Like everybody else, I’ve been trying to make sense of the Las Vegas shooting, in which a 64-year-old guy named Stephen Paddock apparently opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 country music festival attendees from his 32nd-floor room in the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 59 people and injuring hundreds more.

One of the confusing things about this horrible incident is that from what we know about him so far, Paddock doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would do something like this. He went through a lot of trouble to kill as many people as he did, so you’d think he must have done something else on a smaller scale first to think this would be worth the effort, and yet according to reports he had no criminal record, no extremist political views, no trouble with his neighbors, and no obvious prior signs of mental illness. That’s strange because you don’t go from being a normal person to being a mass murderer overnight without a period of transition. The idea that people “just snap” is more myth than reality. It takes time to become the kind of person who would commit this kind of atrocity. So why weren’t there any signs?

I suppose one possible explanation is that Stephen Paddock was not the shooter: The real shooter lured him (and his guns) to the hotel, shot him, and then opened fire on the crowd, escaping before the police arrived to find a “convenient” murder-suicide scenario. I don’t actually believe this is what happened. It’s a movie plot, not real life, and unless the perpetrator is a Moriarty-level criminal mastermind, it would also leave a ton of evidence that would be easy for the police to discover. It’s even less likely than just snapping.

(Also, recent reporting about the incident rules it out.)

Another possibility is that Paddock had a brain tumor that caused a sudden, violent change of behavior. No doubt this crossed my mind because I’m familiar with the case of Charles Whitman, who similarly shot at a crowd from a high perch, at the University of Texas (Austin) in 1966, and was discovered at autopsy to have a brain tumor which some neurologists have speculated may have contributed to his behavior. Paddock’s behavior could also be explained by some other form of brain damage, perhaps from a stroke or a traumatic head injury or some other cause.

The truth is, the most likely explanation for the conflict between Paddock’s normal life and its violent end is probably much more prosaic. It’s most likely the same explanation as for every other murderer who is described by acquaintances as “quiet”: We’ve only heard from people who didn’t know him very well.

When something like this happens, it’s easy for the press to find the killer’s neighbors and colleagues, but few of them are likely to know anything relevant. As with most of us, a lot of people may have known him, but few people knew him really well. The media, and maybe the police, just haven’t found people who know, if they even exist.

I’ve been watching the reaction on Twitter to President Trump’s pardoning of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio is a despicable authoritarian bigot, who I’ve written about several times previously. He is famous, and famously proud, of how tough he was on the prisoners in his custody. He liked seeing them mistreated and humiliated, often in very unpleasant ways. I don’t know if he actually enjoyed it when his prisoners died, but a bunch of them have died, often under questionable circumstances, and Arpaio has never shown an ounce of human sorrow.

I was most struck by the reaction from Mistress Matisse:

Now, this next part is probably the sort of thing that only seems profound at 3:00 in the morning (when I started writing this), but bear with me… What really got me thinking is that Mistress Matisse and Joe Arpaio have something in common: They both like to hurt people.

As you might have guessed from the name, Mistress Matisse is a professional dominatrix. She literally hurts people for a living. And if you follow her Twitter feed (@mistressmatisse), you’ll see she enjoys her work. Oh, I’m sure there are days where she’s like “Oh God, I can’t wait to veg out in front of the TV once I finish sticking needles into this guy’s penis…”, but for the most part, she seems to have found satisfying employment. She hurts people, and she’s good at it.

Nevertheless, Mistress Matisse is pissed about Joe Arpaio, because of course, the difference between Mistress Matisse hurting people and Joe Arpaio hurting people is consent. And consent makes all the difference in the world.

Mistress Matisse posts descriptions and photos of the some of the things she does to her clients and, honestly, I couldn’t take that. If she tried to do some of those things to me without my consent, I would resist, violently if necessary. But her clients not only give their consent, they actually pay her to do those things.

Yet if I’m ever in Seattle and I happen to run into Mistress Matisse, I wouldn’t be the least bit concerned about her pain-causing skills. I don’t pretend to know or understand her very well, but I’ve read enough of her writings to know that she thinks very carefully about issues of consent. She doesn’t want to hurt people against their will.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, on the other hand, doesn’t give a shit about consent. He’s a thug, and he had an army of deputy thugs working for him. I would be very nervous running into him in a situation he controlled. If he could find a way, he wouldn’t hesitate to have a critic like me thrown in a cage in the 110 degree heat of the Arizona sun.

