The politician who gave the strongest condemnation of police tactics in Ferguson, Missouri, may not have been President Obama or any of the other liberal Democrats you might have expected. It was probably Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky.

“Americans must never sacrifice their liberty for an illusive and dangerous, or false, security,” Paul wrote in a column for Time. “This has been a cause I have championed for years, and one that is at a near-crisis point in our country.” And Paul didn’t just decry police behavior. He also attacked the criminal justice system—and he attacked it as racist. “Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”

What’s going on here? It’s easy enough to dismiss this as opportunism. Paul has been looking for ways to soften his harsh image, in advance of his 2016 presidential bid. Showing solidarity with minorities is a perfect way to do that. But all politicians are opportunistic. In this case, Paul’s position happens to be consistent with his political worldview. He isn’t just a Republican, after all. He’s a Republican with strong libertarian leanings. He wants to shrink the power of the state. Demilitarizing the police and reducing the severity of federal sentencing laws, a cause he has championed, are two ways of doing that.

And Paul isn’t the only conservative with libertarian leanings who spoke out against police tactics on Thursday. Senator Ted Cruz issued a statement, condemning the harassment of journalists. Conservative writers used social media and columns to make similar arguments. Here, for example, was Mary Katherine Ham, an editor-in-large at the conservative website Hot Air:

We ask more of law enforcement in a free society and we should. We don’t accept that everyone in a community must be under the gun because some of them committed crimes. Or, that journalists should be arrested while trying to cover that community. ... Stipulated that we ask cops to handle challenging, dangerous, delicate situations like riot and looting in Ferguson or manhunts in Boston. Because this is America, we ask them to do it while preserving the rights of innocent bystanders and even those who may be engaging in crime.

Paul and Ham both noted that libertarians have been warning about excessive police tactics for some time now. They have a point. And I know quite a few liberals (starting with yours truly) who didn’t pay enough attention at the time. One reason is the very real, very significant political differences between the two ideologies. The libertarians see overzealous police as symptomatic of overzealous government in general. Demilitarizing the cops, defunding the welfare state—it’s all part of one seamless governing agenda.