 This weekend we welcome Will Grigg, the blogger, speaker, and writer who chronicles the U.S. police state, the drug war, and the prison industrial complex. We discussed police state Keynesianism, how the embryonic U.S. police state became avert, how scalable totalitarianism replaced constitutional republicanism, and why there are 124 SWAT deployments in the United States each and every day. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises' Weekend. We're very happy and pleased to be joined this weekend by none other than Will Grigg from Idaho. Will, how are you today? Jeff, I'm doing very well. Thank you so much. Let me just embarrass you a little bit. Throw this out there. I think it's your quitter handle. It's Blarney Kunkarny. That's correct. So I can't just let that go by without an explanation. I was afraid that would be the case. Until September of last year, I labored under the misapprehension that I was a mixed Irish and Mexican heritage. And then I met my birth mother as it happens. I met her while I was on a trip to investigate the case of police abuse in Idaho Falls. And she explained to me within about a minute and a half of our introduction that I have no Mexican ancestry at all. I'm actually of Cherokee and Hawaiian and Irish and Basque derivation. So I'm not Blarney Kunkarny in the sense of the Kunkarny part referring to Mexican ancestry. I'm actually, I guess, Iberian rather than Latino, but the nickname was given to me in college and it stuck and so I'm keeping it. Well, that background also explains a lot, right, while you're a natural contrarian and natural fighter. I think so. It's DNA. If you take a look at those groups of people, you're not seeing anybody who would be invested with what the politically correct call privilege. I don't want to avoid a privilege of any kind. We will not ask you to check your privilege at any time during this program today. Check with them. But let me get right into this. You had a recent article on NewRockwell.com entitled the militarization of everyday life. It's a huge topic. We had a Mises Circle event in January in Houston where we talked about the police state and your name came up in a couple different speeches at that event. I'd like to throw this out. It's interesting. We used to say that a statist or a socialist America that was developing everywhere you go would resemble the DMV, right, the doctor's office, et cetera. Now that seems sort of quaint, doesn't it? It seems it's going to, it's more likely to resemble the TSA or something worse. Yes. You're talking about the bureaucratization of everyday life akin to what we saw in the satirical film, the prophetically satirical film, Brazil. But unfortunately, what we have in the United States today is something more akin to Guatemala under military rule back in 1983. I was in Guatemala in 83 and 84 near the pit of a very long and very bloody civil war. And in August of that year, there was a coup, and coups occurred with a certain metronomic regularity in Guatemala rather akin to elections elsewhere. And the CIA replaced one general, Efri Rios Mont, with an oligarchy of faceless generals because that way they'd be able to diffuse the blame for some of the atrocities that were taking place. You wouldn't have a single figurehead upon whom you could lay the guilt and burden of everything that was being done. But what happened in that date, August of 1983, is the chair of people in armored personnel carriers stormed the presidential palace. If you take a look at the photos of that event, you'd be struck by how much they resemble an American police SWAT team in 2014. They're in a vehicle somewhat akin to these vehicles being provided to the police agencies and sheriff's offices through the Pentagon's 1033 program of the LESO, the LESO program, law enforcement support organization program. These are proliferating across the countryside, and they bespeak a radical escalation to what had been the latent mission of the police since we ended up with government police agencies in the 19th century. The police were always modeled after an occupying army. Robert Pio had been the imperial military governor of occupied Ireland in the 1790s. There's my Irish heritage speaking, I suppose, and when he created the metropolitan police in the first decade of the 19th century, he adapted his so-called peace preservation force as the template for the metropolitan police. And from that template had been struck pretty much all the police agencies throughout the Anglosphere and much of the world. And I think it's interesting, Jeff, that when Pio was proposing the creation of the metropolitan police, his chief opposition came from conservatives in the British parliament who did not cotton the idea of a standing army of occupation amidst it was in the front of their Anglo-Saxon tradition, in which you'd have constables or you'd have deputies who'd be entrusted with missions on the part of courts, but you weren't supposed to be seeing a uniformed military functionary in every street corner. Of course, the Bobby's for a while were not armed, but there was always this implicit role that they would play as the dispensers of government licensed violence. The conservatives in Great Britain didn't like that. Within about 15 years, they made peace, but unfortunately they migrated across the Atlantic and took root in New York and then was carried at gunpoint and bayonet point across the broad breast of the Western Hemisphere, the northern Western Hemisphere, the name of manifest destinies so that by the time they closed the frontier in 1890, pretty much everywhere where so-called civilization had taken root, you had Peel's model of government policing flourishing and wrecking havoc, quite frankly, on the settled customs and peaceful folkwaves and most of the people upon whom this model had been imposed. America didn't have government police agencies for the most