I don’t have any profound point here. And I certainly hope this is not coming across as “Joe Arpaio is even worse person than a professional dominatrix,” because that would be insulting to the pro dom community. The juxtaposition between Mistress Matisse and Joe Arpaio just struck me as a stark illustration of the importance of consent.

As a someone who leans libertarian, I place a lot of importance in the concept of consent. And I regard the absence of consent as a defining requirement for legitimately designating something as a crime: Sex without consent is rape, commerce without consent is theft, and inflicting pain without consent is torture.

Lack of consent alone is not enough to make something a crime, but if there is full consent, then it should never be a crime. As far as I’m concerned, Mistress Matisse is a successful and valued practitioner of an unusual art. Nothing to worry about.

Joe Arpaio, on the other hand, hurt a lot of people without their consent. Obviously, detaining and punishing criminals without their consent is a necessary part of criminal justice, but the lack of consent also makes it especially important that the criminal justice system is subject to strict requirements and oversight. Arpaio had little of that, and he and his deputies went way beyond what was necessary to keep the peace.

It’s particularly relevant to the contrast with Mistress Matisse that Arpaio jailed consensual sex workers and subjected them to harsh conditions, including one particularly gruesome case in which his guards tortured and killed a sex worker. Yet that’s just one of many deaths and many more prisoners subject to torturous conditions. Arpaio was one of the most monstrous figures in modern American law enforcement.

There’s something very wrong, some kind of complete inversion of the meaning of consent, when we have governments that want to throw people like Mistress Matisse in jails that are run by people like Joe Arpaio.

A hypothetical question for my criminal law readers (or anyone else who has ideas): What should I do if I inadvertently come into possession of contraband?

To make it more concrete, suppose I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, when a stranger confronts me, thrusts a duffle bag into my hands, and runs away. When I open a duffle bag, I find a tightly wrapped kilo of cocaine, a pile of child pornography, and a MAC-10 submachinegun. As I look up, I notice several police officers coming down the street, obviously searching for someone or something. They haven’t noticed me yet. What should I do next?

As a good citizen who has come across evidence of a crime, it seems like I should probably turn all of this in to the police. But if I walk up to one of the cops and show him the bag, I’m essentially confessing to possession of the contraband items and proving it with physical evidence. My possession was unintentional, and that might make for a winning defense at trial, but I’m not so sure it would keep me from being arrested. This seems like a risky choice.

If I had a lot of time to decide what to do, I could contact a criminal defense lawyer to help me. I imagine he could probably make a deal where I don’t get arrested for turning over useful evidence of a crime. Or maybe there’s some other solution.

On the other hand, if I didn’t have the time to talk to a lawyer, I think the safest move would be tossing the duffle bag into the nearest dumpster and hoping that nobody saw me with it. That seems like the simplest way to get out of a sticky situation, but is it? Do I have a legal obligation to report the contents of the duffle bag to the police? After all, I saw the other guy possess it, so I’m a witness to a crime, and I’m also in possession of physical evidence. If I throw away the duffle bag, am I concealing a crime?

My reason for asking this is because of a New York Times opinion piece in which Doctor Sandeep Jauhar describes an incident in which he feels he protected doctor-patient confidentiality:

I once took care of a business executive in the emergency room who had hired call girls during a weekend drug binge. When he saw a police officer outside his room, he quietly handed me an envelope containing a large amount of white powder. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I discarded it. For the next several hours the patient eyed me suspiciously, probably wondering whether I had ratted him out. But it never occurred to me to do so.

Professor Steven Lubet from the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern takes issue:

Hiding evidence of a crime isn’t confidentiality; it’s obstruction of justice. There is nothing about one’s status as a physician — or a lawyer, for that matter — that requires or excuses the possession or concealment of contraband.

Jack Marshall also disagrees:

Confidentiality is one thing, assisting in a crime is another. The Hippocratic Oath says “What I may see or hear in the course of treatment, I will keep to myself.” That only means, however, that doctors who learn about criminal activity a patient may be involved in is bound not to report it (lawyers have the same obligation). Jauhar did more than not report criminal activity; he participated in it. He crossed the line by disposing of contraband.

There’s a side issue here, because an unidentified white powder in an envelope doesn’t prove anything. To this day, Dr. Jauhar has no idea what was really in that envelope. And it doesn’t matter that a cop might have arrested the patient upon seeing that powder without any proof that it was an illegal substance. Nor does it matter that a judge might have held him in jail for weeks before getting a lab report identifying the powder as an illicit substance. The epistemological failings of the criminal justice system have little relevance to medical ethics.

