Rushdoony and the Disappearance of “True Police”

In light of the protesting, beset by rioting, and calls to “abolish police” or “defund the police,” someone shared R. J. Rushdoony’s 1965 essay, “Localism and the Police Power,” which was an appendix in his The Nature of the American System. One selective passage shared, however, is misleading as to his views (to some extent) and to the nature of biblical law for police. I would like to address such misuses (there are more than one, but we will look at one, and then the whole context).

One passage shared seems to set Rushdoony (and by intent Christian Reconstruction in general) against all forms of radical police reform. It says this,

Lawless demonstrations today are an increasing instrument of social revolution, indicating a contempt of law and of the police. Such actions may be aimed against the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or against segregation, but they are also aimed against the police, in attempts to discredit them and to make them a hated agency. The conduct of the demonstrators, whatever the professed cause, is more often an anti-police action, and the continuing use made of the demonstration, after it is history, is as an ostensible record of “police brutality.” All this is simply revolutionary action, and, whatever its broader goals, the immediate goal is the discrediting of the local police.

If we were to abstract this from its context, and assume some kind of 1-to-1 comparison to today’s BLM issues, etc., this seems to stand as a striking condemnation of all protests and anything that smacks of “anti-police” activity. We must, it seems, fall back to a “support your local police” mentality, almost at all costs. For any anti-police activity is “revolutionary,” which is to say, “Marxist”!

The real test of whether any writer’s viewpoints are worth their salt is whether they are consistent with the underlying principles they espouse or not. Or perhaps a better way of analyzing it would be to walk backwards, presuppositionally, from the conclusions or applications they espouse: given the application, what must be the underlying principles? Are those underlying principles consistent with the overarching principles of biblical law we say we believe in? I am here to tell you, this has not always been the case with Reconstructionists, let alone Reformed writers in general. This includes Rushdoony, among others.

At the heart of the problem with applying his essay on police injudiciously to today is the fact of what we mean by “police.” Are we defining it according to a biblical ideal, some tradition, or by the current existing institution uncritically? Rushdoony himself notes this very problem of definition in this very essay: “In this day and age, many are content to define things in terms of existing function rather than nature and meaning.” He moves then to define “police according to its “origin, purpose, and nature” (159). This includes seven key points (159–160). We need to examine these closely.

Rushdoony on the Nature and Meaning of Police, Ideally Conceived

I want us to look carefully at each of Rushdoony’s seven points to see how radically different his conception of police in this essay is from the “existing function” of today which some have incautiously assumed. According to Rushdoony, “true police” necessarily is:

1. A locally controlled and hence decentralized agency which is unrelated to other police bodies of other cities or counties and lacking in any national federation or union. The police, properly, are city and county law enforcement men.

This point actually includes a couple points: “true” police are “unrelated to other police bodies.” Given the amount of database, resource, information, and cooperative sharing that takes place today between departments on all levels, municipal, county, state, and federal in all directions, modern police fails Rushdoony’s definition of “true police” on this point at the very start. But we are just getting started.

This point also says, “lacking any national federation or union.” Police throughout America today are linked and leveraged through all sorts of federations, associations, lobbies, and unions. Again, we no longer have true police by this standard.

2. The police are not a military body, even if in uniform. They are civilians in every sense of the word, and their authority is a civilian authority.

By more than one measure, as has been so adequately (and frighteningly) documented by Radley Balko (Rise of the Warrior Cop), police in America today are radically militarized. Much comes in the forms of federal grants for equipment, military surplus equipment, for the war on drugs and other federal programs. There are even some programs of formal cooperation between military and police; but the informal measures are far more vast and in themselves startling and dangerous enough.

Likewise, the double standard of immunities enjoyed by police that are in no way applicable to civilians shows how far down this road we have traveled. When Rushdoony wrote this, the Constitutional questions were not fully settled on this issue yet; Terry v. Ohio, which created a new standard for police powers in searches and arrests which had never existed before, was not approved until three years later (1968). Likewise, the further expansion of those powers did not arrive near their present form until Harlow et al v. Fitzgerald in 1982. There are many other cases in which they were expanded, and still are as of very recently. All of this happened after Rushdoony wrote this, and I cannot find anywhere where he commented on these cases. That aside, the end result is that police today are not civilian “in every sense of the word” by hardly any measure. On all counts, modern police fail on this point also.

3. The police are supported by the local property owners, whose agency they are, by means of a tax on property. The entire support of the police is local, and it is the property tax.

Even setting aside any ideological differences on this point, it also is not true anymore today. Police are only partially funded by property tax. They are increasingly funded through revenue generated through fines, probation and jail fees (which can be extraordinarily oppressive), state and federal grants, and asset forfeiture. On the “entire support” being local and property tax standard, then, modern police fails again.

4. Their orientation is accordingly local, and the protection of life and property is their essential task. They are thus essentially a non-political body.

This point may be the sole area in which some modern police could theoretically even come close in this list, but that all depends on how you define being a political body. Many police are controlled by unions that are just as wed to Party politics as any other, and some police lobbies routinely line up with certain platforms of certain parties. In other cases, lobbies can thrust themselves into local matters to sway public opinion on bond funding for new jails or programs, etc. This is hardly apolitical, even if not in the party sense, in the sense of pro-police industry against the people.

