My Transformation: From Big Government Statist Cop to Small Government Libertarian Police Officer.

My policing colleagues have been known to call me an anarchist in a government uniform, a renegade, a radical, a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, and they’ve all been pretty much correct about me.    

The police are to SERVE THE PEOPLE, NOT GOVERNMENT.    

HOW TO “WAKE-UP” THE POLICE
Before introducing myself, I’d like to introduce you to the goal of LIBERTARIAN-COP. It’s to bridge the gap between the people and the police, to restore pride and respect in policing but to also “wake-up” the police and to “wake-up” the public. It’s to inform the public on how to wake-up the police effectively rather than just yelling at them. Likewise, I’m also here to provide you with the “other side” of the story, from the police perspective, to help give clarification where clarification is needed.    

WHO IS LIBERTARIAN-COP?
HOW I TRANSITIONED FROM BIG GOVERNMENT STATIST TO SMALL GOVERNMENT LIBERTARIAN
I’m a police officer in the City of Toronto and have been since 2009. We’re the largest municipal police service in Canada and Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America. Only Mexico City, New York City and Los Angeles are larger than Toronto.   Since becoming a police officer I've worked in the gang ridden neighbourhoods of Scarborough and have also worked right downtown Toronto.  In a service of approximately 5200 uniformed police officers, I've been awarded Police Officer of the Year and I've also been Police Officer of the Month twice in addition to numerous other awards.      

From the time I was a child, I always wanted to be a police officer. I remember my first year in school, junior kindergarten, I was about four years old and I had to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up. So with my crayons, I drew what is probably the worst Picasso-like picture ever of a police officer, swinging his nightstick in his left hand and with his gun in his right hand. And that’s my earliest memory of wanting to be a police officer.   

I grew up listening to stories of my grandfather who was a Staff Sergent in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The stories were always of him single-handedly taking on a pack of criminals as he was often in a rural detachment out in the snowy east coast of Canada where he was the only police officer. My Saturday nights were action packed watching the hit TV show COPS, Top Cops and then Rescue 911. Three full hours of exciting policing action. I grew up with the impression that the police were virtuous, mild manner servants of the people in their community but in the blink of an eye, could switch into the most aggressive violent sheepdogs protecting their herd when the herd they were sworn to protect was threatened. However as I came to learn, the police were actually there to serve political and big business interests (but we’ll talk more about this in later posts).    

In high school, I joined the military as a reservist. I was very idealistic. I had a Canadian flag on my wall, I believed that government would never lie to me and always had my best interest at heart (was I ever wrong). In 2003 I was deployed to Bosnia with the military. I moved on to become a paratrooper, I specialized in reconnaissance, I even represented the Canadian military at an international patrolling competition called Cambrian Patrol. Cambrian Patrol was hosted by the British military in the Brecon Beacons mountain range in Wales. The Brecon Beacons are notorious for being some of the most hostile terrain to navigate and have been made famous by the British SAS as this is where they conduct their selection process.

Having suffered an injury I then switched over to Military Intelligence where I worked as an intelligence operator.  

While spending a great deal of my time in the military, I was also a student at the University of Toronto. I graduated with a Hons B.A. in Criminology and Political Science. I spent the majority of my time in university defending the state, the police and the military. Most of the students and faculty were anti-government yet they were also self-proclaimed socialists and communists and thereby supportive of big government police states. This always confused me and made me laugh at their hypocrisy. But my time in university also fundamentally changed the way I would approach policing. Almost all of my professors were also anti-police lawyers, I despised them for their flat out hatred of the police, but they did provide me with my most valuable tool that I bring to policing, the need to question EVERYTHING and to become analytical. To look at the presuppositions that define the context in which a law was created, the spirit behind a law, and to apply that law fairly and to not just enforce a law because a law is a law and as a police officer I’ll enforce it blindly. To question the law, and to make sure that a law is there to protect the civilians and not just to protect the government. While this has been my most valuable asset that I bring to policing, it’s also been quite controversial, constantly putting me at odds with management for standing up for what I believe to be right and wrong.  

It was also during university that I discovered a fringe movement, a movement that would have me ostracized by both the Left and the Right political spheres. It was Libertarianism, classical Liberalism, not the new liberalism that is actually Marxist in ideology. Being a Libertarian can best be described as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You believe your gay neighbour should be allowed to marry another man while smoking marihuana and openly carrying a gun. And as a libertarian, you have the right to either agree or disagree with your neighbour, but you can’t impose upon his rights nor can he impose upon your rights nor force you to adopt his worldview and vice versa.  

Most importantly, as a libertarian minded police officer, I believe that the state should be limited in scope and reach. That the state should have little say in how an individual can live their life as long as they are not hurting anyone else or breaking any social contracts. Many laws do more harm than good and it’s up to an informed public to help guide the police in changing their views on their role in society. 

 

GOOD NEWS!!!
There is already a huge growing movement of libertarianism within the policing community. Most often these police officers are scared and intimidated to voice their opinion. I remember just a few years ago, I was in the gym at work. I was alone when another officer from the station whom I had never before spoken to, came in and looked around suspiciously to make sure no one else was there before saying, “So I hear you’re one of us?” I laughed and asked what he was talking about, thinking he was about to make a sexual advance on me. His reply, “you know! A Libertarian!” That was our dirty little secret. Since then we’ve moved on to be out of the closet openly Libertarian. Future posts are going to include facts and figures that you can use to wake up the police from enforcing draconian 1984ish laws. Stuff that’s going to speak to a police officers sensibilities. But that’s it for now. I just wanted to introduce myself and say hello. Stay tuned…