Privatize the Police!

(Not really.)

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I have a very nerdy pet peeve: I bristle whenever I hear someone refer to the government as having “a monopoly on the use of violence.”

The phrase is cribbed from the German sociologist Max Weber. But it’s a misquote. Weber’s actual definition of the state was the institution that held “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” The distinction is crucial; without that word, the phrase is obviously false. Clearly, the state does not have a “monopoly on violence.” Go out and tackle someone. You’ve just committed violence. There you go — the state has not monopolized it.

The state does, however, have a monopoly on legitimate violence. If you tackle a random stranger, you’ll likely be arrested for it, because, unless you’re a cop, your use of violence is not “legitimate.” If, on the other hand, a police officer, in the course of trying to subdue you in a lawful arrest, tackles you, it is legitimate. You may have a problem with it (I would), but that’s too bad: unlike you and everyone else without a badge, the state has the right to exercise violence legitimately. That’s what makes it a state. (Weber is speaking descriptively, not normatively; in his definition, “legitimate” and “perceived as legitimate” are synonymous.)

If this sounds like an academic quibble, that’s because it literally is one. But it’s also at the very heart of one of the most divisive political questions of our moment: whether we should “defund” the police.

On Wednesday, Congresswoman Cori Bush was asked by CBS News to explain how she can call for defunding the police while paying $70,000 for a private security detail for herself. Her answer was long and a bit chaotic, but it amounted to: Because there are people who want to kill me.

For people living in high-crime neighborhoods, that response may seem to beg the question. Cori Bush isn’t the only one facing the threat of homicide. Nationally, murders are up by nearly 13 percent over last year, which was, in turn, up by 25 percent over the year before. That rise is concentrated in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods, where people can’t afford a private security detail. Why should they be deprived of police protection while Cori Bush gets her own little bespoke police detail?

That’s the obvious question. But there’s also a more fundamental one implied by Bush’s support for the defund agenda: should the state be denied the legitimate use of violence, while Cori Bush’s private security detail enjoys it?

Bush has compared policing to slavery. So has Representative Jamaal Bowman. Rep. Rashida Tlaib has called policing “inherently and intentionally racist” and said that it “can’t be reformed.” The challenge to the institution of policing from these members of the Squad is not an incremental one. It calls into question the very existence of armed employees of the state who are licensed to use violence to enforce laws.

This is where my quibble becomes more than academic. We live in a country with nearly 400 million guns in it, by far the most in the world. The United States government will likely never have a monopoly on gun violence alone; forget about “violence” in general. At present, however, government employees — police officers and soldiers — are the only ones whose use of force in situations other than self-defense is widely deemed justified, legal and legitimate. The state, that is to say, still enjoys what Weber described as a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” The call to abolish the police is a call to strip the government of that legitimacy.

That’s a radical, but not philosophically impossible, position to defend. But if one is to defend it, one needs to then answer the question: if not the state, then who will be authorized to use violence legitimately?

“Nobody” is a non-answer. If we were content to act like children, we could pretend that we could abolish violence from the world simply by declaring it universally illegitimate. If we commit our thought experiment to the parameters of the real world, however, we have to acknowledge that people will employ violence whether we like it or not. The only control we have over it is our ability to act, as a society, to regulate it — to determine who is authorized to use it, and under what conditions, and who is not.

Cori Bush paid $70,000 to a private New York security firm to protect her, which is to say, to be prepared to use physical violence to subdue anyone who attempts to attack her. Presumably, the firm is legally licensed to perform this service. Its employees are authorized by law to do so, meaning that the government has given them conditional permission to use physical force on people for certain purposes and under certain circumstances. Were Cori Bush’s security guards to deploy that force in a way they were not authorized to — say, to rob an old lady on the street, or to rough up someone who called them a bad word — that would be an illegitimate use of violence. They would then be subject to arrest and incarceration, which is to say they would be subject to the legitimate use of violence by the state.

Strip state-sanctioned violence of its legitimacy, and what are you left with? Is Cori Bush’s security detail still authorized to use violence to protect her, because we’ve granted them that legitimacy in lieu of the state’s? If so, ok — that’s a position you could take, and try to defend. In fact there’s a whole literature you could lean on, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman. It’s an old, familiar position called “privatization.”

Perhaps Cori Bush’s call to defund the police while paying a private security detail is standard issue political hypocrisy. Or maybe it’s consistent with a philosophical position on who has a right to use violence and who doesn’t. If she really thinks we should all make do without a bunch of armed professionals trained to use lethal force to protect us, then she should probably ditch the rent-a-cops. If what she really wants is to privatize the police so that those who can afford a private security detail can hire one, and those who can’t, can’t, then she should just say so.