 That's the beauty of technology. Okay, quickly, I want to comment on Supreme Court ruling today, which had a, you know, I don't have the full ruling. It was like, it was kind of a ruling when a case, it's called a shadow or gray or whatever. I just saw this quickly, so I'm not going to comment on extensively, but it is interesting, where they didn't hear arguments, but they make a ruling anyway. This is a ruling that basically, so Texas passed a law, that basically said that social media cannot ban content, cannot, you know, suppress content on their platforms, based on the, if it's conveying ideas based on the content. So, and there was a temporary injunction passed by a law court basically saying that Facebook and Twitter had to abide by the law while it went through courts, while it went through the appeals process, the legal process and the appeals process. What the judges did today, by a 5-4 I think majority, three conservatives and one liberal voted against this. By a 4-4 majority voted to do away with the injunction. That is prohibit. Facebook and prohibit, stopped the law from going into place, so nothing has changed. Facebook and Twitter are still legit, and they did it from what it looks like. It's an interim kind of ruling. What it looks like, what they did it on, is on First Amendment rights ground, so that I thought was excellent. Basically, that this law would infringe on the First Amendment rights of Twitter and Facebook. So, to be continued, because it's a fascinating story, there was also, I think I told you in another show, that a court overruled the law in Florida that also restricted the ability of Facebook and Twitter to restrict certain posts by politicians, and they overturned that. So, the courts seem to have a proper understanding of property rights, a proper understanding of free speech, and they seem to be implementing that. That is, as I've told you, I think the sanest of all the branches of government are the courts. So, we'll see. I mean, I don't think this is the end of it. I think there are a lot of court cases. By the way, Donald Trump's lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that Twitter was influenced by the government, by the Democratic Party and by the Biden administration to kick him off of Twitter, that lawsuit was thrown out by a judge as well. So, all these attacks against social media, all these attacks to try to limit the power of social media over our expression on their platform so far have dramatically failed in the courts. Now, I think Congress is going to try to pass laws to fix that, so far the courts have appell the right position, good for them, and it's something we will watch and I will continue to fill you in on as we move forward. So, that is a small piece of good news. Not much of that common out there, but that is good news. All right, let's see. So, I want to talk today about policing. The motivation for this really comes from what happened at the school in Texas where truly horrific inaction by the police. I mean, they set outside the building for 45 minutes an hour. Now, it's true, it's hard to tell exactly what happened, right? So, I think the evidence is still out of the police department is now not cooperating with the state of Texas inquiry into this. So, I suspect that what they did was bad. But, you know, there's conflicting evidence and I don't want to condemn them until we have all the evidence. We want to be objective here. But it appears that they did not respond. They did not rush in. They did not confront the shooter. What they were doing was evacuating as many students as they could from the classrooms, evacuating as many students as they could from the school. Of course, if they had confronted the shooter right off the bat, seven policemen arrived right as the shooter entered the building. They could have gone in. They could have killed him. They could have spared the lives of many. Maybe a cop or two would have died in the process. I don't know. But they would have spared the lives of many, many of those kids. And we'll talk about the issue of courage and the issue of sacrifice and the issue of putting your life in danger as part of your job and what that entails and is that selfish or is that altruistic and all of that. We'll talk about that. We're going to get to that. But I think the more, I think before we get to that, the other question, the question was raised the other day when we were talking about this, is that the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Scalia, ruled that the police do not have a duty to protect. They do not have a duty to protect you from violence. And there's a number of cases now that have been ruled. Indeed, in the Parkland students, Parkland school shooting, parents sued the police force and the city and the court, the US district judge, Beth Blum, citing the Supreme Court, said that neither the school nor the sheriff's department, nor the sheriff's department had a legal obligation to protect students from the alleged shooter who killed 17 people in the school. She said the reasoning was the students were not in state custody. So the police have an obligation to protect you only, only if you're in their custody. Now that is bizarre. But that is, that is law, as claimed by the courts. Just to cite the course, the claim arises from the actions of crews of third party and not a state actor. Thus the critical question the court analyzes is whether the defendants had a constitutionally constitutional duty to protect plaintiffs from the actions of crews. As previously stated, for such a duty to exist on the part of the defendants, plaintiffs would have to be considered to be in custody. Parkland is in Colorado. So this is in a Colorado lawsuit, right? And this is US federal court. Yes, US district judge. So it's federal court. So this is based on federal law. In 2005, the US Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Anthony