Posse Comitatus by Executive Director on Scribd
June 2, 2020
For Immediate Release:
President Trump’s implication that he will deploy the American military on American soil to battle Americans is yet another failure in leadership. Given the opportunity to act as peacemaker, the president chose instead to escalate the division across the country, risking even more violence and bloodshed. Rather than focusing on the crime that was committed and using the investigation as a focus for de-escalation, he took the unconscionable step of openly advocating for the deployment of trained warriors to fight their own countrymen.
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police was tragic in isolation, but it is part of a systemic failure of a law enforcement model which measures success largely via a high arrest rate. Law enforcement justifies budgets by putting people behind bars. As a result, law enforcement has a perverse incentive to create more criminals. Instead, we should be honoring police agencies with a low arrest rate. We can achieve that by eliminating laws that criminalize behaviors which hurt no one.
Every law requires enforcement. Enforcement injects force into our society. The recent violence we see mirrors that which the police have been dispensing for decades. Police have been breaking into houses without justification at an alarming rate, a practice which recently led to Breonna Taylor being killed in her bed. Police in New York City killed Eric Garner by choking him for selling something that he could have given away for free. And police across the country continue to engage in racist and prejudicial behavior, targeting African Americans for illegal searches and seizures via stop-and-frisk laws. These acts have injected a new and terrifying violence into our society. That violence is now erupting onto the streets.
We seek to end this cycle of injecting force into our society.
- We call on Governors to reject Federal overreach and the activation of the military for policing.
- We call upon every member of Congress to support the “Ending Qualified Immunity Act” introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (L-MI), and we ask the American people to contact their representatives in Congress to urge them to support the bill.
The Libertarian Party believes that all power derives from the people, and the only legitimate
power held by the state is strictly by the consent of the governed. It is now time for the people
to take that power back.
The Libertarian Party can be contacted at press@lp.org
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