part until the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. And there's always been, once again, this embryonic militarism that has been latent in police agencies, and this became overt starting in the 1970s, but the war on drugs. And that's when the SWAT model was adopted by police agencies across the country. And that's something that Richard Nixon bequeathed to the republic was the idea of a government committing war against its own citizens in the name of controlling drug use. Literally, this is a war. There's no metaphorical nature to this. It is a literal war being waged within the borders of the United States. And over the course of several decades now, beginning with the escalation of the so-called war on drugs in the 1980s and then the post Oklahoma City and post Waco escalation of counterterrorism during the Clinton Reno era. And naturally the post 9-11 era, we've seen the steady fortification of this militarist mindset, this occupation mindset on the part of the people of minister police agencies and carry out police functions. And it's been greatly abetted by the federal government. And this is a really good example of the type of distortions that you find in an economy when the government acting as a monopoly rather than a market is dispersing what it calls public funds in order to enhance certain functions at the expense of others. We have no protection for property under the existing regime. The police are not entrusted with the role of protecting persons and property. That's not in their job description. They're law enforcement agencies. They deal in force, not in protection. And it's entirely possible indeed. You can see ubiquitous examples of this for police agencies and police individually who are robustly derelict in their advertised function of protecting persons and property who have no consequences at all whatsoever for that dereliction because as the Supreme Court and other bodies appointed out, there's no enforceable responsibility for police agents. Police agencies here are an individual officer to protect a specific citizen, but they are very diligent in regimenting the public and enforcing at any given point a citizen who's come to their attention to submit through the application of violence. And that's the mindset, once again, of a military body of an army of occupation, and it's become very overt just in the last 10 or 15 years and people, I think, are finally getting a surfeit of it. Well, along with this militarization of local police, I think what goes hand in hand with that is a federalization and centralization, not only of the mindset, you know, away from your local sheriff, but not only in terms of a mindset, but also in terms of federal dollars. So can you elaborate a bit about how some of the ways federal money makes its way into state and local police? One of the chief conduits for this is the Burr Memorial Grant Program, which is used for the most part now to fight the war on drugs. And the war on drugs, I underscore once again, has nothing to do with the protection of person and property. Indeed, it's one of the chief ways that the government right now is violating property rights through a practice called civil asset forfeiture, which occurs when a police officer, usually with a multi-jurisdictional federally funded task force, says that he has reasonable suspicion that a citizen, usually a motorist who's been stopped for some trivial traffic violation, is in the possession of cash or the property that is implicated in narcotics activity of some kind. And so he confiscates the cash or the property or the vehicle, and then a civil action is filed against the property. This is called the in rem or against the thing principle. And usually what will happen is there will be cost prohibitive for the citizen actually to pursue a legal recourse here that would have any rational expectation of him recovering this property to be just too expensive for him to fight the seizure. So the property wound up in the hands of the police agency and they'll call this a victory in the war on drugs. It does nothing to interdict the delivery of narcotics as if that were worthy social objective. It isn't, of course, but it does a great deal to enrich the police agency involved in the seizure because through equitable sharing, that's another federal intervention or another federal innovation. The federal agency that's part of that task force will keep a tithe, usually about 10 percent of what seized and the rest goes to whatever agency or agencies was involved in the seizure. So you have the direct subsidy through the Bernie Graham program, which is used to create these task forces and then the indirect seizure or rather the indirect subsidy through official permission given to the police agency to keep whatever they confiscate through these acts of road piracy. And that's something that's quite plentifully done here in Treasure Valley, which is part of a buy state area that includes pay at Idaho and Ontario, Oregon and a few other cities here that are strategically situated along I-95. And I-95 connects, not only Oregon and Idaho, but a number of other states to Washington, where marijuana, of course, is being decriminalized. Maybe take a look at the Washington to Colorado pipeline, if you will, the Washington to Colorado routes. They all run through this section of the Treasure Valley. And so naturally, this is one of the priorities being pursued here by law enforcement agencies. You can conduct these traffic stops and you can find evidence of people who have obtained marijuana in Washington or suspicion that they've obtained it in Washington or Colorado or they've obtained medical marijuana in Oregon just across the border. And then if you don't arrest the suspect, you can seize his car. You can seize his cash. You can seize anything of value. And this is something the federal government has been doing throughout