot Moore in the head. Moore died two days later.
Of course, everyone in the establishment lapdog media sided for Moore and against Blackwell. I will attempt to show that a person who seeks liberty should side with neither of them.
The case for siding against Blackwell is straightforward. He is known to have no respect for people or private property, as his arrest record contains two arrests for robbery in 1995, one in 2000, and another in 2013. The 2000 robbery also resulted in an attempted murder charge, to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in jail. He was also arrested earlier in 2000 for assault. (A 1999 charge for possessing a weapon and a 2000 charge for possessing marijuana would not be crimes in a free society, as there is no victim and no credible threat posed by such actions.) It is clear from his record of multiple aggressions over a long time period that he is an unrepentant aggressor who should be physically removed from society. The first-degree murder of a police officer charge he will now face and likely be convicted on should take care of that. In keeping with his background, the gun Blackwell used to kill Moore was stolen.
The case for siding against Moore requires more thought, as well as some debunking of statist propaganda. The job description of a government police officer is to enforce the laws and to be paid from government coffers for doing so. To enforce the laws is to present a consistent threat to use as much force as necessary to stop a person who is reasonably suspected to be breaking the laws. There is no evident problem so far, but let us consider the nature of the laws and how the money in government coffers came to be there.
The laws in a statist society are not determined in accordance with the non-aggression principle, but by the whims of politicians. Some of these laws criminalize behaviors which harm no one, and are therefore contrary to the non-aggression principle. But the job of a government police officer is to enforce all of the laws, not just those which are morally defensible. A government police officer is therefore hired to commit acts of aggression against the citizenry, against which the citizenry may morally (if not legally) use force to defend themselves. The money in government coffers was not homesteaded by the state or gained through voluntary trade, but came into government possession either through conquest or extortion. In earlier times, the state claimed lands as well as the resources in them and either murdered or pushed out those who disagreed with such claims and acted upon their disagreements. In current times, the state extorts people for tax payments by threatening them with additional fines, confiscations, and/or imprisonment for noncompliance, to be enforced by the government police officers if necessary.
This much establishes that a government police officer, although providing some useful services at times, is playing a fundamentally immoral role in society. What Moore did on the night of his slaying, however, was not a useful service. He was disguised as a normal citizen, lying in wait to catch someone doing anything which was not in agreement with the laws of New York City, regardless of the morality of said laws. He sighted someone who might be carrying a gun, which as a form of owning private property and being ready to defend oneself is a perfectly valid behavior that happens to be in disagreement with the laws of New York City, to the point of carrying a prison term of seven years upon conviction. (Interestingly, this is 40 percent longer than the amount of time that Blackwell served for trying to murder someone.) While one can make the argument that a free society might not allow Blackwell to carry a gun because of his violent history, Moore saw the potential firearm before he recognized that it was Blackwell who was carrying it, thereby demonstrating that he would have stopped anyone for this. If Blackwell had attempted to flee, Moore (or other officers) would have pursued him and used as much force as necessary to stop him, up to the point of gunning him down. For the above reasons, Moore demonstrated that he was an aggressor as well.
Like Blackwell, Moore also had a violent history, but unlike Blackwell, his will be celebrated rather than condemned thanks to statist propaganda. According to New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, “In his very brief career, less than five years, he had already proven himself to be an exceptional young officer. In that career, he had made over 150 arrests, protecting and serving the citizens of this city. …He had already received two exceptional police service medals and two meritorious police service medals. We don’t give them out easily.” A significant number of those 150 arrests were made for offenses which do not involve harm done to people or property. Such arrests are not morally defensible, but are acts of aggression against those who are arrested. And again, such arrests are made with as much force as necessary to make them.
While Blackwell had gained the nickname “Hellraiser” on the streets, gun control laws have allowed for far more hellraising than Blackwell could have dreamed of, as they disarm victims and leave only those like Blackwell in possession of firearms. Far from protecting and serving, the government police officers who enforce gun control laws enable criminals to victimize innocent people by depriving them of the means they need to deter, repel, and kill aggressors. In a New York City full of morally upstanding armed citizens, a man like Blackwell would likely not live long enough to compile such a rap sheet, thereby sparing his victims of his aggressions, which ironically means that Brian Moore would likely be alive today.
Now that the case that neither of these men are worthy of support from liberty-minded people has been made, let us return to the sports analogy. Agents of the state and common criminals are two teams which are bitter rivals of people who wish to be free. In this case, both teams lost players and failed to gain any real ground. If events like this were to happen enough times, it would make the fight for liberty from both organized and unorganized criminals an easier fight to win.
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