Years back I read an article about a small town mid-west police chief who had only a tiny budget. He painted a junkyard scrap car to look like a police car and towed it to a spot near the interstate highway. People from out of town saw it and slowed down. He was proud that he was able to make the roads safer and reduce speeding.

One major problem with the current law enforcement system is police moving away from this kind of thinking. Like government in general, the focus is less on solutions and more on metrics. Police today are often more motivated by quotas, revenue and funding. Today it would be less likely to have someone do what this officer did because of the focus on revenue from tickets needed to fund ever-expanding reach of police.

Worse yet, we have extremely aggressive asset seizures that come without due process and accountability. Police departments boast of vehicles and assets seized from non-violent drug offenders, some of whom were not even charged or tried.

The massive machine of Federal grants in the name of Homeland Security has seen even small town police outfitted with tank-like armored personnel carriers, machine guns and ninja-style military costumes. This, in turn, costs money to maintain and creates a desire by some police to use all the fancy new gear. So we see SWAT team style raids on families of non-violent offenders, raw milk health food stores and anyone else the police can make an excuse to use their gear, sometimes even mistaken identity wrong-door-raids (check out YouTube for some truly chilling and disturbing videos of SWAT teams busting in homes, shooting family dogs and abusing suspects in the name of non-violent crime).

This militarization of our police is a dangerous cycle. The tanks, helmets, boots and machine guns must be justified and paid for. We see more and more broad asset seizure and an expansion of mandatory sentencing and for-profit prisons. The for-profit prisons, their unions and the police unions feed into a cycle that is far less interested in crime reduction and more interested in arrests and quotas.

Meanwhile we have politicians feeding this broken system by not only refusing to address the issues of drug prohibition, asset forfeiture and mandatory sentencing but by continually adding new laws to the books. Far too often these new laws are those which, if violated, have no victim. Most often, new laws target previously law-abiding citizens for behavior which harms no one and was previously legal. The cycle has led to more police abuses and resulted in a nation which prides itself on freedom to have machine gun toting soldiers in bus stations and on street corners and a prison system which has more humans in cages than any other country on earth.

This cycle must be broken. We must unwind the militarized police system, radically decrease violent enforcement for non-violent crimes, eliminate for-profit prison systems, forfeitures and other financial motivations for legal conflict and we must eliminate laws which represent “crimes” that have no victim. With this comes more individual freedom and personal responsibility and the ability for police to be safer, more in line with the communities they serve and to focus on real crime reduction and actual violent crime.

Let freedom ring.