 This weekend we continue our series of talking to some of the Mises Institute summer fellows and our guest is Tate Feigley Who has combined a background in criminal justice with his interest in Austrian economics? So our topic this week is private police and private law how criminal justice and crime and punishment might look in a more Libertarian society Tate and I discuss how the incentives for private police as opposed to government police are vastly different private police want to de-escalate conflicts and come the most peaceable resolution without incurring any civil liability or Harm to property owners reputation or property itself Tate and I also discuss the insurance model that would likely flourish in a private society Versus the growth model that occurs today when state police departments clamor for bigger budgets when crime goes up by Contrast both insurance companies and the people paying insurance premiums have a direct financial interest in preventing Crime rather than arresting and incarcerating criminals at length Would a private legal system using private competing defense agencies actually produce a society with far less violence at far lower cost? If you're interested in topic of private police and private law stay tuned for a fascinating interview with Tate Feigley Welcome to Mises weekends. Thanks for joining us and thank you for coming to Auburn and spending your summer with us as a summer fellow How was that experience going for you and have you enjoyed having colleagues from so many different countries? Oh, absolutely. It's been a really great experience for me You know the Mises Institute really has a special place for me that a few years ago when I attended Mises U It was almost like a week-long Christmas just being able to interact with all these people who like to read about Austrian economics and Libertarianism and those kinds of things and Being able to extend that to a whole summer Has been really great experience for me and my colleagues here are really impressive. I often feel like Really outclassed. I just have so many different experiences being from all over and you know We hang out all the time we play soccer a lot go get food to eat all the time. So Really great experience So your background is in criminal justice and this is really a thorny area It's oftentimes a sticking point for otherwise from my perspective sensible libertarians In other words a lot of libertarians and monarchists believe that the one thing that the state needs to provide and that has to exist To provide is some sort of criminal and civil justice system and especially the enforcement mechanism of that Which we usually think of as police So let's just talk about this conceptually for a moment Why is it so hard for some or many libertarians to agree that police and justice Systems can be provided in a private libertarian society well, I think part of the problem that people have in envisioning this is They don't see how Police Competing police can really interact with each other peacefully like if you read Inran for example, like what happens When two competing police agencies have a dispute like are they just to go to war? But when you realize that how policing is done, you know in a typical Status system like the US that it's operated like a monopoly And so it behaves like a monopoly that their costs of using violence are actually Much smaller than they would be with a competing police force who has to bear the costs of going to war wars are expensive and so being able to Have the taxpayer subsidize that cost really Gives one reason to believe that Competing police forces really would have a much greater incentive to not use violence than the state does when we look at private security What example I've thrown out there in the past is Disneyland which on any given day represents sort of a private city of sorts maybe 25 or 30,000 people and of course their private security there is very Unobtrusive and their incentives are very different from police. In other words, they want to avoid escalation They want to avoid legal liability for harming someone and they want to avoid bad press or any damage to their reputation of Disneyland So it seems like a place like Disneyland where you have true private security The incentives are wholly different than the incentives for your local police officer. Oh, yeah, this is you know true in any situation so a private policing service that I've looked at quite a bit myself is an organization called Threat Management Center in Detroit and What's interesting looking at them is just how much more accountable as you know a private police force They are than the public police are in pretty much every way. They have a greater accountability. They have Greater financial accountability that if people are unsatisfied with their service, they can let them go Whereas, you know, you get a lot of trouble if you try not paying the public police As you mentioned with Disney security, they want to avoid civil lawsuits Whereas public police are often protected by qualified immunity laws where if they make mistakes in the course of their duties They can't be held civilly liable and even if you know someone who was beaten up by the police Successfully sues a police department. It's you know not coming out of any cops pockets It's the damages are paid by the taxpayer essentially. I think another important part of that is contractual accountability that the Supreme Court has decided on multiple occasions that Police don't have or public police don't have this duty to protect you that Even under the most negligent circumstances if they fail to protect you, they can't be held liable So essentially they don't have to uphold their end of the social contract Whereas with private police you have an actual contract that if they failed to protect you then They can be liable for a breach of contract So I think the fact that private police as an institution are just so much more accountable Really determines the incentive structure that they have to be more beholden to the clients They're supposed to serve rather than to the political classes. Well, you mentioned Detroit Tell us a little bit more about what you found out studying Detroit. It was this