Scalia, ruled that police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm. Now, I am not a constitutional scholar. So I'm not going to step in and argue whether the police have such a duty or not based on the constitution. Because I don't know. Wonder Freeman says fact check, please. What are we fact checking here? I don't know what we're fact checking here. And I'll give you some examples of cases, OK? So this is from a news article here. This is a case of a guy named Joseph Lozito who got on a subway, was in a subway station in New York City, unaware that there had been a stabbing spree perpetrated by some Maxim Geldman that would be going on for 24 hours. Anyway, Geldman confronts Lozito once he's boarded the train. And there are police officers right there. He turns to Lozito with the police there and he says you're going to die. They then fight. Lozito is stabbed. Ultimately he manages to, you know, they struggle. He gets stabbed, but ultimately he manages to disarm Geldman. Only then after he disarms Geldman, does the NYPD PD officers intervene to apprehend Geldman, right? In this case, again, I'm reading from news articles, but I try to cross references. In this case, one of the cops allegedly admitted that he did not intervene in the altercation because he thought Geldman had a gun and he hid because he was afraid. This prompted Lozito to sue the city of New York, the police department, a case he lost in 2013 because Manhattan Supreme Court judge, it wasn't because he didn't believe him. It wasn't because of lack of evidence. It wasn't he lost because, you know, the cops didn't have a reason to intervene. But because precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court that the cops did not have a duty to protect you, protect you when you're under assault. Now, I don't know, maybe all these news articles are getting interpretation wrong, but I'm not sure how you would get it right, right? So let me just see where's this, I mean, here's the Supreme Court case, Castle Rock, Colorado. So a woman, you know, she had, she basically had a thing for the police saying that they would arrest her, that her husband was barred from seeing her children. And basically this, what is it, mandatory arrest status, statute. It was a mandatory arrest status that if he approached her daughters, he would be arrested, right? He took her daughters, three daughters. He took them, she called the police. They refused to go find him and arrest him. They refused to have anything to do with it. Ultimately, he showed up in the police station with a gun and the three daughters were found murdered in the back of his pickup truck. The woman, the wife sued the police in Colorado, Supreme Court ruled that they did not do anything wrong. You can go on and on and on. There are other cases. There's another Supreme Court case in 19, that was in 2005. There's a Supreme Court case in 1989 with, you know, protective services, a child being abused by his father. He's beaten constantly. Social services knows about this. The police know about this. Nothing is done. The child ultimately lands up in a vegetative state and she sues and again, the court rules that the police or the state, generally, has no special obligation to protect the citizen against harm if it did not create the harm. Now, this sounds bizarre to me, but, and it seems like even if there's no constitutional provision, you would think that statutes, locally, you know, state statutes, statutes that may be established police forces, and we'll get to the history of policing in a minute, would mandate, would define the job of the police as protection and define malfeasance of the police when they fail to protect. But of course, that requires, and this is, I think, the insight or that I have my conclusion about this. And I'm open to, I'm open to this being challenged because I've only been thinking about this for a few days. It strikes me as this is what happened. This is what happens when a government loses track of its purpose. In a sense, you could argue that the only purpose of government is to protect its citizens, that the only purpose of government is to have police chase down and confront criminals and get rid of them, that that is the fundamental purpose of government is to protect their individual rights, to protect them from whom, from criminals, from crooks, from gangsters. I mean, we've suddenly lost that perspective when it comes to using the military. We use the military, the nation bill to make the world a better place to bring democracy to the world. So we've lost the perspective of individual rights when it comes to military. And it definitely seems like we have lost the perspective of individual rights when it comes to policing. I mean, what is the police there for? It's to protect the lives and property of citizens, of people in its jurisdiction, citizens are not citizens. That's the purpose. And if we lose the concept of individual rights, and if we lose the idea of the role, the purpose of government, then we lose that idea of, yeah, police are there to protect. Indeed, I would argue that the police were defaulting on their responsibility by not stopping rioters in Portland and Chicago and other places from smashing windows and stealing stuff. It is certainly a navigation of police responsibility to not prosecute shoplifters. And you go on and on and on in terms of the kind of things where they know there's rights violation and they don't protect you from it. But then I started thinking, but look, the police are in charge of prosecuting people when they don't violate rights, victimless laws like drug laws. So the whole concept of policing has been corrupted. The whole idea of the job of the police has been corrupted. So I thought, oh, I wonder when this happened. I wonder when police went from protecting individual rights to just, I don't know, keeping the peace, bringing