A friend of mine, Connor Boyack, runs a libertarian think-tank here in the State of Utah, named Libertas Institute. They’ve made a lot of progress in pushing libertarian-based reforms here in the state. One of their current efforts involves banning police quotas.

In a Facebook post by Connor about interviewing a police officer about quotas (and who requested anonymity), another friend of ours wrote,

Quotas are an insult to the profession of policing. It turns trained professionals who are supposedly hired for their judgement and skill into automatons–basically robots with a heartbeat.

To which I immediately responded with,

Policing is an insult to justice.

A solid quip, if I do say so myself. Is it true? In my opinion, completely.

Justice is the righting of wrongs, the making whole again. For there to be “justice served” you need two elements, 1) a crime, and 2) restitution.

Policing as we know it today throughout the United States and elsewhere is primarily tasked with law enforcement. It is the laws of states that are enforced, no matter how right or wrong in the opinion of police officers.

Two fundamentals points must be made here. The first is that a so-called state’s laws are nothing more than recorded opinions backed by a threat of violence (no different in kind than the “laws” of street gangs or mafias). The second is that most state laws are of the nature that violating them does not involve the creation of damages toward a victim. In other words, most laws simply prohibit liberties, not crimes.

Since these laws are backed by threat of violence, their enforcement is a criminal act. One cannot serve justice in the process of creating an injustice. It’s an impossibility.

Further, when a real crime is committed, policing is used to generate profits for the state and its cronies in the forms of fines, prison contracts, and the tax codes to generate “revenue” to pay for them. More injustice is created, all the while restitution is either non-existent or relegated to the non-competitive tort system.

As I hope is obvious by this point, the practice of policing serves only to create and maintain new forms of injustice. That is why I say that policing is an insult to justice. In reality, it’s antithetical.

Quotas are not an insult to the profession of policing, rather, quotas are merely a feature, quite compatible with the type of predation that is the foundation of the policing profession.

Serving justice would require the abolition of quotes, the abolition of policing, the abolition of taxation, and the abolition of the state.