The main question here is what should Doctor Jauhar have done? Marshall says he “crossed the line by disposing of contraband” but then doesn’t explain what he would have done if he had been in Jauhar’s place. Lubet also fails to describe what the doctor should have done. He mentions the problem, but he doesn’t seem to recognize it: “There is nothing about one’s status as a physician — or a lawyer, for that matter — that requires or excuses the possession or concealment of contraband.” When it is illegal to both possess and cease to possess something, that doesn’t seem like very good lawmaking.

Are Lubet and Marshall saying that if they had been in the doctor’s place that they would have walked over to the nearest cop and said, “I just got this from a patient and I thought you should see it,” and then handed him the envelope full of (probably) cocaine, taking it on faith that he wouldn’t get arrested?

It doesn’t work to say they wouldn’t have taken the envelope in the first place, because how could they know what was in it until they looked inside? And please don’t say that the doctor should have handed the envelope back to the patient once he saw what was in it, no unless you want to explain why giving illegal drugs to a patient is more ethical than discarding them.

You might think it’s crazy to believe the police would arrest a doctor for turning over drugs that he found on a patient, but just because the police might not arrest him for it doesn’t mean it’s not a crime. And if it is a crime, they might arrest him for it. It wouldn’t be the first time police decided to arrest someone now and sort out the details later.

I admit that I haven’t heard of any doctors being charged in situations like this, but it does happen to other people. I have read news reports of security guards at music venues taking illegal drugs off concertgoers and then getting arrested for possessing illegal drugs. So unless there’s an explicit exception in the law for doctors in this situation, it seems to me that Dr. Jauhar was in danger of getting arrested, and disposing of the envelope was the prudent thing to do. (This is not legal advice, but it’s very, very practical advice.)

The basic problem I’m having with this whole scenario is that mere possession of contraband is inherently a victimless crime that harms no one. That’s not just my opinion, it’s physics. Granted, there are some substances which can actively endanger innocent people if not contained properly — radioactive materials, unstable explosives, poisonous gases, biosafety level 4 pathogens — but a big pile of cocaine or child pornography or guns does not hurt innocent people merely by existing. And possessing that pile of contraband doesn’t mean you’re hurting people either.

Further proof that crimes of possession are not based on reality comes from the fact that members of the criminal justice system routinely do the same thing as the people they are arresting and prosecuting. If a cop finds a baggie of cocaine in your pocket, he’ll arrest you for possession and then take the baggie of cocaine. That means he’s now in possession of a controlled substance, and yet somehow that’s not a problem. Depending on the nature of the contraband and the standard practices of each court system, the contraband could also end up in the hands of the prosecutor, the defense lawyer, the judge, and even the jury. And apparently none of those people are committing a crime.

(Actually, that might not be the case. Legislatures are notorious for not including exceptions for law enforcement activities in the criminal statutes, meaning that in some states things like police sting operations, SWAT raids, and even death penalty executions are technically crimes. Another way to put that is that police and prosecutors sometimes break the law in the course of their jobs, but nobody charges them with crimes.)

We criminalize the harmless possession of contraband because it’s a useful proxy for other crimes that are more difficult to police. It’s a lot harder to catch somebody smoking pot in their own home than it is to catch them with pot in their pocket as they walk home. It’s a lot harder to catch an armed robber than it is to catch someone in possession of an illegal gun. It’s a lot harder to catch graffiti artists tagging a building than it is to catch them buying spay paint. All other things being equal, police and prosecutors prefer to go after crimes that are easier to prove.

Unfortunately, we also criminalized possession of various contraband goods out of a desire to “send a message” that some related behavior is bad, or because the people enforcing the laws are confused enough to believe that there really is something harmful about possession of contraband.

And so our criminal justice system keeps doing stupid things like arresting people for child pornography images on computers that they possess on behalf of someone else, or arresting people for “residue,” or intercepting packages of drugs in the mail, delivering them to the recipient on the label, and then arresting that person for possessing the drugs that they just gave him.

Possession is often kind of a stupid crime, stupidly enforced. And don’t get me started on crimes based on constructive possession…

I’ve always thought that “possession” was an odd type of crime. Legal possession is such a passive concept. It doesn’t seem right to even call it a behavior. I’m pretty sure you can be guilty of possessing contraband even when you are literally asleep in bed. That just doesn’t sound harmful enough to justify punishment.

And consider what happens if the police bust you for possession of marijuana: The police will confiscate your stash. At that point they are the ones who are in possession of marijuana, aren’t they? Why is it that it was illegal when you did it, but it’s legal when they do it?

