Private Police Forces

This is the first in what I intend to be a long line of posts exploring how (or if) the free market would give us better solutions than government. 

Of course we will start with what many consider to be an "extreme" option. Even most libertarians I know would say that one legitimate role of government is to protect the population from crime and violence. Let's start with the arguments against, and the responses to it.

1) Private police forces would only serve the wealthy. The simplest response to that: this is what happens now. As The Daily tells us, those who live in Detroit (a city known for not being wealthy) are not getting police protection (HT to Reason). Mara Gay writes:

The last time Brown, 73, called the Detroit police, they didn’t show up until the next day. So she applied for a permit to carry a handgun and says she’s prepared to use it against the young thugs who have taken over her neighborhood, burglarizing entire blocks, opening fire at will and terrorizing the elderly with impunity.

 Average response time for police in Detroit is 24 minutes, according to Gay, which is more than double many other major cities.

Worse, government police forces spend their time harassing innocent people. According to the ACLU, New York City's stop and frisk policy means that nine innocent people get harrassed in order to catch one small time drug user.

The effect of all this is that the poor don't get any of the benefits of having police, and are actually oppressed by them. In fact, The Washington DC court of appeals has ruled that the police are under no obligation to protect you.

2) Poor people could not afford a private police force. This is almost an extention of #1, but worth answering. Gay states in The Daily that Detroiters are paying $10-$200 a month. According the National Center for Policy Analysis, it IS much more expensive in some cities, but the reason for that are regulations that severely restrict who may act as private security. Some cities only allow off-duty police officers to act as security, and costs can be $30 an hour. It would seem that government interference in this case makes the poor worse off.

3) Government police need to be the ones to solve the crimes. Also valid, but how are they doing at that? One thing I don't ever want to happen to me is murder. But if that ever happens, I want them to catch the bastard. Unfortunately:

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI.

The FBI goes on to say the reason: crimes of passion (with an easy to identify assailant) have been replaced by gang and drug related murders.

4) If we have private police forces, they'll start acting like warring gangs to increase their territory. Sounds to me like this is another area in which they would then be acting like governments currently do. It's certainly possible that, as private police forces gain popularity, that they may decide to use violence to eliminate the competition. After a period of consolidation, we'd end up in the exact same situation that we are in today. However, this is all highly hypothetical. Should we really choose the devil we know, given all the clear victories that would come with the change? The danger, in this situation, is that we would lose control over who protects us, right? Do we have control now?

Verdict: Putting the protection of citizens in the hands of a political class means that this protection becomes politicized. If you don't like how the politicians run things, well, you get one chance every two, four, or six years to weigh that against the hundreds of other things that they've done, and choose to keep them or not. If you employ a private company, you can make that change any day. A privatized force will, and does, deliver many advantages, and does appear to be the superior choice.