the country. There are places much worse than this. There are places in Texas and Tennessee that are much worse than this. But these are the priorities of the federal government. One of the priorities of the federal government is abetted here and they turn the police into literal roving bands of brigands, government licensed thieves. And at the same time, of course, there's no security for person or property. That's the advertised function of the police agencies. But the federal government through these distortions in the way that the so-called security marketplace is operated has created these perverse incentives for police to be behaving as robbers for cops to act like robbers. That's one good example of how the federal government has done this. And the Byrne Grant program received a huge increase in 2009 as part of Obama's stimulus package. I call this police state Keynesianism. They increased it by billions of dollars, the amount that was being given out through the Byrne Grant program. And police agencies responded as they were expected to. There was a piece in the June 21st Washington Post talking about jurisdictions in Maryland where practically the only thing the police do is conduct marijuana seizures. And practically the only thing that the courts do is they process these petty misdemeanor marijuana offenses. That's because the federal government has provided them with money to carry out these programs. And as a result, this is pretty much the 24-7 occupation of the police agencies in this jurisdiction. And I don't think that that's at all atypical of what you can find in a lot of small jurisdictions throughout the country. Well, when you use the term police state Keynesianism, I mean, it really is just that, isn't it? They are trying to build a demand-side growth model for crime. And if there's not actual organic crime being committed, they'll create categories of crime via, for example, criminalization of drugs. That's, of course, an insight that I and Rand gave us in one of the soliloquies by one of our villains in Atlas Shrugged. You know, the state has no use for innocent people. It has to make criminals out of all of us. And there was a terrifying book that came out a few years ago by Harvey Silverglade called Three Felonies a Day in which he described the fact that, and he laid out specific and copious examples of the fact that each of us, during a life in which we do no injury to anybody else, every day will commit three acts that are suitably perverse and ambitious prosecutor could describe as felonies and prosecute as such and put us into a system in which our guilt is essentially assumed and we will not have the opportunity to confront the accusers against us in an adversarial setting where a jury is instructed that the government has to overcome a burden of proof. The government is presumed to be wrong and the defendant is presumed to be right. The way that these systems operate, these trials operate, particularly in the federal system, is that you're as a defendant, given multiple charges on the basis of one overt act for the purpose of extorting from you a plea bargain, a plea agreement of some sort where you will acknowledge guilt for some supposed offense in exchange for being spared a lengthy term in the gulag and make no mistake about it. The United States prison system is for all intents and purposes the gulag archipelago, but they're creating a demand side market here, not only in terms of making criminals out of all of us. I mean, the only thing the government makes, quite frankly are criminals out of innocent people and corpses out of living human beings. That's what the government produces, but they're creating a demand side market in the sense that they're providing these subsidies and this war fighting material to local police agencies and they're doing so on concessionary terms, meaning that the taxpayers absorb the cost, the agencies do not. So they have to find some use for the money they're given and some use for the MRAPs, the armored combat vehicles and other war fighting assets they're provided with. And with that, when this happens, of course, the mission of these agencies becomes reconfigured according to federal priorities. Every police department becomes a support system for the multi-jurisdictional drug task force and for the SWAT team. Here's a really good example, Jeff. There's a town not far from here, Nampa, Idaho, about 80 to 90,000 people in the population. It has a violent crime rate well below the national average. The police chief recently requested a new fleet of SUV patrol vehicles. Just two years ago, they had, I believe, 41 or 45 vehicle allotment that was paid for, but the police department doesn't like these. They're not comfortable. They're the standard interceptor models. They want the tricked out SUVs. Now, in order to buy these new vehicles, the Nampa police department would have to touch up the local tax victims for about $441,000. Nampa, just within the last year, received an MRAP. That is to say a surplus warfighting armored vehicle from the Pentagon. The market price for an MRAP, if you or I wanted to go out and purchase one, is about $600,000. However, rather than selling the MRAP and taking the money and buying these new patrol vehicles, the police chief wants to keep both of them. And quite frankly, he couldn't sell it if he wanted to because there's no market. Why? Because the only people who want these vehicles are police agencies. They can get them for free as far as their end user costs are concerned, because the Pentagon is willing to give them to them. So they end up with these vehicles that are very expensive to maintain, very expensive to fuel, and they can't unload them because the market for them, such as it is, has been destroyed through federal intervention. So what are they going to do with these vehicles? You know, rather than letting them rust and