calm, doing what the government wants it to do, or just not having the responsibility, you know, rushing in and saving people when they feel like it, not rushing in and saving people when they don't feel like it, with no consequences. When did that shift happen? And in reading about the history of police, it becomes obvious to me that we've never had, and this is new to me, we've never had a proper conception of policing because the whole idea of police, the whole idea of a state run agency responsible for prosecuting, for finding criminals, from protecting people from criminals, from preserving the peace is a completely new concept. It didn't exist when the Declaration of Independence was written. It didn't exist when the Constitution was written. There's no wonder there's not a lot about policing. There's nothing really about policing in the Constitution because there was no police. There was no federal police. There was no state police. There was no local police. There was something called a constable and there was some vague notion, but it was unpaid. It was not necessarily, oh, it was very low paid. It was often volunteer. It was not necessarily under the guise of the government in any kind of sense. A defund movement didn't happen in 1989 when the Supreme Court ruled this. A defund movement is a movement that happened over the last two, three years and yet these court cases and the inability to sue police and this lack of responsibility on the part of the police looks like it's existed for a long time. Police, based on Supreme Court rulings, it's existed for a long time. It has nothing to do with the defund movement. The defund movement only wanted to make it worse. A defund movement in some senses is more consistent with our perspectives on what the police is, common perspectives. The police there is to be a social services agency. That's what the defund movement wants and that's in a sense what the statutes and what the courts are telling us. They're not there to protect us. What are they there to do? So it turns out that police, as we understand it today, is a completely modern idea. It's an idea really that in the form in which it takes today, the First Police Force was in the 1830s in London. It was copied then in New York and Boston in major cities in the mid-19th century. But before that there was no police force, a uniformed force that went out there into the neighborhoods and actually tried to bring about peace and then investigated crime. There was no crime investigation before this. So it's a concept. The First Police Forces actually were in First Police, semi-modern police, were in France. France under I think Louis XV put together a police force. It was primarily there to be a branch of the government to make sure that its laws were followed, just laws, unjust laws, criminal laws, uncriminal laws. It was there to preserve the peace, to crush riots, to stop mayhem. But it was there as a real branch of government. And indeed a lot of the opposition to creating police forces in the United States and England was a fear that this would increase the power and the force of government. So in the name of limited government, there was an idea that we don't want the government to get into the area of police. So how was disputes, we had a court system. But how did we get criminals to the court? How did we find guilty parties? Who did the investigating? Who chased down criminals? Well, bounty hunters basically. So the criminal system in the UK, if somebody stole your property, you would basically hire a bounty hunter to figure out who stole your property and to arrest them and to bring them in front of a court. The Pinkerton's were later and the Pinkerton's acted side by side with the police. But yes, the advantage the Pinkerton's had was the Pinkerton's could cross state lines. The Pinkerton, because they were a private organization, they were not restricted by state law. So in the 19th century the United States had a police force but no FBI and no national police force. So you were very restricted in terms of jurisdiction. But in England, in pre-19th century, in the United States pre-19th century, everything was basically bounty hunters. And the bounty hunters often landed up being the criminals themselves. The bounty hunters often got bribed by the criminals. The system was super corrupt. Criminals would steal stuff, then negotiate its return with the authorities for the right ransom. So they would ransom goods. And there was no, so the owner of the goods would actually find it sometimes cheaper to negotiate with the person who stole his goods from him than to hire a thief catcher, a bounty hunter to go catch the cook. The system was very inefficient. London was, there was a lot of crime in London. There was a lot of crime in New York. And as a consequence in the 1830s, police departments found it. But again, they didn't have a clear mandate as far as I can tell. And again, I'm curious if there's anybody who knows this history better than I do. They didn't have a clear mandate by then because with regard to individual rights, they didn't have a clear mandate in terms of their job was to protect individual rights, their job was to protect the lives and property of the people living under their jurisdiction. So their job was mainly to, in broader terms, kind of vaguely describe to keep the peace, and it changed over time. For example, in the beginning, they didn't do much investigative stuff. They were in the communities, they prevented crime, but they didn't investigate and try to find criminals after the fact. It took a while before the first kind of detective bureaus were established that actually went and investigated crimes and tried to find the criminal after the fact and bring him to justice. So it turns out the police is a very, very, as we know it today, is a very modern phenomena. It's a very new phenomena that the state does