So just because Zimmerman didn't have a badge he wasn't an authority figure? He was investigating a suspicious person. He was acting EXACTLY like the free market citizen enforcement militia you guys seem to want?

The specific outcome where his lack of training, paranoia, and general being a pussy caused him to shoot that suspicious person is pretty much why every civilized country in the world relies on a paramilitary enforcement wing rather than letting the magic of an armed citizenry control crime.

Though even in ACland I'm pretty sure DROs are supposed to have enforcement agents who are like police today, so I don't even know what's going on here. Why does the libertarian forum zeitgeist see Zimmerman as a member of the tribe who needs to be defended, just because he doesn't have a badge?

LOL

Yea, **** militia. that stuff never ends well. I don't think training/transparency would help the problem, and I don't think an armed citizenry would help the problem. the problem is OVERSIGHT. there's none, and SoCal is seeing problems like this everywhere right now. LAPD is much better than it was 20 years ago but still awful. The LA sheriffs are in the middle of a huge embarrassment, there's been a lot of evidence brought forth lately of inmate abuse and racism within the men's central jail, and calls for Sheriff Lee Baca to resign or DO something. What's he do? Him and other sheriff's dpt superiors turn around and say, "It's not our fault the deputies form cliques and disobey orders."

At some point, police need to be held accountable to someone OUTSIDE the police force, before problems like the Kelly Thomas beating happen. How that's supposed to happen, I have no idea. The papers have been running stories on some of the other officers involved, about how they had multiple citizen complaints about excessive force that went ignored. Just makes me sick.

Flywf making a lot of sense itt (not sarcasm)

I don't think anyone but Zim thought of him as an authority figure.

2nd paragraph was dead on.

b

This.

also, Seattle PD should be included in your list. At least the head chief is being investigated here now. We'll see what happens.

b

If justice and arbitration could be served by competing businesses, then a business that employs violent thugs out to "get some" on whoever they encounter would cease to exist because no one would pay their hard earned money for such a service, and such businesses would be overwhelmed with lawsuits, boycotts, and quick and total ostracism from society.

As it turns out, we have a state that violently arrogates itself the ultimate decision maker in all conflict for all citizens in its territory. With this monopoly power of final arbitration, and only with this, the state can make law, and of course it does, such as laws that imprison people into cages for life over the possession of a plant.

As the amount of laws our monopoly has made have become so arbitrary, and so plentiful, its enforcement wing must grow in scope and size as well. The enforcement wing must grow more invasive as the arbitrary laws become more invasive, and they must become more aggressive as our monopoly demands so. The laws will always trend towards increasingly invasive and increasingly aggressive, since control is indivisible, and a lack of control must always be the state's reason for action in lawmaking.


trollololol.

No, I still need you to explain to me how training and professionalism would have altered the decision making process of these officers that beat KT to death.

The institutionally encouraged attitude comes from the increasing invasive and aggressive nature and implementation of our made-up monopoly laws. The training such an encouraged attitude necessitates is stuff like: Explosive Breaching and Advanced Sniper Techniques for Law Enforcement from companies like "Forced Entry Tactical Training" and other similarly named outfits. These outfits by the way are just former tier one guys whose entire skillset revolves around killing and killing quickly, and they train our police officers to do...what?

And by infil/exfil I meant the entire scope and support of such movement leading to direct action, actions on objective, a bit more than just a horse or a car. My hard earned money is stolen every year so that I can be provided with a direct action unit that trains around the clock to obliterate me in the night should I be suspected of possessing a plant.


Troloolloll.

You believe America is becoming less of a police state?

WTF are you talking about? If I'm Bill Gates, I'd have guys like this roaming all around a 100 mile radius of wherever I am. The Mexican cartels don't seem to hire a bunch of reasonable guys. To say that if we only got rid of the government, thugs would disappear is complete horse****. Anyone who's got a ton of money is going to insta-hire the baddest meanest craziest mother****ers he can find. And he's not going to care AT ALL about the rights of some dip**** that happens to step on one of his guy's shoes.

Seriously this case demonstrates that police need to be trained how to deal with the mentally ill better. People who cannot understand the consequences of noncompliance present a serious problem for any law enforcement entity. It's like the #1 best example for how the police need more and better training, maybe better screening for hires, etc.


Anyway, razrback, that's some real solid old school 2008-era ACism. Just like to point out that in the real world, professional "militarized" security firms run by the state are significantly better behaved than their private counterparts(both criminal and noncriminal). Nobody working for Xe or the Mexican cartels gets in trouble for being too violent towards randoms. That the real world doesn't conform to Murray Rothbard's theories extrapolated from The Hardy Boys is not that surprising, so we don't need to dwell on it.

Just out of curiousity, who would you assume the most recent previous employer is for 99% of Xe contractors?

The US Military, of course. And once freed from the terrible effects of working for a monopoly provider of justice and subjected to the ostracism power of the free market, those guys turn around and...

today a fullerton court awarded thomas' mom a million dollars in a wrongful death suit settlement. I wonder why the dad didn't get anything.

He supossedly turned down 900k and focuses on the criminal case.

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?se...nty&id=8663479

Even if we grant that he was resisting, and presenting a danger to the cop, it doesn't follow that he deserved being savagely beaten to death (by people who are employed to mantain the peace).

oh.. NVM

Put a number to it. How many Sklansky years would the homeless guy have shorten the cops lives by if they used less force?

You have your mutual bleeding attack vector. Let's estimate that. 0.6% of Americans 15-49 are infected. Needle sticks are 0.3% to transmit HIV. Mutual bleeding is going to be far less effective than a needle stick, knock off a couple of orders of magnitude. We're at 0.000001. If untreated, the median survival time is 10 years. With treatment, the prognosis is 20-50 years. Life expectancy for a male born 30 years ago is 70 years total. Guesstimate 15 years lost in the event of infection. So that's a Sklansky loss of about 8 minutes if you let him draw blood and it mingles. Of course, you don't have to beat him to death to keep him from drawing blood, and that's a whole of chain of improbable that takes the EV down to milliseconds.

There has been a lot of discussion treating risks as binary -- and taking as given that non-zero risk justifies launching nukes. How many Sklansky days is enough to justify force? I'd suggest that the magnitude of the risk must be bigger than the error bars at a minimum.