From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Subject: Re: SWAT team kills innocent woman in No-Knock raid.
Keywords: SWAT police no-knock raid death
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 17:54:39 GMT

In article <1992Aug18.023148.8725@eskimo.celestial.com> wix@eskimo.celestial.com (Dennis Wicks) writes:
[...]
>Good points, EXCEPT . . . 
>
>All public employees, and most private ones, are indemnified for any
>actions they take in the performance of their assigned duties.  This
>means that in the aence of a criminal conviction, the people being
>sued are not going to lose one penny!  They will get paid for all
>the time that they spend in court, and if it is more than eight hours
>a day, they will probably get overtime too! 
> 
>So even if the judgement is for the plaintiff, the money is going to
>be paid by the taxpayers.  And you know who that is, YOU and ME baby!
>
>The only real way for these people to actually pay for their actions
>is through loss of their position or job.  But the Sargents will make 
>Lieutenant, and the Lieutenants will make Captain, and the Captains
>may even make Chief!  And of course the judge will get reelected! 
>Not much of a penalty for them!

Hmmm...darn! guess we have to use our imaginations!  Well, no problem!
I've had mine tucked away in the garage all wrapped in Cosmoline and a
tarp ever since the end of the Vietnam War, all ready to go!...rrroarrrhhh!
argh! coff, coff...*ignition*...fooosh! :)

The science fiction author Jack Vance has written novels that deal
with law enforcement functions in future societies, incidental to the
plot.  See, for example, _The_ _Killing_ _Machine_ (TKM) (or _The_ _Star_
_King_) (you should be able to find a copy in a used book store.  JV is
generally a good read, and I recommend his work highly, especially for
those who relish style.  Sadly, much of his stuff is out of print).
In the universe of TKM (and TSK, and others) humans
have evolved an interstellar civilization, with the Oikumene, the
civilized part, surrounded by the Beyond, a frontier where adventurers,
criminals, messiahs and the generally restless or ambitious can go
(interstellar travel being cheap; relatively modest fund-raising efforts
can procure a space-vessel) to try their luck.  The Oikumene is
urbane civilization a couple of thousand years in the future, where one can
drink Anchor Steam Beer in thousand-year-old taverns that get whitewashed
every 100 years (a quite attractive one in several ways IMO).
The Beyond is a wildly disparate anarchy with millions of stars and planets
available to whomever can drive an interstellar vessel out there; the sole
interstellar unifying institution Beyond being the Deweaseling Corps,
a paramilitary organization (indeed, police itself, with police-type
technology) which ferrets out police agents from the Oikumene in pursuit of
pirates or criminals.  The Beyond is, in a lot of ways, a libertarian paradise!
Read the book!

It's interesting to look at and speculate about the ways that police functions
might be parceled out if we had a more humane culture.  What do they do?
Many of these functions are really more of a healing, helping, or nurturing
nature.  It may be that the coercive aspects are a relatively recent
sinister innovation of the state, merely a toolbox for social control and
self-maintenance.
In an anarchic or libertarian society many of these functions might be carried
out on a volunteer basis via a rota by, say, a neighborhood coalition of
people who lived there, or spontaneously by citizens themselves, from
moment-to-moment, as the situation demands.  An example might be the subduing
and/or restraint of somebody sniping away with a weapon (a recent thread on
seattle.general, I recall), a la the Luby Cafe massacre, or "first-responder"
emergencies and/or disasters of all kinds.  This already happens.  My point
is that humans have always had these functions performed in one way or another;
Fire-fighting is, especially in rural societies, a volunteer activity, as
are things like mountain rescue organizations, etc., etc.
Humans just naturally go to the aid of others in trouble, just like they have
always done.  People perform individual and public healing and helping and
repairing functions in all societies; even in hunter-gatherer societies,
as close to true anarchy as human societies ever get, somebody who went
bonkers (a rare event.  The only aborigines that go bonkers are those that
come intact with western-style civilization; perhaps aboriginal shamans
and healers know more about that than I do) would be restrained;
Sick people are still loved and cared for.

Trouble is, that monstrous cancer of civic functions, the State, aided by
economies of scale, has usurped and consolidated
these functions under one umbrella, which it then directs towards the
furtherance of its own extra-human-scale policies,  aided by ambitious
sociopaths (who might not fare so well in a more anarchic or free society).
So we get crusades, pogroms, Wars On Things People Don't Like, fireworks
and pyrotechnics and battering rams and other dramatic mesmerizers that look
good on TV (the ultimate attention-getting device -- but wait for
hi-sensory-bandwidth multi-media virtual reality!), and convey an image of
paternalistic semi-benevolent-but-intimidating omnipotence, stressing the
powerlessness of the individual and the power of the state.  This not only
reinforces dependence on the state but tends to have self-stimulating
properties that can rapidly get out of control, as we all are now learning
to our grief.  We are presently seeing instances of this the world over
right now.  The history of the 20th century in particular seems to be
repeating itself in tighter and tighter loops.

Certain "police" functions would appear to have their analogs in the
pain-feedback-mechanisms that are part of the body-safety mechanisms of
living creatures.  For the analogically impaired :) ,
	body politic is to police functions AS
	living creature is to pain-feedback-mechanism.
An example is the pain that we feel that tells us
to stop exerting a muscle, before the tearing strength of tendons are
reached, or muscle fascia rupture from pressure.  It's why we don't
tear ourselves apart when we perform activity of any kind.  When the
pain-feedback-mechanism gets deranged, as it does in individuals who take
PCP [ (recalling another long-dead thread [ hey -- how about a "famous threads
of yesteryear" newsgroup :) :) ]  in seattle.general ], one has enormous
strength because of the analgesic effect of PCP on pain, allowing muscles
to exert far more force than normally, at the expence of wear and tear on
the body.  Perhaps it is also the case that extraordinary bursts of adrenalin
or other fight-or-flight body hormones do the same thing.  One hears of tales
of mothers lifting cars off of their children (sometimes crushing a few
vertebrae in the process).  So it is with the coercive forces/functions of
the police, as it functions as the pain-feed-back mechanism of the body
politic.

One could even regard the state as a sort of singularity of authority --
a sociological black hole that humans orbit around (human groupings being
analogous to various cosmic aggregations such as stars, meteor swarms, comets
etc.), and fall into once they get past the analogical Schwartzchild radius,
as it appears that this society is perilously close to.  I intend this as
hopefully a fruitful jumping-off-place for speculation, brainstorming, and
exploring future visions of society.  I await your rotten veggies and
roadkills :) :) !

Recommended reading (in no particular order):

	Foster, M. A.                     Vance, Jack
	The Morphodite                    The Palace of Love
                                      DAW 325, 1979
	Foster, M. A.                     ISBN 0-87997-442-7
	Transformer
	DAW 524, 1983                     Vance, Jack
	ISBN 0-87997-814-7                Big Planet
	                                  Ace 06171, 1978
	Vance, Jack                       ISBN 0-441-06171-0
	The Face
	DAW 361, 1979                     Vance, Jack
	ISBN 0-87997-498-2                The Killing Machine
	                                  DAW 309, 1978
	                                  ISBN 0-87997-409-5
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
e-mail me at kurt@eskimo.celestial.com for a copy of Bob Black's essay,
"The Abolition of Work"
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc