Le crime qui créa la police

[José]

Il y a cinq ans, à l'époque dorée du Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Michael Gilson de Lemos écrivait un article sur les origines privées de la police et du service postal, et comment l'État persécuta ces bienfaiteurs, pour ensuite, tel un parasite, s'approprier de ces inventions. Que personne n'espère une lecture prévisible ou politiquement correcte :

The Crime that Created Police

Jonathan Wilde: Detective, Entrepreneur, Martyr

by Michael Gilson De Lemos

This is the story of the cynical judicial murder of the man who created a critical segment of modern policing as a private institution—and the expropriation of postal services that preceded it, services so efficient and targeted to individual needs that they have not been replicated to the present day. It allowed its takeover by the government, giving birth to police as understood today. With it were murdered and expropriated the first proto-Libertarian innovations in police and postal public services: and not only is what exists today a less efficient monstrosity built from their corpses, but it is the story of the murder of the very concept of private, voluntary services that address the needs of the individual and thus the people.

Why, it is sometimes asked has there been an intellectual and cultural bias to government police? Even with the vast government propaganda, shouldn’t the market have made them all private by now, or there at least be well known private alternatives, especially at the beginning? Particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, doesn’t that prove something is wrong with the idea? Or was there a moment when it was ripped from our historical awareness, as the role of juries is now under accusations of runaway juries and the media deification of anonymous judges? What about ancillary services, such as postal service? Were these not always governmental and somehow inherently so?

A standard method of Libertarian social analysis is to not follow the fashion of starting discussion with the latest paper, fad, or institution but dig into the causes. Invariably Libertarians find that at the bottom of every “obvious” government institution lies something entirely different. Rothbard and Gabriel Kolko, in exposing how business regulation began in the US, from different angles used this method in a classic way: in government, things are often the opposite of what they seem.

In the case of the genesis of the police, it has had to await the recent public access to the records of the Old Bailey, the notorious citadel of evil of the British justice system in the 1600s. In fact, numerous innovations were created by private persons—police schemes, the postage stamp, fire companies, insurance groups—only to be seized or confiscated by the government as they proved profitable or popular.

The Police Were Born in Crime

In Britain, the process was similar to latter day America. From medieval times there were an array of private police and neighborhood guard efforts—starting with the simple neighborhood “hue and cry” when a problem was discovered—that provided low cost service close to and controlled by the people using them, and thus at tension with a central government that for monetary, power and religious reasons thought to create a compulsory and uniform system whether it solved the problem or not.

Thus, in the name of “improving” and “regulating” private action, laws were imposed that raised their costs and created distortions.

Laws destroyed the volunteers by requiring unusual and increasingly burdensome hours and encouraging hiring of government “professionals.” People willing to volunteer a few hours a month suddenly found themselves required to put in many hours a week and started failing to show up, which the government then adduced as proof of the need for regular taxes, the failure of freedom, general greed and laziness, and the necessity of what we would today call government “professionalization.“ Criminal abuses by those in the watch were illogicaly magnified as proving the entire system of community participation was flawed. Community and neighborhood control was broken down by distant and intimidated juries and central courts.

We see a similar process in militia training. Ancient Republics trained soldiers as part of teenage schooling (an age when young people love such exercises), so efficiently that chronicles are filled with stories of the young Alcibiades or Caesar mastering complex situations with perfect self-possession while yet teens. But in the US an impetus of the modern military were pointless mandated militia drills, delay of training to when people had already begun their careers, and government hostility to militia clubs, resulting in the "problem" of people not showing up for training and calls for a compulsory military. Indeed, governments were horrified when the system still worked: the nationalization into "National Guards" and the creation of armories and gun control legislation in every city reflected the refusal of militias to fire on union strikers, that militias and private patrols arrested Federal revenue agents, and that Blacks successfully defended themselves against government-encouraged lynch mobs. Now there are calls to restore the draft via a "national service" to fill in for government inefficiencies while still attempting to throttle a natural approach in training and self-defense.

The process was in fact not dissimilar to how businesses are regulated by government into inaction or bizarre behavior, or misbehavior of the few (usually ignoring the role of corrupt government officials) sensationalized, which is then put forth as proof of not how government regulation and coercion backfire but instead of how more is needed. The government then does not, with its new found monopoly, set out to solve the problem but to instead prosecute those challenging its do-little monopoly or in violation of its highly technical and abstruse “standards.”

We are seeing this applied to the last remnants of citizen vigilance today in the US and the UK. After several incidents where people did not help others in distress, as it turned out for either very good reason or it was actually the inaction of off-duty government officers or people encharged with the task who were confusing the situation, laws were passed to compel citizens to offer help. Police have then preoccupied themselves with prosecuting, as is being seen in Florida, those who did not help soon enough, thus encouraging people to not help at all, and thus justifying the need for more “professional” government officers. Those who defend themselves from burglars or street muggings find themselves prosecuted for illegal ownership or use of weapons, overuse of retaliatory force, and the like.

The Old Bailey site, if one reads between the lines, has trouble concealing the tale of sinister corruption. Item after item in fact indicates not an evolution but new imposition of government control and citizen reaction over the centuries.

As a result, by the early 1700s, quasi-government officials wished to take over the “thief-takers” who acted as detectives, negotiated the return of goods and provided numerous arbitration services, and to place the process under court control that allowed the profitable jailing and transport of citizens on unsupported charges of “possession of stolen goods” that operated like the marihuana possession laws today (in contrast, kidnapping, hard to fake, was lightly punished). This culminated, a century later, in Peel’s founding of “honest” government police, which “Bobbies” inevitably corrupted to spawn the models of choice-free, centralized, bureaucratic, politicized and increasingly adversarial-to-the-citizen police as exist today.

The problem was that in the early 1700s the workingman Jonathan Wilde had, from a somewhat rascally background, developed the practice of detectives to new heights, creating community watches and many advanced techniques and practices used by police when they do actually get out into the community. He proposed in satiric attacks that jails actually increased crime, and advocated a more sensitive approach. He undermined attempts by city blue-noses against bawdy houses and for placing people in the profitable prisons, and in turn was denounced by local puritans in the government. In his “True Account” he understood the issue in terms of Nozickian or Friedmanite competition perfectly:

"When two of a Profession are at Variance, the World is let into many important Discoveries; and… an Expectation naturally arises of some Billingsgate Treatment."

People simply went to him rather than the official government if they wanted results. His brilliant integration of community, proaction, mediation and alternatives of defense completely transcended current Libertarian ideas of e.g. competing defense agencies, where well-intended scholars such as Friedman laboriously theorize on what might happenm instead of—as Aristotle posits as the first step of the scientific method—being aware of what did happen and which thus can be sensibly perfected and repeated.

Among his innovations:

• A negotiation service to obtain stolen goods from the criminals for a percentage and return them to the owners.
  
• Community groups to organize watches that interacted city-wide.
  
• Advice to people on how to prevent thefts.
  
• According to various oral traditions, he had the beginnings of a welfare agency to help thieves reform and by the same token saw to the arrest or charivari executions of real gangsters.
  
• An alternate method for handling the crime problem when the government was the major cause of it.
  

This last was particularly important. Not only were growing taxes and regulations impoverishing Britain, but the government had discovered that convicting people for theft on evidence that would be laughed out of court today—and draconian punishment, including what was in effect enslavement and deportation for a set number of years of its citizens and community dissidents, which by impoverishing families induced many to steal in order to feed themselves created a self-feeding cycle—was highly profitable and consolidated its shaky power after the restoration of the Monarchy.

The deportations were enslavement: many of those deported as in effect indentured servants for set terms found those terms meant life as they were extended for minor infractions at the whim and sole judgment of the service-holder. Indeed, one of the dirty secrets of the American Revolution was that this was the major form of slavery extant at the time of the American Revolution that many of the Founders were attempting to stamp out, of which African slavery was a variant: to understand how thoroughgoing it was, many White persons were so enslaved to Black freedmen into the 1800s; its presuppositions and draconian processes continue to corrupt the legal system (a prisoner is technically a slave of the government, and once again punishment in the US, despite mind-numbing “fair“ punishment formulas that take account of every factor but the direction of the wind yet result in disproportionate sentences) to this day.

