Do You Ever Get the Feeling the Police Aren’t Working for Us?

Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan has noticed something: police in the UK don’t seem to be working for the people who live there. Or at least not for all of them.

The thought may have first occurred to him back in September, when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport and detained for 12 hours because of some posts he had made on Twitter/X. These posts had offended some activists in the trans community, and one or more of those activists had reported them—not to X, but to the police.

For context, Linehan says he has been on the receiving end of multiple genuine death threats from trans activists—including from activists who have made complaints to the police about his Tweets—yet not a single one of these activists has been arrested.

“For years,” says Linehan, “I’ve been reporting a group of men to the police. They’ve harassed dozens of people, committed fraud, and in some cases been convicted of serious crimes, including sexual assault on a minor. When I report the harassment and death threats they send my way, nothing happens. When others report them, nothing happens. But here’s what does happen: the police investigate us for talking about them.”

So Linehan has decided to take matters into his own hands: He’s raising money to hire a private investigator to gather evidence on this group of men and their activities, and then present this evidence to the public:

“I’ve decided to do something that feels wonderfully ridiculous and also completely necessary: hire a proper private detective. Someone who actually investigates things. Novel concept, I know.”

Linehan’s experience is not unique. UK police currently arrest around 12,000 people annually under the country’s “Malicious Communications Act 1988” and “Communications Act 2003” (which cover, but are not strictly limited to, posts on social media). Between ten and twenty percent of these arrests result in imprisonment.

Linehan (who now lives in the US), and others living in the UK, could be forgiven for imagining that it’s just possible these police departments do not work for them, but serve other masters.

The question is: How did the UK get to the point where a person cannot get the police to take seriously harassment and death threats against him, but that same person can find himself under arrest for making a post that one of the people threatening and harassing him finds offensive?

The answer is actually very simple: With a monopoly, there can be no accountability to customers. Students learn this in their economics 101 classes. However, in those classes, the lesson is incorrectly applied to free markets, while ignoring the biggest monopoly—the one that can never legally be challenged by competition: the state.

Popular narratives from mainstream culture (Robocop comes to mind) tell us that “privatizing” policing is dangerous because corporations are not accountable to the public and will abuse their power. We need government to take on this function, we are told, because government is accountable to us in ways that private companies never can be.

This belief could not be more backwards.

Mainstream economics textbooks tell us that once a producer has achieved monopoly status, it is no longer subject to normal market forces: Because it no longer has competitors, it need not worry about the pressures of competition. The monopolist is now free to raise prices at will, while allowing the quality of its goods or services to fall. After all, where else are its customers going to go?

The problem with this analysis, when applied to private companies, is that even if a particular company were to achieve a monopoly at a given point in time, that monopoly status is in no way guaranteed. As long as others are free to enter the marketplace, even a monopolist must remain alert to the threat of potential competition and continue to work to maintain its customer base.

The same cannot be said for monopolies created and enforced by the state.

Unlike their private counterparts (think Microsoft, Amazon, Apple—companies that still work to serve their customers and keep costs low, even while appearing to dominate the marketplace), government producers behave precisely as we are told the textbook monopolist will: Raising “prices” and not caring a whole lot about making their “customers” happy.

In the realm of policing, this indifference to customer satisfaction has crossed the line into outright antagonism. It is difficult to reconcile performing this poorly with being considered “public servants.”

So what is the solution?

Fortunately, there are already examples that refute the notion that we must depend on coercive state entities to have protection from crime. Indeed, these often demonstrate the superiority of non-governmental solutions.

Perhaps most notable is Dale Brown, whose Threat Management Center (TMC) cleaned up some of Detroit’s worst neighborhoods—neighborhoods the police wouldn’t go anywhere near. In 1995, Brown approached owners of some of the apartment buildings in these neighborhoods and offered to install a security officer in each building, in exchange for one free apartment.

“From the day I started,” he says, “there was only one more home invasion—I caught them—and there were no more murders.”

This, on a block of about ten apartment buildings that had previously seen home invasions daily and murders monthly. Not only did Brown’s simple intervention make the neighborhood safer for its residents—it also produced downstream effects that revitalized the area as local businesses were able to flourish.

So why did Brown succeed where government police had failed? The first answer is incentives. Monopoly-state police departments receive their funding each year regardless of how good a job they do at keeping crime down. Indeed, when crime rates rise, so do calls for increased funding of the police. But this is not how businesses operate.

If a business fails to produce results, it will eventually begin losing money and ultimately cease to operate. If Dale Brown hopes to continue doing business as a private security company, he needs to produce the kinds of results his customers want. The same is not true for government police departments.

But there’s another critical piece of the puzzle: Accountability.

Because Brown and his team are civilians, they do not have the insulation from liability that comes with being part of the monopoly state. Very specifically, they do not enjoy the qualified immunity afforded to police officers. What this means is that they will be held accountable, as any other civilian would be, should they cause harm to anyone’s person or property while doing their jobs.

“I’m accountable,” says Brown. “That means, if I put my hands on someone it has to be legal. There has to be a way for me to explain it as a civilian.”

Because of this, Brown and his team operate very differently from government police departments. They do not prosecute people for victimless offenses, such as using or selling some drugs. And their approach is less confrontational.

“A police officer believes you’re a threat,” says Brown, “so they begin to talk to you in an autocratic, aggressive fashion. What we do is build a psychological bridge to explain to you that there is no need, there’s no option for violence, there’s no opportunity, and there’s nothing to gain. So you must leave now, and I’m letting you leave. My staff is letting you leave. You can simply go.”

The approach has paid off. Only a year after TMC began its work in some of Detroit’s worst neighborhoods, those areas saw a 90 percent drop in violent crime and a 100 percent elimination of home invasions and homicides. I’m going to make the very safe guess that not a single government police department across the country can boast these kinds of statistics.

We are long past the point where policing is simply ineffective or incompetent. Graham Linehan and others are learning the hard way that monopoly-state policing is, in fact, a weapon that can be aimed directly against us—with repressive, and sometimes deadly, effects.

How much worse will it have to get before enough of us are willing to reconsider the faulty foundations upon which it is built?