Because the law says so, I guess, but why? Cops can’t legally break into someone’s house and steal their jewelry or force women into having sex with them, so why is possession different? What’s the principle here? Clearly, since cops are allowed to do it, possession of marijuana doesn’t actually cause whatever social harm the law is seeking to prevent. So why is possession still illegal?

I think the answer has to be that possession is a proxy for the behavior that causes actual harm. In the case of marijuana, that would be the harm caused by smoking marijuana. (As a libertarian, I don’t see any net social harm from smoking marijuana, but let’s ignore that for the sake of argument.)

The problem — for the drug warriors, anyway — is that it’s hard to catch people smoking marijuana because it only takes a few minutes and they can do it in hiding. So the legislatures have moved backwards on the causal chain to criminalize a precursor act that is easier to detect: People generally possess marijuana for a lot longer than they smoke it, and they often do so in relatively public places where police can observe them, question them, and search them. Thus criminalizing the possession of marijuana serves as an imperfect way to attack the problem of smoking marijuana, at the cost of criminalizing behavior that is not really harmful.

This explains why it’s not a crime for cops to possess marijuana after a bust: They aren’t going to smoke it later.

Other crimes of possession can also be justified by their relation to harmful acts: We criminalize felons possessing guns because we don’t want them murdering people, we criminalize young people possessing cans of spray paint because we don’t want them vandalizing buildings with graffiti, and we criminalize possessing open containers of booze in cars because we don’t want drivers to drink.

The exact conditions under which it’s okay to punish people for harmless behavior in the name of stopping a related harmful act is a moral and ethical question worthy of exploration, but for now I’d like to look at a more practical problem. Because the behavior that is illegal is distinct from the behavior that is harmful, scenarios can arise where the law doesn’t really make sense.

For example, it’s illegal to possess child pornography. Clearly, mere possession is harmless, as proven by the fact that police and prosecutors can possess child pornography in the process of sending people to jail for it. Possession of child porn is nevertheless illegal because we don’t want people to look at it.

Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett gives an example of how this can lead to a bizarre dilemma:

Suppose that a client comes to you with a problem: he has a computer hard drive full of child pornography, and he wants to know what to do with it. What do you tell him?

It’s illegal for him to continue possessing the images. So you can’t advise him to do nothing (and keep breaking the law).

The smart thing for him to do would be to destroy the hard drive (if I could, I would recommend swisscheesing it with a drill press).

But tampering with evidence is illegal under both Texas and federal law.

This is not just a hypothetical situation. At least one lawyer has been prosecuted for destroying child pornography on a client’s computer.

Lawyers wouldn’t be facing this kind of conundrum if it weren’t for the crime/harm separation that is inherent in possession laws. If possession of child pornography wasn’t a crime, then deleting it from the hard drive wouldn’t be destruction of evidence of a crime. It would arguably even be crime prevention, since deleting it prevents people from looking at it, just as flushing marijuana down the toilet prevents people from smoking it.

(I’ve never heard of someone being charged with destroying evidence of pot possession by smoking it, but people do get charged with tampering with evidence for eating drugs when the cops pull them over.)

On the other hand if the crime and harm of possessing child pornography were linked, if mere possession somehow did cause actual harm, then deleting the pornography from the drive would be stopping a crime in progress. The lawyer would be a crime fighter.

If you have trouble thinking about possession being harmful in that way, try imagining it this way: The lawyer visits the client’s house, but instead of learning that the client has child pornography, he discovers that the client has an actual child, locked in a cage in the basement. Alarmed, the lawyer frees the child, who immediately runs off. The child is confused, however, and is never able to identify his captor or the location he was held. By releasing the child, the lawyer has in a sense obstructed the ability of the police to charge his client for kidnapping, yet no sane person would argue that he shouldn’t have done it.

I’m not going so far as to say that possession should never be a crime, but the fact that possession crimes don’t work that way is a sign that possession is a strange kind of crime, one where stopping the crime is also a crime. I’m not sure how to fix this, but I’m pretty sure it’s broken.

This is my third post in a series of ruminations about lethal force. Part 1 discussed the basics of what might or might not be self defense, and in Part 2 I discussed how participants and witnesses report and distort what happens, and in this part, I’ll be exploring how the news gets out, and what we do with it.