Worse: The British legal system fed and was fed by the misery it created and the ease with which the innocent were convicted: people were victimized by theft accusations of those wishing to get rid of annoying relatives, servants who would not accede to their sexual impulses, inconvenient spouses, difficult creditors, the insane, pesky neighbors, simple revenge, and people who alarmed the government by asking for things such as their rights.

As one looks at the transcripts of the Old Bailey site, one reads not a tawdry tale of an England suddenly gone mad with a lust to steal one’s neighbor’s candlesticks and kerchiefs, but the magnification of neighborhood, domestic and revenge dramas by a winking government happy to, after a 10-minute trial, send the victims to years of servitude and destroy entire clans for its own aggrandizement and power. The mere accusation that something possessed was stolen led many to ruin, and these operated in the same fashion as the barbaric criminality of the possession and forfeiture laws today, so beloved by prosecutors, that ignore intent, effect or evidence. This was not some glorious era of the birth of government policing and courts, but the death spiral of a corrupt society that spawned the American Revolution, yet continues through scholars and propaganda to color thinking today not only in Britain, but any country that has had any British influence.

A Modern Prosecution?

While it initially used his services, the government soon cast Wilde in a different light. His negotiations were denounced as inducing thieves to steal. He was accused of forming a mafia like regime with his citizen councils. Apparently, some people were also stealing from their oppressors, and Wilde was accused of turning a blind eye to these—as was, if so, also the government. Wilde in his trial implied that at least some of his accusers were accusing him of what they were doing—and were distressed, presumably, that their cut was going down as Wilde diminished crime.

The trial transcript, now unearthed, reveals the horrifying scheme the government used to stop him, take over his reputation, and destroy his service: it not only accused him of theft to make himself look good with an easy property recovery, but claimed he ran a colossal fencing operation where he actually directed the thefts he then claimed credit for solving—but in fact targeted him with a fantastic law—proposed by the principal legal officer of the City, the Recorder, who was one of the judges—passed specifically against him so that he could, bizarrely, be charged with conspiring with himself to steal by simply accepting a reward. In effect, by this law, the entire British Government came down upon him.

This is the correct context for understanding the historical record. For this was, increasingly like today, the era of the “Bloody Code” and harsh punishments for minor offenses on little evidence.

Remorseful thieves were unlikely to admit anything and people were reluctant to bring charges lest an unjust death be on their conscience.

People responded to Wilde’s system of negotiating for the return of goods while encouraging people to take preventive measures, and soon groups carrying out his system arose in every area. The government was particularly horrified that he had organized people into quasi-democratic juristic councils in every district where they took care of their own justice needs in a sort of franchise operation, and people settled affairs without invoking the draconian government punishments or profitable fines.

In effect, he had begun to privatize to the people the entire capital in a disciplined, networked organization in an era where average men still did not vote. If people took active control to eliminate small thieves, it did not take much imagination for officials to wonder what would happen as the larger thieves of government came next on the list? As the government understood what was happening, it reacted. The outrageous tirade of the judge to Wilde’s plea for justice and exposure of what was really happening speaks for itself.

Like today’s prosecutors, the government took no chances, piling on one charge after another hoping something would stick. He was arrested for theft under 11 counts guaranteed to inflame the public that claimed he headed a mafia-like “Thieves corporation,’’ was not so much eliminating thieves as doing “mob” hits on competing thieves, and even sold human blood. Wilde protested the government was effectively in league with criminals to destroy actual police protection and they were after his life, even as thieves he had been unable to catch suddenly appeared as government witnesses.

And Wilde? Under the madcap procedures of the time, defendants could not compel witnesses, and were not allowed to even know when their trial was, so witnesses for the defense generally found it impossible to testify. His attorney could only raise points of law—felony defendants were actually forbidden attorneys since, “the crime being serious, they could adequately be motivated to defend themselves.” In contrast, Wilde’s system was open to any witness.

Not that the government witness proved its case. Wilde had recovered a stolen item—a bolt of cloth—from a shop and done so without expectation of reward. When the shopkeeper tried to raise the ransom amount for the thieves to recover the item, he did not let her do it. The witness was clearly reluctant and thought well of Wilde. The judge then engaged Wilde’s attorney in a metaphysical argument on whether one is a felon when not a thief, based on the meaning of the law passed to trap Wilde and whose Alice in Wonderland quality deepens over several readings—while blocking attempts to question the likely thief so facts that could help Wilde would come to light.

