Justin Amash

Pitching Conservatives on Ditching the Police State

During Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the Red Guards were a radical student-formed paramilitary organization. Inspired by the push to recreate a new communist China and destroy the “Four Olds”, the Red Guards targeted anyone deemed sympathetic to intellectual or bourgeois ideas. Red Guard tactics quickly devolved into property damage, violence, and torture. Thousands were murdered. The Red Guards were both condoned and condemned by the central government, but they were unable to be controlled. The movement in some cases spiraled into a civil insurrection that was eventually defeated by the army in 1968. Lawlessness, destruction of private property, disregard for human life–clearly, conservatives and I agree that the terror campaign of the Red Guards was a moral abomination. But I have a question for conservatives:

Were the Red Guards bad because of their ideology, or because of their violence?

Well, what if we kept the ideology, but got rid of the violence? Apparently, the “Party for Socialism and Liberation” is an American political party that advocates communism. Their positions (perhaps unsurprisingly) are rather odious, but as far as I can tell, they are not actively going around the country murdering small business owners for owning capital. This is clearly morally superior to the Red Guards.

What about the reverse? What if there were paramilitary organizations in the United States operating outside the law, but they happened to not be communists? What would their moral standing be? They wouldn’t target people holding onto traditional values, like the Red Guards did, but that would not make citizens feel better that hundreds of people were being murdered.

American police forces are Red Guards without communism.

Too harsh? Let’s take a look into this phenomenon where we’ll find outrageous situation after situation. In 2011, cops killed a former marine with no criminal record, Jose Guerena, while his wife and children were hiding in a closet from the unidentified intruders. Guerena, while armed, never removed his safety from the gun. Naturally, he was hit over 20 times by police. No evidence was found in his home of any illegal activity. The warrant was served suspecting that Guerena was selling marijuana. At the time medical cannabis was legal in Arizona, but someone selling it without a license? Better have a no-knock raid. Police settled out of court for civil damages, and a County Deputy is quoted saying ” the officers performed that day in accordance with their training and nationally recognized standards”.

In 2013, three off-duty police officers working as security guards in a Frederick County, Maryland movie theater were asked to remove a patron who was attempting to see a second showing of a movie without paying. The customer, Ethan Saylor, was 26 years old and had Down Syndrome. The officers refused the help of his aide, arrested Saylor, and in the process, fractured his larynx, resulting in his death from asphyxiation. A grand jury found no wrongdoing, and I could find no citation indicating the officers had lost their job. The family settled for $1.9 million (the judge did decline to extend qualified immunity for the officers).

In 2015, police destroyed a Colorado man’s home in pursuit of a shoplifter armed with a handgun. When I say destroyed, I mean “… the tactical team bombarded the building with high-caliber rifles, chemical agents, flash-bang grenades, remote-controlled robots, armored vehicles, and breaching rams”. The house was condemned afterwards leaving Leo Lech homeless. The city compensated him with $5000. He took the city to court and an appeals court ruled in 2019 that he was entitled to no compensation, as the police were acting within their police power, not taking items as part of an investigation.

I could go on and on: a homeless person beaten to death by officers, Massachusetts state police using military helicopters to spot single marijuana plants, a retired unarmed Sunday School Teacher shot four times in her car (cop lied on his report, was convicted of manslaughter, served two years), but there was one final story that stayed with me.

In May 2014, one night just past 2 AM, police in full SWAT gear served a no-knock warrant in a small Georgia town. A roommate of an informant they had never used before had apparently bought methamphetamine at the house earlier in the day. Ignoring the minivan parked in front with the car seat in it and the kid sized play pool, police assumed no children were present in the house despite no actual surveillance having been conducted. Their target, it turned out, wasn’t present and when he was apprehended later in the morning, he was not armed. Nonetheless, they easily obtained a no-knock warrant on the flimsiest of information. Police broke into the house and threw a flashbang grenade inside where no less than four children under the age of ten were sleeping. It landed in the playpen of the youngest, a 19 month old baby, and exploded. The police found no contraband or illegal items, but the infant was put into a medically induced coma. A grand jury declined to indict the deputy who obtained that warrant (naturally), and the county paid out a multi-million dollar out of court settlement.