News

In most cases of lethal force, not only do we not know what happened, we don’t even have access to anyone who knows what happened. All we get are accounts passed to us by news reporters, editorial writers, bloggers, and acquaintances. As I’ve tried to show, these incidents can get very complicated once you take into account the ethics of lethal force, subjective perceptions, and the possibility that people are lying. Meanwhile, news stories necessarily have to economize on detail, because there’s limited space and limited time to write. Therefore it’s highly unlikely that any of our sources of information will pass along every detail we need to know.

Furthermore, the people telling the story are also subject to all the same distorting influences as the witnesses: They could make mistakes interpreting witness accounts, they could misremember witness accounts, or they could spin the story (or outright lie) to serve their own agenda. Even if they try to keep everything straight, they’re bound to make mistakes, and they’re bound to distort the account based on their own interpretation.

The same thing will happen all over again when people read these stories and pass them on, comment on them, or write blog posts about them (and don’t even get me started on Twitter). It ends up being like a game of telephone, except that instead of passing the message along in a line, from one person to the next, it’s more like something happens to people in the center and information about it radiates outward along multiple interweaving paths. Each person in the information flow receives different stories from different people at different times.

Further, as they receive each piece, they can either adjust their mental model of what happened to accommodate the new information, or they can reject the new information because it seems unlikely to be true, based on the model they have so far. In this way, everybody comes to believe a different version of the story, and they will interpret new information based on the framework established by that story.

Argument

That we all have different ideas of what really happened is a big problem when we start to argue about what it means. It’s hard to have a discussion about right and wrong, crime and punishment, when we don’t agree on the facts. It’s doubly hard when we don’t realize that we’re all working from different mental models of the main incident.

I first noticed this several decades ago, back before the internet was everyone’s source of news, as I watched the story of one such incident dribble out in a series of small revelations. I can’t remember enough details to look it up, so I’m certainly misremembering it, but I’m offering it as an example of a phenomenon, not to discuss the specifics of the incident. The series of revelations, in the order I encountered them, went something like this:

• A drunk guy visiting a friend late at night accidentally went to the wrong house and was yelling and pounding on the back door when the homeowner shot and killed him. To me, it was hard to see how the homeowner could possibly be in reasonable fear for his life, so this sounded like some kind of murder.
• The homeowner said he thought the guy was trying to break in. Burglary is not a reason to kill someone, but a guy breaking into the house while you’re there might justify lethal force. However, it was difficult to agree with the homeowner’s perception, since pounding and yelling aren’t really a break-in.
• Before pounding and yelling on the back door, the guy had rung the front doorbell. Presumably he thought his friend was asleep, so after the doorbell didn’t work, he went around back to try to get his attention. Some people argued that burglars never do that, but I had heard that ringing the doorbell was a great way to find out if a house is unoccupied without doing anything clearly illegal. If the homeowner answers, just say you must have the wrong address and walk away. Or if you’re the violent type, ringing the bell gets the homeowner to open the door for you, so you don’t have to risk attracting attention by breaking in. This information seemed to cut either way in terms of fault.
• The most damning detail to come out was that the homeowner shot the guy through the back door. This seems indefensible. You’re never supposed to shoot without identifying your target, and you have no idea what’s on the other side of the door — what if a neighbor came over to investigate the noise and was standing behind the guy? What if the guy knocking had a child with him? You just don’t know. Shooting through the door was terribly reckless and made it seem more like a murder of some kind.
• At least until it came out that the back door was a screen door. The homeowner heard noises from the back of the house and went to investigate. He didn’t just find someone pounding and kicking the door. He found someone punching and kicking through the screen into the house, while he was standing there with the gun in his hand. No wonder he shot.

This was actually a fairly simple story, and yet many of the people discussing this story, including the news media, weren’t used to thinking about the issues involved in lethal force, and they had missed a bunch of important points, including the final detail that changed everything. And as these points came out, arguments kept erupting over the incident, often between people working from different versions of what happened.

Laura hears that Alice shot Bob after he broke into her house in the middle of the night, and based on that, Laura concludes that Alice justifiably shot Bob in self-defense and should not be charged with a crime. Natalie hears that Alice shot Bob after inviting him over, and based on that, Natalie concludes that Alice murdered Bob and deserves to go to jail. They have both reached reasonable yet incompatible conclusions based on what they know.

It seems like a simple misunderstanding that could be cleared up with a little discussion, but it’s simple human nature that once we have staked out our positions, we become resistant to considering alternatives, even if the evidence for them is pretty good. Confirmation bias and other phenomenon make us resistant to changing out minds and accepting new evidence, even if the evidence from which we formed our initial opinion is proving increasingly shaky. Further, the strength of our belief makes it difficult to consider that other people may have reasonably interpreted the situation very differently.