Wilde was almost saved. This was the era when judges made clear which way they wanted the case to go and jailed juries who turned in inconvenient verdicts. The jury stood up to the government, acquitted Wilde of the theft but saw no way of acquitting him of recovering stolen property and accepting a reward—apparently expecting he would be pardoned of the death penalty as was common—and the government lost no time: while convicted thieves were normally exiled or received fines, it hanged Wilde and court cronies took over his business. Pamphlets by nobodies filled the streets with increasingly lurid tales of his alleged crimes, further official calumnies created a circus against him at his hanging. Unquestioned fences operated with impunity; and crime—and to judge by the decreasing quality of the Old Bailey trials, trumped up charges also—blossomed. And the witnesses for the prosecution were discreetly executed upon equally questionable trials and silenced forever. In due course the Bow Street Runners took over many functions, imitated Wilde’s innovations such as being readily available and sending out investigators immediately, and while efficient, they were the elite that replaced the citizen’s providing and negotiating their own justice.

On the same day as his trial, the government unhesitatingly had over 60 trials where it sent people in a few short minutes to years of servitude or sentence of death, most on shaky allegations of taking small bits of cloth or merchant’s disconnected recollections that may well have been misplaced inventory. The defenses were perhaps most revealing: a litany of counter-accusations of revenge, misidentification, implications that the item was sold at the accuser’s behest and then they were blamed for the resulting price, the item was returned or statements that the item had been borrowed as normal. In some cases it appears people were, as in Wilde’s case, being convicted despite the accusers all but proclaiming the accused's innocence.

It is said that as he was jeered at the gallows, in a last testimony to the hypocrisy of the time and what was happening to him, he refused to talk—but ostentatiously picked the tee-totaling minister’s pocket, and removed a corkscrew that he displayed with a cool gaze to the uncertain crowd—and to future generations that might understand.

Scholars, unable to conceive the nature of Wilde’s innovations and restoration of common-law private policing, uncritically take accusations and memoirs of his enemies at face value and universally denounce him as at best a colorful rascal and at worst a conniving monster of theft, taking the story as settled. These scholars and writers would be careful of any trial transcripts and government stories if it was about the Nazi’s prosecuting some Jew for running a justice service, the Communists some businessman or the Inquisition some Witch on charges of trumped up thievery, and would give us a masterpiece of “close reading” putting the matter in perspective and showing what was really happening behind the scenes—more so, one would suppose, if the Nazi, Communist or Holy Office jury acquitted the accused and attempted a rebuke of the government by convicting the person of doing a good deed. Not the statist intellectuals, who apparently can‘t conceive of something so fundamental, like a fish not aware it lives in water, as showing the state itself is questioned.

The story is not settled. Reading between the lies and understanding what must have been happening, understanding the nature of coercive institutions reacting to change, reading Wilde’s extremely perceptive statements, go a long way. Perhaps Wilde may have added a little thievery to his operations but it might have been as police departments often allow snitches to wet their beaks to uncover bigger game. But at the end of the day the fact that stands over the case like the Colussus of Rhodes is he was acquitted of the only and underlying charge with common-law standing: the jury, far from throwing the book at him refused to convict him of theft, and found him guilty only of the good deed recovering stolen goods under the confusing and absurd law—one so strange it also technically made the judge and prosecution equally guilty.

While some, such as Vidocq—who 80 years after set out to found to the chagrin of official French police the Surete, the first detective agency— studied Wilde as a great innovator and seem to have understood what he was trying to do, among contemporaries no one was interested in a complicated political trial or understood the concept of private, voluntary innovation that put the public back into "public" services.

Thus he was comfortably transformed into a colorful rogue in tales such as “The Beggar’s Opera,” and ambiguous stories by Fielding, who benefiting from Wilde’s destruction, stepped into the vacuum and created the "first effective police force” and Defoe (including his Bastiat-like tongue-in-cheek essay, “Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business” against free-enterprise mentioning Wilde which hinted that if he was a criminal, there were far greater in the government and its regulations.

In the 1800s Ainsworth, who put the pot into potboiler, recast Wilde as a weasel in Jack Sheppard and even Sherlock Holmes’ Professor Moriarty and the play and song “Mack the Knife” are based on him.