degenerate, disintegrate, they're going to find some use for them. And these are vehicles that have no conceivable use for operations involving the protection of persons and property. They're force protection vehicles. They're to be used to protect the police. Protecting the police is pretty much the highest priority at all times in all circumstances for police agencies. You know, officer safety is always their prime directive. Well, as a segue, when it gets down to the individual officer mindset, I think it's critical. Yes. You discuss how warfighting material from the US military that was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan has made its way into local police and sheriff's departments. In addition, a lot of former military personnel from those two conflicts have made their way into local police and sheriff's departments. And I think that there is a mindset that many of these returning army, marine veterans, etc. carry with them into police work. And I think you are probably best equipped to discuss the dangers of this. The key danger, of course, is that the role of the military is to destroy the target. And the advertised role of a police agency, although this is a deceptive description, of course, but the advertised role of a police agency is to protect persons and property. And those are two completely incompatible missions. So you've not had a clean effort to distinguish between the one role and the other over the last four or five decades. They've been co-lingled and blended, beginning with the rhetoric coming out from the top about this being a war on drugs. And of course, now we have a war on terror, but also in terms of the priority recruitment that you get for police agencies, on the part of police agencies for people who've got military experience. I recently had a conversation with the sheriff here in Payette County, his name is Chad Hoff, and we disagree, as you might imagine vehemently about a number of things, the drug war chiefly among them. But one of the things he told me I thought was quite revealing, he said that he finds it very difficult to deal with new recruits as deputies to his sheriff's office here. When they get out of the post-academy in Meridian, Idaho, he has to de-thugify them. He actually used that expression. He has to explain to these people, most of whom have a military background, but they cannot look at the public as this undifferentiated mass of menace. They have to assume that if they're going to work for his agency, they're going to have to accept certain risks. And that means that their safety is not going to be the highest priority. The safety of the public is going to have to be. I want to commend Sheriff Huff for something in addition to his observations about the troubles he's having with some of the deputies. He, not too terribly long ago, intervened in a SWAT standoff. And SWAT standoffs happen quite frequently in this country. There are 124 SWAT deployments a day, somewhere in the United States on average. But this one involved a domestic dispute. And he arrived on the scene after the SWAT team had already been deployed. And rather than ordering them to charge the house and fling flash bang grenades into the living area and such like, he said, wait here for a second. He actually took off his gun and went knocked on the door and talked with the subject of the SWAT raid and said, look, we need to get this cleared up. I'll send these guys away. But let's get this cleared up so it doesn't go any further. So he de-escalated that he's obviously old school. That's the mindset that you had for the most part in domestic police agencies until probably the mid 1980s. They were still teaching de-escalation. They were still training people to have at least the residual commitment to this idea of being a peace officer, finding some way to solve a problem that doesn't involve the use of force, doesn't necessarily involve putting handcuffs on somebody and taking them off to face charges. That was a mindset with which I was very familiar as a teenager when I wanted to be a police detective. And I did ride alongs with the Madison County Sheriff's deputies and spent some time in police headquarters studying what they did. That's a mindset that's long gone. It's been killed. It's not a matter of expiring by natural causes or it's not a matter necessarily of some kind of tragic demise. It was a matter of design. If you talk about these people as being involved in a war, and you define the public as really the enemy, but it's to be expected that institutionally the priorities for recruitment would focus on people who actually have experiences as agents of armed occupation overseas. And the skill sets are really quite comparable because a lot of methods used in occupations and places such as Haiti and Kosovo and then obviously in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of those methods are actually field tested by SWAT agencies here in the United States. The first place I saw the expression clear and hold with respect to urban warfare or low intensity warfare was in Northern California in late 1990s. And we take a look at the way there's been sort of this cross pollination historically between the police and the military goes all the way back to the occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war back in the late 1890s. And so it's all been baked into the institutional cake of policing, government policing. It started out using the model of an army of occupation. And now that we have a government that recognizes literally no restrictions on its ability to inflict its will both overseas or here at home. It shouldn't surprise us quite frankly that the same methods, the same tactics, the same weaponry that have been employed in foreign occupations had been brought home and are being used with increasing prominence here in the so-called homeland. That's one of the reasons I