private Defense agency of sorts that you mentioned were they operating in the high criminal areas of Detroit in rough areas so they operate in a variety of areas they have about 1,000 households that they serve and 500 businesses and Their paying clients are typically more upper-scale Communities that they provide these kind of Lamborghini style Services as they call it to protect them around the clock But they also serve a lot of lower-income people that Due to these profits that they make from serving more wealthy people They'll provide free services to domestic violence victims who are actually Referred from the prosecutor's office to threat management center this business. They will Transport them to and from court take their kids to school or even guard them around the clock In more extreme circumstances, they will provide free self-defense training to Families with children. They will also perhaps most interestingly is provide free training to sworn law enforcement personnel one night a week in You know tactics to de-escalate situations and also training them in a martial art That's designed to not cause permanent injury so that there's fewer lawsuits. It's what I found kind of ironic is that despite the service that Threat management center provides the Detroit police see them as a threat as competition They closely monitor them. They are pretty eager to catch them doing something wrong But in their 20 years of existence, they haven't yet had any court dates for civil or criminal matters Well, and as we've seen in recent months here in the US In a lot of impoverished areas the police are seen as the greatest threat of all in other words Some of those communities might actually prefer no police no government police To the police that they're getting because of the police violence We've seen and and it seems to be unaccountable All right, absolutely like like mentioned earlier that like these police they they don't have any accountability In terms of you know damages they may cause and they aren't really trained in a way to be service providers the way they're trained is Mostly to regard officer safety as the number one thing and so in these high crime areas It shouldn't be a surprise that that you have to depend on the goodness of their hearts rather than Any other incentives that they might have right rather than any market incentive You know both Rothbard and Hoppe talk about an insurance model when they talk about private police and insurance model posits That while both an insurance company and an insurance premium payer The insured have an incentive to prevent crime before it happens Whereas state police have a tendency to respond to crime and when crime goes up They don't get fired, but in fact they clamor for a greater budget. So it seems it's that state police Have a growth model. They almost benefit when crime increases whereas a private model. That's more dependent on insurance Has a financial and a direct incentive to prevent crime and to keep crime low when you look at some Public policing agencies like the way they're evaluated really provides them with these perverse incentives so for example some police unions when they're Negotiating their budgets. They will use these measures of performance and need performance is measured in terms of Arrests and need will be measured as you mentioned in terms of crime rates higher crime rates mean they need more but from the perspective of what Clients want they would much rather have crimes preventive than ever have having them happen in the first place and yet to engage in kind of a proactive preventative approach negatively impacts both these measures that there's fewer arrests and a lower crime rate and so looking at the incentives facing insurance model It's much more costly to Recover stolen property than it is to you know prevent it from being stolen in the first place So I think with the insurance model you see the incentives of both the service provider and the Customer are aligned much better than you do with a monopoly police force. That's paid by paid through taxes What do you think arrest and incarceration would look like in a private system clearly the the agency Has an incentive and not to warehousing criminals at a great expense for long periods in the past when There was less of a role for the state in the provision of adjudication and dispute resolution most Well, there wasn't even a criminal law most cases were treated as torts and so Most punishments as we call them were in the form of restitution. I think that a private society would Rely much more on restitution even for possibly violent crimes I'm also not sure whether a private society would Totally rule out the possibility of execution As far as prisons I know I'm sure familiar with Robert Murphy's model of private prisons Essentially taking prisoners maybe training them and Kind of collecting a debt that they might might be owed from but I don't know what Incarceration might look like, you know, what's so interesting about the restitution concept as opposed to the imprisonment concept Is that it would presumably reduce or do away with a vast variety of victimless crimes, right? The restitution model relies on actual restitution for an actual victim as opposed to just taxing us as taxpayers to provide Expensive incarceration for all these crimes. It didn't touch or affect us. I think that's why you have some You know legal scholars like John Hasnes or you know others in a more free market tradition Just recommend and get getting rid of the criminal law. Just have a civil law So that Anything that would be considered a crime is there has to be a victim There has to be some party who's injured and will argue in court about how they've been injured Yeah, I think without a criminal law You wouldn't have these problems of victimless crimes that there'd have to be some Identifiable victim to collect this restitution As the situation across the United States begins to look more and more like the situation in Greece or this Situation in Detroit. I think we should all be thinking of how effective policing and how effective crime prevention Might begin to unroll. Tate Feigley. Thanks so much for your time ladies and gentlemen. Have a great weekend