And today? Wilde can expect no help from pseudo-intellectuals who believe all history is facilely explained as a conspiracy of patriarchs, racists and likely anti-Semites standing in the way of the enlightened government collective with bogus ideas of liberty, objectivity and serious attention to facts, and not only social science but art must advance this attitude. Thus currently and predictably for the times, Liss' Conspiracy of Paper moralizes that Wilde shows what happens with no police force, “the somewhat vague notion of liberty,” patriarchy, and works out his Judaic issues beyond “the very silly idea that historical fiction must be serious.”

Thus does literature indeed bear witness to the theft …of history.

A Different Type of Pioneer

Why should we be surprised?

Jean d'Arc saved France and was condemned as a traitor. Galileo was a great scientist and was portrayed as misleading people to ignorance. Medical science is riddled with great discoverers jailed as quacks.

The first advocates of free enterprise were burned at the stake in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid by the Inquisition. History is taught as the chronicle not of innovators but great thieves ruling countries portrayed as noble men. Even this month, a Peter Thiel leaps beyond all conceptions of monopolistic government postal delivery, creates a Paypal, and instead of being awarded a medal, is derided as “merely” a thieving capitalist and indirectly prosecuted under a ludicrous law for terrorism. The true pioneers of government alternatives were and are as misunderstood and buried in half-truths as early users of penicillin were burned as witches, and await their Will Durant.

Was the Wilde case unique? No. The expropriation of Wilde, from his efforts to his memory, was not unique to the era. While typically reference sources today attribute postal systems to the military posts of everyone from the Pharaoh Necho to various Chinese Dukes, the truth is that the first real system was a private venture by the practically unknown William Dockwra.

A few years before Wilde, he developed a competitive service next to the lumbering general Post for the general public, and created in a brief period every innovation taken for granted today: local stations, postmarks, prepays, and speed delivery—for a penny. This was at a time when thanks to government procedures, one could post a letter to Holland—but not across London.

After a period of confusion the government reacted viciously. It declared that Dockwra had infringed on a monopoly of services it never provided, he was prosecuted, and the government took over his organization, which by then in one city dwarfed the entire government system of the realm, and his employees. The more we study the past, the more we see the present: One motivator was government law enforcement pointing out that with mail in private hands, censorship and spying would be very difficult.

At one time much of the mail was delivered cheaply in the US by private post; in a similar process, they were throttled by government bureaucrats to a cheering section of social scientists claiming to find “natural monopolies” only government could address. This trend, under the influence of libertarian ideas and the creation of e-mail and services such as Federal Express has begun to reverse; and, several of the next-day service pioneers were avowed Libertarians.

Indeed, it has been remarked that postal package and government monopoly services seem incomplete and less efficient halves of a coin. One gets a glimpse why when one looks at the unequalled service of Dockwra: He provided not only door-to-door service like a Federal Express, but this was around set routes that delivered and collected mail 10 times (!) daily. An amazing 500 and growing stations existed in the City of London, typically several times what exists today in a city of that size.

Revealing its real motivation, the government did not just prohibit his business—it expropriated it, seizing stations it had not built in a centuries old series of monopolies but which Dockwra created in a matter of months.[1]

Being of minor aristocracy he did not suffer Wilde’s horrendous fate—but while a public outcry led to a pensioned job, as things died down he was again accused, Wilde-like, of the reverse of the truth: mismanagement. He lost everything. It was not until the last century that some deliveries were as efficient; says the 1946 Britannica of a service extinguished for nearly 300 years:

“This truly remarkable enterprise gave London a postal service which in some respects has never been equaled before or since.”

Reference sources ignore or distort their existence. Even civic architecture perpetuates the censorship: one goes to the Central Post Office in New York and sees chiseled in magnificent splendor on the colossal building Herodotus’ famous quote on Persian government couriers that they deliver through ill-weather and gloom of night—not that after 300 years, the US Postal Monopoly still can’t deliver the mail as cheaply, quickly and pleasantly as the man their institutional ancestor stamped out of existence and which monopoly they use to jail any who dare re-introduce the idea that government monopoly service is a pious racket, a fraud.