appreciate the fact that the ACLU and its very useful recent report on police militarization used the title bringing the war home. That's literally what's happening here is that the warfare state has simply opened a domestic front and police see themselves as war fighters rather than as peace officers. Well, we could talk about this topic all weekend. I want to just leave you with one last question though. Can you discuss from your perspective this particularly American phenomena of warehousing people in cages and the prison industrial complex that's growing in the United States? That's a really good example of what you describe in terms of a demand driven economy here between I think 68 and maybe 80 percent of the people who are being warehoused in cages have committed no offense against persons of property, which is to say that in no rational sense can they be construed as criminals. Most of them are behind bars because of drug related offenses that don't involve violence or fraud directed at any other human being. And a great many of them find themselves rotating in and out of cells or on probation or parole because the parole violations that represent some form of misconduct that they're arbitrarily assigned overlord called a parole officer disapproves of. The system of probation and parole is something I really want to explore. There are a number of articles I'm going to be writing in the near future. A number of stories I'm working on right now that involve people who while they were incarcerated had their sentences arbitrarily extended, which of course is illegal. There's one really terrible case like that in Mount York County I'll be writing about very soon. But it is a reproach to our country given our aspirations to exemplify ordered liberty for the rest of the world that we have an absolute terms the largest prison population of any society in history, not in per capita terms. We have a larger prison population, the bat of China. A country so vast that our entire population is a rounding error in calculating theirs and which is ruled by a group calling itself the Communist Party. We have a larger prison system than that of nominally Communist China. And I think one of the reasons why people have allowed this to happen is because they are burdened with the comforting illusion that somehow they are exempt from the scrutiny of the people who fill the prisons in this country. I mentioned earlier Harvey Silverglade's dire but necessary warning in three felonies a day. People don't understand that we live under a system that is not that of a constitutional republic for all the flaws that that configuration would have or would be better than what I'm about to describe. We live in a system of scalable totalitarianism. We have a system where any one of us can find himself as as hopeless as the Zach described in social needs and gulag archipelago. Zach, of course, is a political prisoner, somebody who for all intents and purposes has no rights. And most people have been bewitched into thinking that police are somehow tasked with protecting their rights and their property. They don't understand that police are actually involved in what we might call the retail level distribution of tyranny on behalf of the coercion cartel. And I think this is one of the many ways that this idolatrous attitude called American exceptionalism has blinded our eyes to what's really going on. Now, fortunately, Jeff, I think just this last year we've seen plentiful evidence that the public has reached its saturation point without rage over the conduct of the police. That's the good news. The not so encouraging news is the fact that there is a huge constituency consisting primarily of course of law enforcement personnel and their administrators and their contractors and so forth. There's this huge constituency that thinks of themselves in tribal terms and will always in all circumstances think that the most important thing they can do is not only protect police physically, they carry out these errands of quarters on behalf of the government, but also protect their interest institutionally when you're talking about salary negotiations and qualified to be doing everything else of that kind. So I think in the near term we're likely to see an escalation in hostility on the part of law enforcement because the public's becoming dissatisfied with what's going on and consider how that works in view of how the market is supposed to function. If these people were involved in providing security as a service to people and they had a customer base as dissatisfied as the American public is right now, how would a private entity react to those market signals? They would change what they're doing. What you have here, of course, is an institution that follows the logic of monopoly rather than market. So what they're going to do, exercising a monopoly on force is to exercise that monopoly more forcefully. That's happening in Albuquerque right now, where this scandal-plagued police department that's been involved in serial murder of local citizenry just went out and got 350 civilian copies of the M16 military rifle. This is the way that they're responding to criticism by the public they supposedly serve about the use of a military grade weaponry to kill helpless people, but going out and getting more of it at public expense. Again, that's the logic of monopoly rather than the market. Well, that's an excellent summary of our current situation. I'd like to thank you for your time this weekend. Ladies and gentlemen, I encourage you to follow the work of Will Grigg. You won't find a better chronicler of the US police state, the US drug war, the US prison industrial complex. You can find his articles at lurockwell.com. You can Google his blog, which is pro Libertata blog. And you can follow him on Twitter at Blarney Cuncarny. Thanks very much and have a great weekend. Thank you so much, yeah.