End the Occupation of San Francisco! : Indybay

Tell him to stop diverting money from city services to pay for the police presence, and to let the Federal Government and corporations pay for their security costs themselves. Tell him to scale back the police presence to the bare minimum necessary to prevent people from getting hurt, and to stop the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. Tell him to allow bicycles back on the streets and to allow the protestors to create ecologically friendly car-free pedestrian zones. Tell him to step back and allow the bottom-up transformation of San Francisco into an anti-war environmental oasis. If you're a San Francisco resident or voter, tell him that as well.

A city that is opposed to the war has no business sending in shock troops to defend the instutions that fund and profit from the war. It has no business sending in riot police to beat protesters and stop the occupation of Federal buildings. The Federal government has enough money earmarked for Homeland Security to do that themselves. Let them foot the bill, not us. Corporations have plenty of money to spend on private security guards if they want to defend their property. Let them pay for that themselves. Save the money for those of us who are struggling just to pay our rent. The police presence is not necessary. It is not even desirable.

There is a long tradition by which communities have engaged in self-policing, with results far more desirable than heavy-handed use of armed government agents. As we have seen in recent police scandals, concentration of power in the hands of instutions separated from the people leads to corruption and the use of power not just to serve and protect, but also to loot and oppress. Such attacks have been going on in our poor and minority communities with little notice since long before this latest scandal, from Los Angeles, to East and West Oakland, to Hunters Point in San Francisco. From the very beginning, when city police forces were first created in this country in the 1830's, they were feared and opposed by the common people, not trusted.

For most of the last one and half thousand years of Anglo-American history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the early 19th Century, it has been the responsibility of the victims of crimes and members of the community to track down offenders, arrest them, and bring them to court themselves. For all this time, this proved quite an effective way of controlling crime, even in huge cities like London, six million strong even back in the Middle Ages. Never once was there a call from the common people to create an armed government force to protect the city people. It was the ruling class that created city police forces as a means to control, not to protect.

I urge everyone reading this to fight for more community control and self-policing and to fight back the forming police state. I urge everyone to keep the current protest actions going, not just until the end of the war abroad, but until the end of the war happening on the streets of San Francisco, until the city is demilitarized and the heavy police presence scaled back. Willie Brown is not acting like a friend of the anti-war movement. At the present moment, he is presiding over an increasing militarization of the City of San Francico.

Make your voice heard. Here is Mayor Willie Brown's contact information:

Willie L. Brown, Jr., Mayor
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 554-6141
(415) 252-3107 (TDD)
(415) 554-6160 (fax)
damayor@sfgov.org

E-mails are the easiest, but more attention will be paid to phone calls. More attention still will be paid to faxes. Letters are the most effective of all, but the slowest, so you should probably hand-deliver them tomorrow if you want them to be effective.

Please send this call on to your friends! Print it out and bring it to the protests.

Bibliography on Law Enforcement Without the State:

Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990). A complete defense of a legal system without the State from a public policy standpoint. Chapters 2 & 3 contain a more detailed description of the historical development of law that I mentioned in this piece.

John Hasnas, "The Myth of the Rule of Law" (Wis. L. Rev. 199, 1995). I haven't read it, but I have been to a lecture on the topic by its author. I am told it contains an account of how there can be no objective neutral interpretation of written law, how the concept of "rule of law" turns us into accomplices to oppression, and how a decentralized approach that spontaneously creates order is possible.

John Hasnas also recommends the following readings which I have not read:

Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (1983). Best and most accessible account of the nature of the early legal system and its decentralized nature.

Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998), Part III. An account of both how a restitution system can function to provide social order and a philosophical support of such a system.

Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law (1966). A good introduction into the nature and historical development of the English common law system.

R. C. Van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (1973). A somewhat more sophisticated account of how the common law system arose from Norman administrative instutitions.

William C. Mitchell & Randy T. Simmons, Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy (1994). An overview account of government failure.

Daniel Burton a.k.a. Melchizedek, Lord of the Brambles