American police have been a threat to freedom for a long time and in many forms. Violent no-knock raids on unsuspecting families, drug enforcement that both fails to stop drug use while also stacking up bodies, executions of unarmed and nonthreatening citizens because they don’t obey police orders, burning infants, the stories sound unbelievable. They are clearly an out of control, unaccountable paramilitary force.

Let’s talk about the recent protests, the catalyst for this post. Left leaning protesters have focused on police abuses’ connection to racism. I stated earlier that American police are Red Guards without the communism. Leftists are extending that argument; instead of Red Guards murdering people for the Cultural Revolution, protesters point out that American police are murdering people due to systemic racism. John Oliver details this argument here. Libertarian critiques of the police state have tended to categorize the ideology of the police in terms of authoritarianism, or opposition to personal liberty; hence the focus on the enforcement of drug laws that infringe on individual autonomy.

Naturally, libertarians emphasize a narrative where police abuses can be counteracted by libertarian ideology while progressives emphasize an alternative narrative that can be solved by social justice. If you are a conservative, you are likely to be suspicious of these critiques as they seem self-serving. Nonetheless, both critiques have a solid basis: Black Americans are killed at a disproportionate rate, and many unnecessary deaths clearly occur when serving drug warrants on citizens who have done nothing violent. Moreover, compared to the Red Guards, American police are not nearly as ideologically cohesive, yet they remain a powerful and unaccountable force as we’ve seen. This creates a dangerous situation where many ideologies and interest groups have an incentive to influence the police for their own ends.

But let’s recall what we stated earlier. Are unaccountable paramilitary groups bad because of their ideology or their violence? I argue, it’s their violence.

And we’ve seen from the previous examples, American police are remarkably violent. But those were just anecdotes. Here is part of a table of countries, and highlighted in blue is the rate of police killings per 10 million people. The United States at 46.6 is surrounded by renowned criminal justice systems like Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and trails standout nations like Iran.

This is bad.

We don’t actually know the amount of people killed by the police in the U.S. because the government doesn’t require police departments to track that data. The data linked in the Wikipedia article is from the Fatal Encounters database, which suggests about 1800 people killed every year by American police. The Washington Post database focuses only on police shootings and indicates around 1000 people are shot to death by the police each year.

To drive the point home, let’s first consider developed countries. The United States is by far the worst developed country in terms of police killings per capita, but the distant second place is Canada (which is so far up on the table, I couldn’t include it on the screengrab). Canadian police kill around 10 people per 10 million population compared to America’s 46.6–nearly a five fold decrease. In fact, American police are significantly outperformed by those of Pakistan, a country where military coups are commonplace, and which only had its first peaceful transition between elected governments in 2013.

The Washington Post database suggests about 25% of those killed by police are Black, which is disproportionately high for their percentage of the U.S. population. But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that we could wave a magic wand and prevent all Black killings by the American police. Even if we did that, our rate of police killings would remain 350% of the next highest developed country. And to be clear, Canada is the second worst developed country we have data on, most others are much better.

I want to reiterate that last point: American police killings are not 350% of Canada’s total police killings, but 250% higher deaths per capita even if there were no more Black victims of police violence.

In fact, even if this hypothetical scenario of drastically reduced police killings, the rate of American police violence would remain much worse than a country like Egypt’s. In 2018, Human Rights Watch wrote of the Egyptian election:

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government.

This is the country that has a significantly less deadly police force than us. This is disgraceful.

So if you’re a conservative, and you feel left-wing (or libertarian!) activists have a differing ideology than you, you’re probably right. But I think you may have much more in common on this issue that you might initially believe. The question we must agree on isn’t “which ideology should an unaccountable paramilitary force within our borders have?”, the question is “do we want unaccountable paramilitary organizations murdering hundreds of citizens a year?”

