When libertarianism happens to a lot of people

If you’re like most people, you’ve recently learned the term “police militarization” while reading about the ongoing police crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri. Even major news sources like Reuters have picked up the term.

Washington Post blogger Paul Waldman seems to have recently discovered the phenomenon himself and wondered, “where are the libertarians” writing about Ferguson? If Waldman read more Washington Post blogs, he would have realized his libertarian colleague Radley Balko literally wrote the book on the topic and has been covering it, in depth, since 2006.

Beyond being an embarrassing moment for Waldman, the public reaction to events in Ferguson highlights the broad overlap libertarian values have with those held by Americans of diverse political views.

In this case, most decent people are disgusted by the killing of an unarmed teenager, wanton violence used against peaceful protesters, and brazen suppression of the press. Aside from being morally appalling, the situation in Ferguson is the intersection of three prominent public policies studied by libertarian researchers—police militarization, police accountability, and the right to film in public.

But what’s happening in the small, St. Louis suburb isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a much larger trend that libertarians have been following for years.

Before Ferguson Police donned military gear and attacked protesters, libertarians wrote about the cases of Aiyana Jones, Todd Blair, Jonathan March, Jose Guerena, and countless others. Before Ferguson police used tear gas on an Al Jazeera camera crew and arrested Washington Post staff, libertarians were documenting the police-led war on cameras.

What libertarians have learned from our focus on this issue, and what may set us apart from people in different ideological camps, is that police don’t commit horrible acts of brutality simply because they’re awful, mean, or racist people. Though those things may be true, police officers, like everyone else, respond to the incentives they face. The most important incentives police face are those created by policies at the state and federal levels.

As Milton Friedman said, “The way you solve things is by making it… profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”

It may take a depraved officer to shoot an unarmed teenager or fire tear gas at a news crew, but a depraved officer might behave like a civilized person if he faced any likelihood of serious consequences for violent misconduct.

Small police departments would be less likely to have tanks, riot gear, grenade launchers, or machine guns if the Department of Defense wasn’t giving them away like candy.

Fewer police forces would have SWAT teams at all if the federal government didn’t pay them to raid small-time drug dealers’ homes.

Police in general would have better relations with the communities that employ them if they focused on crimes that have victims. This could be accomplished by ending the War on Drugs and legalizing prostitution.

Prosecutors would be less willing to aid police in corruption if they faced civil liability for prosecutorial misconduct.

Radley Balko coined the phrase, “libertarianism happens to people,” to describe how an individual’s view of government changes when he or she experiences a particularly poignant episode of government oppression.

You may have been horrified by the images of a militarized police force brutalizing protesters who are rightfully upset about Michael Brown’s killing. If that leads you to hold in contempt not only the men with the guns, but the public policies that enabled them, then libertarianism happened to you.