it is new. It is amazingly open to corruption and the number, you know, it's primarily corrupted during periods in which the police have to prosecute non-prosecute victimless crimes, like during a prohibition and now during the drug era. But it also turns out that local police forces are super influenced by local politics. They super have over the years, you know, swayed from being social services departments to having no cops on the beat but just being tough and being investigative, back to like broken window enforcement like there was in New York in the 1990s and then spread to the rest of the country. So policing is all over the place and there is no one kind of view of what a policeman is and what he does and what his responsibilities are and what his legal duties are. We have a lot of thinking, a lot of literature about the responsibilities of the police towards criminals. We have very little about the responsibilities of police towards the people they're supposed to be protecting. We don't really have a theory of policing and as a consequence, the Supreme Court doesn't get it and it doesn't surprise me with Scalia who wrote the opinion, Scalia who claimed that individual rights were nonsense and stilt. It doesn't surprise me that police are so weak. It doesn't surprise me that police are so badly trained. It doesn't surprise me that police are not physically strong and not required to have the kind of training like you would in the military because then I expected to do military stuff. It's supposed to, you know, much of the policing is supposed to be to walk around the neighborhoods and chat with the neighbors and have good relations and have snitches and cultivate good relations and keep the peace and it's very rare and unexpected that the police have to get engaged in a gunfight and they're not expected, I guess, to really, really rise to the occasion. So while I definitely think that police is a legit function of government, I don't think it's really been thought through about how to deal with the police, how you would deal with it constitutionally, how, if you rewrote the constitution, would you now have a provision defining the policing function of the state and what that entailed and what the responsibility of the police was? I think you would. I think you would and I think the founders realized how important policing would become. They would, I mean, the whole idea of police confiscating property, the whole idea of police funding themselves through the tickets that they issue you, a parking ticket, speeding tickets, all of that, I mean, it really is horrific and there don't seem to be any proper guidelines for the police and the police of course is, the police is a state issue when the police are state police. It's often a city issue because the police are city police, they're not state police, they're governed by city laws, but there's also federal police agencies, there are lots of them, from the FBI to the, what do you call it, the agency, the firearm, tobacco and something, right, that are big, the Treasury Department, the Secret Service, there are many policing now functions at the federal level that go way beyond what I think a police should really do, but I'm not sure the principles of policing should be a state issue. It strikes me that they should be a federal issue and the fact is that these were all ruled based on constitutional principles. So, should this be some principles guiding the functioning and the proper relationship between the citizens and the police force? I think so. Counties have sheriffs, sheriffs are police, sheriffs is a term that goes back to ancient England where there were constables and what became known as sheriffs. It's Shire Eve, something like that that turned into sheriffs. It comes from the word Shire, which is a, I guess, a little area, community, like in what that fantasy thinks, the Shire thing. There's a lot of thinking that has to go into this, but there's no question in my mind that given the importance of policing, given the police wagons, given the police have a monopoly over the use of force and they're supposed to only use it in retaliation, given that they're an agency of the state, that they are much, much too important for a proper constitution not to have something in principle to say about them, to stay about them. So, while police today, because of the way it evolved, it evolved out of cities, it started at the city level. State police agencies were a much later development. First, it started as city agencies. I think the Texas Rangers and there were a few other states that had their state policing agencies, but those were primarily late 19th century developments. And then the modern state police entities were 20th century developments, whereas city policing is something that started in the mid 19th century. So, there's been an evolution since the mid 19th century, and it is worth to consider whether that evolution has been, whether that evolution has been a proper evolution, whether that evolution has been governed by the proper constitutional principles. All of that, I think, is something that needs to be worked out and really thought about. I've just thought about it for the last few days because of what I noticed, the police inaction and the fact that people's response, well, they don't have a duty. They don't have a legal duty, legal responsibility, which just seems bizarre to me. We'll see what happens in Texas. Maybe Texas law is different, maybe the laws in Texas do place a responsibility on them. It does seem like the Texas state authorities are looking into what happened at the school. They are concerned about what happened in the school, and they're looking at the behavior of the cops. If nothing else, they should be shamed, and I'll get to that in a second. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and, of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.