If think you might have some common ground with reformists, here are some simple ways to make the police more accountable:

Get your congressional representatives to sign on to Justin Amash’s bill to end qualified immunity or Rand Paul’s bill to end no-knock raids
Push your local representatives to pass the 8 Can’t Wait police reforms to make police more accountable
Consider reforming or busting police unions, which are the single most powerful interest group that has opposed police reform for decades

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

This blog voices a lot of frustrations with the American electoral system, and with election season coming up, it’s worth talking about again. The United States is a republic, but voters tend to significantly overestimate the importance and impact of their votes.

To reiterate some of what I said in 2016, your vote in November is unlikely to matter. Most Congressional elections are not close. There may be uncertainty in other, less well polled elections for lower offices, but there’s also a much higher cost to finding out who the candidates are and what they stand for. I consider myself pretty interested in the political process as I write about it often. Nonetheless, I know almost nothing about my state representative and state senator. I can (and will) look them up, and see where they stood on votes, as I can with my Congressional representatives, but this will also require looking up which state votes were important to the topics I care about, something which I may not be able to find out easily and which I’m sure other people do not have the time to do. Moreover, it’s pretty common at the federal level for legislators to try and avoid going on the record and opt instead for voice votes, and I suspect similar incentives dominate at the state level.

If I can find good information on their voting record which reflecting beliefs I find objectionable, it is not clear that I can find information on their electoral opponents. Party affiliation does help, but not every candidate from a party holds all party positions.

Additionally, even close elections that you can find information on do not necessarily map well onto issues you care about. I care about promoting free trade, liberalizing immigration and/or worker visas, ending the war on drugs, and addressing issues in the criminal justice system. Many politicians only side with me on some issues but not others, yet I only have two options for any election that is actually competitive (and again, most are not).

Moreover, most politicians not only don’t share all my positions on important issues, they have really terrible positions on other issues that weren’t even on my radar. Now I have to worry about Republican politicians looking to deport immigrants through abusive crackdowns of civil liberties. I’m also now concerned about Democratic promises to vastly expand Medicare, already the largest entitlement in the federal budget and contributor to runaway healthcare spending. I freely admit that many people do not feel this way; they feel that the “progressive” or “conservative” positions pair well on a wide range of issues, and they can identify with many others who share an overlapping set of beliefs. In this view, the inability for libertarians to find someone who shares their core issues is a function of libertarians having bad or unpopular ideas and that’s why they have no support.

I disagree for several reasons: one is that many people do not vote at all. They may not think much about politics, or if they do, perhaps they realize, as is my thesis here, that there is very little benefit to voting. It seems quite plausible that they hold ideas that differ from party orthodoxy and don’t see a reason to vote when you can only choose between party orthodoxy. Another is that a plurality of registered voters do not have a party affiliation, something that has only been true in the last ~20 years or so. It’s also true that when surveyed, many Americans express rather moderate views on a variety of issues. Finally, it’s worth noting that there is obvious intra-party tension and factionalism. There are serious groups of Republicans who do not like Trump. There are libertarian critics like Justin Amash and Mark Sanford, neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as well as just stalwart conservatives like everyone at National Review. It also seems to me that there is some strong disagreement in the Democratic Party between neoliberals and progressives, and so it seems absurd that the political system only allows two parties when there is so much diversity of opinion and no way to express it electorally.

Worse still, our current two-headed system promotes partisanship and tribal extremism instead of nuance. I know several people that, when pressed, don’t really believe that the government would do a great job if we had a Medicare-for-all system or had government paid college. Yet these same people feel that if they don’t embrace these left-wing ideas, their only alternative is to be a fan of Trump, whom they reasonably despise. I’ve also experienced the reverse: conservatives that didn’t like Trump, but clearly preferred his tax policy to Hillary Clinton’s and figured Trump might not be so bad. Many now are so concerned at what they perceive as a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takeover of the Democratic Party, they have nowhere to go but to embrace Trump. If we had a system that promoted the creation of several different groups and smaller parties, we’d have a much easier time finding a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Unfortunately, our current system also takes issues that many people generally agree are bad and just ignores them. There are policy positions I would consider to be completely disqualifying for any public servant, such as approval of a vast warrantless domestic spying program costing tens of billions of dollars a year or the murder of children through drone strikes by the president with no authorization of war from Congress. Nonetheless, there is no point to disqualify candidates from my support due to these issues because they have been widely ignored by all candidates in the major parties. Complaining about the two party system is the classic archetype of the crazy libertarian going off the rails again, but I hope others are genuinely saddened that our electoral system doesn’t offer a way to utilize our vote to oppose the murder of children by our government.

