When to shoot a policeman

A policeman was
premeditatedly shot dead today.

Now, I don’t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible
crime — indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I
would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence — or
even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust
law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone’s
life, say. Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of
government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate
all the pornography or computers or guns. Under those circumstances,
it would be not merely my right but my duty to shoot the
policeman.

But this policeman was harming nobody. He was shot down in
cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently
announced the act on a public website.

The murderer said he was “protesting police-state tactics”. If
that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate
expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug in the process of
invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other
person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing
police-state tactics.

Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible
social good, pour encourager les autres. It is right and proper
that the police and military should fear for their lives when they
trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the
balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason
our Constitution has a Second Amendment.

But this policeman was refueling his car. Nothing in the
shooter’s justification carried any suggestion that the shooter’s
civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the
murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose
rights had been violated by the victim. This killing was not
self-defense.

There are circumstances under which general warfare against the
police would be justified. In his indymedia post The
Declaration of a Renewed American Independence the shooter utters
a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of
police abuses. If the political system had broken down sufficiently
that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I
would be among the first to cry havoc.

Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human
being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual
policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police. As Abraham Lincoln
said, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing
government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending
it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow
it.”

But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at
which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken
down. This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice.
There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the
Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.

Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under
these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn. This
was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the
policeman but the murderer dead. (There would be no question
of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his
crime.)

But that this shooter was wrong does not mean that
everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A
single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be
condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the
system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a
warning as well.

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