When these people get into arguments with each other over the incident, the difference in conclusions is simple and obvious, but people’s internal mental models of what happened are hidden, so folks on each side have trouble understanding how people on the other side could reach a different conclusion, and they often misattribute those conclusions to ignorance, prejudice, or anti-social values rather than recognizing that different assumptions are in play.

If Laura and Natalie hear each other’s conclusions without hearing the reasons for them, they’ll conclude bad things about each other. Laura will be appalled that Natalie wants Alice to go to jail for shooting a home invader — she may accuse Natalie of coddling criminals or believing men should be able to attack women without consequences. Natalie, on the other hand, will be appalled that Laura believes that murderers like Alice should go free — she may accuse Laura of coddling criminals or believing that women should be able to gun down men without consequences.

We’ve seen this sort of thing happen in Ferguson, with the shooting of Mike Brown by Darren Wilson. Some people see an unarmed black kid gunned down by a white policeman and conclude that anyone who doesn’t think the cop belongs in jail must be a black-hating racist who thinks it’s okay for cops to gun down black people in the streets. They want justice for Mike Brown.

While there are certainly some racists who feel that way, I think it’s safe to say that many of Wilson’s supporters simply don’t believe that narrative about the encounter. They think Mike Brown viciously attacked Darren Wilson and tried to grab his gun, presumably to kill him, and then when Darren Wilson tried to arrest him, Brown attacked again and Wilson shot to defend himself. They think Brown’s supporters are just white-hating racists making excuses for black violence, or attention-seekers trying to drum up trouble out of ulterior motives. And while there are certainly some people doing just that, I think it’s safe to say that many of Brown’s supporters simply don’t think he attacked Officer Wilson.

It’s hard to understand other people’s arguments when you don’t realize you’re not arguing about the same thing.

Interlude: The Police

Shootings by police officers have been in the news a lot lately, and they’ve touched off a lot of controversy, especially when the police shoot unarmed black males. For the most part, I think we should analyze police shootings the same as any other, but there are a few special considerations.

For one thing, police get a lot of training in how to handle potentially violent encounters, and this training affects their perceptions and the conditions under which they fear for their lives. For example, a police officer may have been trained that an assailant with a knife who is within 20 feet can stab him faster than he can draw a gun, so he’s likely to regard someone 15 feet away with a knife as a deadly threat, and he can likely point to his training as the reason he was in fear for his life.

Also, police follow a departmental use-of-force policy, which specifies when and how officers can use different degrees of force, up to and including deadly force. So officers may escalate their level of violence according to training or departmental policy rather than according to what a reasonable non-police-officer would do.

In addition, we expect police to actively fight crime. This means that we expect them to look for trouble, and when they find it, we expect them to stand their ground rather than try to run away. That would be suspicious or troublesome in an ordinary citizen, but for a police officer, that’s the job. We actually expect police to make arrests. This necessarily involves laying hands on people. It’s a violent act that would be called battery and kidnapping if anyone else did it. As a society, we want police to do this violence to protect us from bad people who would harm us, so acts that would cause other people to lose their right of self defense are often acceptable when done by a police officer.

On the other hand, just because police are carrying out a public service mission in accordance with their societal role, training, and departmental policy doesn’t magically eliminate the social costs of what they do. Having people with guns who are looking for trouble, standing their ground, and grabbing people off the street to lock them up in cages is still a form of harm to the people they are doing it to, even if they are criminals.

When police officers hurt people according to departmental guidelines, that doesn’t mean that it’s okay. It just changes the discussion from a question of personal ethics to a question of public policy. Instead of asking if the cops are bad people, we need to ask if the cops are following bad policies.

Just because the cops were doing what they were told doesn’t mean the policy, the mission, and the training aren’t wrongheaded, unethical, or downright evil. Just because police departments theoretically serve the needs of the society they’re embedded in doesn’t mean they aren’t up to no good. Like all institutions, they will serve their own needs, which may conflict with the public good.

For example, police conduct tens of thousands of drug raids every year, and on some of those raids the officers mistakenly kill an innocent person. The mistakes may be honest mistakes — the police thought they saw a gun, or they thought they were taking fire — so we might conclude that the officer did nothing deserving punishment, nothing that we’d call evil. At the same time, we might also conclude that staging a series of drug raids that carry the risk of killing innocent people is a policy that does more harm than good.

I’m almost done with this subject, but I think I have one more post in me.