And for non-competitive elections, there may be competitive primaries, which aren’t really great systems either, as I’ve discussed before. If the primary is deciding the eventual winner of the election, it doesn’t make sense that a plurality of voters of a single party should determine the winner of a general election seat in a primary election where 90% of possible voters didn’t vote at all. For example, in the notable dethroning of high ranking Democrat Joe Crowley in NY-14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with less than 16,000 votes, in a district where some 690,000 people live, presumably with some 300,000 possible voters. PredictIt currently gives the Democrat a ~85% chance to win, although the market isn’t very liquid.

In less democratic countries, there is overt voter fraud and intimidation. The United States doesn’t really have that problem. It nonetheless does have odd echoes of a “rigged” electoral system like one you would find in low-trust corrupt authoritarian countries with poor rule of law. For example, having one side consistently win a landslide, non-competitive election (like most congressional seats) seems like something you’d find in a “fake” democracy. Having a “competitive” election between two candidates you didn’t pick and you don’t know well which doesn’t allow you to express dissatisfaction with important government programs sounds like a “fake” democracy too.

I should admit that I don’t love the idea of hyper direct democracy either. Even if voters had a reason to learn about the political system, I’m unsure if they would promote good ideas. In all honesty, I probably side with political elites over average voters on a lot of issues. That doesn’t mean I believe there is no room for reform. I’ve discussed many different possible ways to improve our system, and in fact a few weeks ago I mentioned the important opportunity Approval Voting is getting this year. Yet none of those ideas will be seriously discussed this election season.

To summarize, our election system has a variety of important and fundamental flaws. Candidates are picked in nonrepresentative primaries, many elections are noncompetitive, voter information is scarce, while voter choices are limited to two candidates who do not represent the broader electorate’s views on many issues. Other important issues are just broadly ignored while the system promotes discord and extremism. Yet there will be a significant amount of discussion about how important it is to vote in November. With these flaws I’ve outlined, I apologize in advance if I’m unimpressed by such claims.

If you believe that you see a large difference in a particular race for office that you think might be competitive, that’s great, and feel free to vote. But don’t feel bad if you believe voting is a waste of time. Maybe you don’t like Trump, but you also wish all the Democratic candidates weren’t just talking about deficit busting economic policies with poor fiscal outlooks. That’s fine because there are ways to engage politically that are more important than voting. That includes addressing our broken electoral system and raising awareness about how this doesn’t have to be the way things operate; approval voting offers a real alternative that’s being attempted right now. It’s also worth mentioning that Congress’ decline in power relative to the President means that partisan politics is now more infectious; only one of a very few competing ideologies can control the White House and the immense power it has been ceded. Meanwhile, a powerful Congress is made up of hundreds of individuals, allowing for diversity of opinion, broad coalitions, and compromise. Congress should be taking back power it has ceded to the executive branch; I would hope readers would want to make this the major election talking point it should be, instead of the libertarian-rant-footnote it is now.

In conclusion, civic engagement is important; political awareness is vital to a thriving democracy. Nonetheless our electoral system is broken in such a way that voting is not the vital civic duty it is often claimed to be. If you are concerned about the partisanship that created Trump, if you feel like a world where facts don’t matter ought to be changed, then voting isn’t enough to change these trends. That does not mean there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, reforms are needed on a more fundamental level, including changes to our voting system, primary system, and party system. Discussing and promoting those ideas is the best way forward.