Yet people, such as this commentary challenging the current system by “Can we trust e-envoy?” by TeleWest head David Docherty, find their thinking expanded and their assumptions turned upside down when they learn even a little of Dockwra. “Have you ever heard of William Dockwra?” he begins in wonderment, as if he were Schliemann unveiling the unbelievable and disorienting truth that Troy really existed, that everything he—a leader of our society—was taught on the subject is suddenly and obviously false, and can barely realize it himself.

Wilde and Dockwra, like Caesar, though dead and wrongly reviled, you are mighty yet.

Thus was the current era of government policing and city “services” born: culminating in the official murder of Jonathan Wilde to justify government police forces, the takeover and destruction into the memory hole of his innovations—except in the family traditions of those who knew and understood him, many of whom were criminals transported to America by the same judges and who in turn influenced the attitude of their children, the American Revolutionaries, about government versus community police—and the defamation that, to judge by the Old Bailey site, continues to this day.

Even by implication on political websites, as the ruling Labour website calls for “More Police”—along with more teachers (even as the government wages a Jihad against low-cost and innovative private schools such as Summerhill) and more nurses (occasioned, according to health consultants I talked to in UK, by the brilliant government decision to cut nurses or so overburden them they would quit so as to justify raising doctor’s salaries while “cutting costs” with their expanded tasks and now on the way of being replicated in the US).

Do more police equal less crime? Do more white blood cells mean more health—or that a cancer of the blood has struck the system?

A New Libertarian Scholarship

Murray Rothbard stated Libertarianism is ultimately interdisciplinary science. It is well to take this seriously.

Ayn Rand once incorrectly claimed that a Libertarian system would mean police forces exterminating each other. She was quite amazed when I pointed out to her that far from an objection, creating peace among contending views was the problem that political philosophy was called on to solve, where all political theories did not end but began, and that a voluntary method was the only secure way.

More: there was historical precedent for contending police forces right on the very street where she lived, namely contending government forces, and the riots among New York’s politically motivated and coerced police forces in Civil War times (then a fact relatively unknown among Libertarians, but now put on the screen in Scorcese’s Gangs of New York).

This is worse. The truth is that it was a matter of government exterminating the freedom of people to create alternative services under a common law. This Ur-crime of government police and city services is so fundamental that, as one can see looking at the Old Bailey, London and other government sites, it is continued to this day in the distortion of the events. It must continue to be denied and trivialized by government, scholars, writers because if true, history since then is wrong.

Despite that he died 3 centuries ago and his corpse was mysteriously removed, government sites spare no effort hiding the memory of a man behind whom stands the truth that, at one time, policing was not a function of government, but built by the voluntary action of citizens, was evolving in a quantum and natural leap into organized protection from it.

The fact is, these Libertarian precursors litter the history books and are being strangled all around us—only to pop up again because they express the spontaneous logic of freedom in mutual help. Libertarian scholarship has merely begun: even as an Ayn Rand might not fully grasp the implications of what she was saying, so Libertarian scholars must accept as the first step of their work that all of the history we have been taught is not merely a lie, but focused on the wrong things, and like archeologists and perceptive advocates must re-state and disclose the missing strand of social science: of voluntary government, as repressed and as essential as in the physical sciences once anatomical research was a crime and even today if a doctor strays too far from the established views he may forfeit his career.

The task of the young Libertarian scholar is to discover these precursors in each culture, and identify and document them as they happen today in what will be a new history and social science born after a false start as the meretricious glorifier of coercive government—and its cronies in business, universities, religion, unions, and every social class.

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Reference

[1] For more on this sad story the fascinating William Dockwra and the Rest of the Undertakers, The Story of the London Penny Post 1680-1682, by T.Todd, published by C.J. Cousland and Sons Ltd., Edinburgh, 1952. Also for a libertarian researcher on the subject, Summers, “The Postal Monopoly”.

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Michael Gilson De Lemos ("MG") is on the National Committee of the US Libertarian Party, and also co-ordinates the Libertarian International Organization. Retired as a Fortune 100 management consultant, he is working on books on management and libertarian philosophy. His email address is gilsondelemos@msn.com.

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from The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 2, No 15, April 14, 2003

http://thereisnostate.proboards39.com/v45i…9940&page=1