Further, given our nation’s history, it seems rather blind on Rushdoony’s part to suggest that local police are apolitical traditionally. Police departments across the South were literally created in response to the freeing of blacks and in support of a host of new legislative policy aimed at marginalizing and re-enslaving blacks under a new name. Police in many parts of the country were used similarly for racist and class-oriented purposes, not just in the South. How all of this escapes calling-out as “political” is anyone’s guess. It is also the main reason there have been consistent moves to impose federal standards on local police: state and local police historically resisted improvement in this area. It is a huge blind spot in Rushdoony’s view of police, as we shall see.

5. The local orientation of the police means also no national responsibility. Federal law is outside the jurisdiction of the police.

This point has already been addressed in more than one place above. In some cases, federal standards have been imposed on local police because locals refused to treat minorities and the poor as humans. Courts had to step in, in the name of human and civil rights. In other cases, local police have themselves invited federal responsibility and jurisdiction through taking federal grants, programs, powers, assets, etc. Again, by this point, modern police fails Rushdoony’s “true police” test as well.

Point 6 is rather long to reprint entirely. Its summary says this:

True police power is thus in the citizenry and not in the state; it is delegated, not surrendered. This is the identifying mark of a true police, and the source of its offense to a totalitarian order.

“Not surrendered” here means that citizens can perform police functions, too, still, even though we have sworn officers. But even in states with citizens’ arrest powers, police are still given powers and immunities above and beyond that of ordinary citizens. That alone shows we are no longer in a world of citizen policing, and more into the world of totalitarianism.

Furthermore, today, the creation of citizen review boards to oversee and decide on police powers, are resisted by police departments in many cases, and regarded by many as leftist attempts to intrude on the police. In reality, they are much closer to the common law standard in which police power is merely a citizenry power and is fully accountable to them. By this standard, too, then, modern police is found wanting.

7. The police are an aspect of the local citizenry’s self-government and of their right of self-defense. Attempts to destroy the police by destroying their purely local nature are thus veiled attacks on the right of self-defense.

It is commonly observed today that the very police so many conservatives support will generally without scruple be the ones who confiscate their guns in such an event. If we had “true police” today, this would not even be a concern. We would know that police in general would not be heavily enough advantaged in arms to carry out such a mass disarmament, and we would further be able to trust that no member of any such force would carry out such an order. But who believes either of these to be the case today?

As it is, therefore, perhaps we should regard the very existence of police forces as they exist and are constituted today as a standing threat—perhaps the single greatest standing “veiled attack,” to use Rushdoony’s phrase—on the right of self-defense and the Second Amendment.

At the very least, we should understand modern police to fail on this point as well.

We can see, therefore, that on all seven points required for Rushdoony’s understanding of “true police,” modern police departments fail. Even if we fudge on a point or two and grant them, it is still an overwhelming failure.

What does this mean? At the very least, it means that whatever support he gave for local police against “attacks” occurring from communist forces at that time do not, by definition, apply today. By all seven definitional points, modern police have become the very centralized, coopted, totalitarian, socialistic institution he warned against in 1965.

Further, this means that criticizing the police today, even calling for their defunding or abolition in some cases, is not the same as the “attacks” or criticism he described back then. This is true even if we are criticizing them today for the same things he objected to back then. The reason is, the police of today is nowhere, not on any point, the same as the police he defined back then. Criticisms of police today therefore do not fall under the same censure. To claim otherwise is to equivocate on the definition of “police” by Rushdoony’s own definitions.

Were police powers even so righteous at the time?

It is even worth considering whether the police Rushdoony conceptualized for himself in his own day themselves even fit these definitions. I do not think they did. It may have been the case that the departments were far more decentralized and under local funding and control, but there are other factors to consider as well.

Prior to his seven points, Rushdoony quotes a 1962 textbook which gives fives principles of policing. One of them is, “Police duties must be carried out impartially.” Another says that “punishment is not part of the police function but belongs to the courts and correctional institutions.” (159)

Both of these points were widely abused throughout police departments in America up until and through the 1960s. The whole revolution in criminal law procedure led by the Warren Court occurred precisely because both of these points, especially the first, were widely abused.

Local control is an ideal, unless of course the locals are racists, especially activist or violent ones—if they want to keep blacks out and don’t mind using statutes and bullies in blue to accomplish that ideal. Then, local control is an evil in God’s eyes. Even if everything is done under the color of law, and all our pretty little decentralized levels of government and separate jurisdictions are in place, the root of it is a violation of moral law and a deprivation of certain rights in the name of others.

You simply cannot appeal to one set of rights (like localism or states’ rights, or “individualism” and “private property”) for the purpose of violating another set (the Civil Rights of black people, for example). You do this, and God will bring judgment in history, usually in the form of totalitarianism. Then, the very people who were morally depraved enough to try to set up such a society to begin with will probably stand by and play victim.

Again, through the eras before the 60s, these problems did not just occur in the racist deep south states, but throughout most of the United States, including California, Illinois, and many others. It was a nation-wide problem. To pretend like the remedies that came in the form of the Warren Court cases, leveraging the federal standard universally in many cases upon state and local police, were the frontline of the encroach of tyranny is disingenuous. There may have been communists and ANTIFA-types causing various troubles at the time; but the primary trouble was taking place throughout the country under the blessed disguise of the very decentralization and local police power we want to uphold.

This is to say two things. First, we must have our hearts right. We cannot appeal to localism unless we first have sanctification in the local populace to begin with. Note: this was true even for the alleged good old days. But it is true today as well. Until we truly confront the haunting problems of racism, partiality, and police abuse of power, our appeals for local freedom will be threats to the freedom and peace of a great many people. They will fall on deaf ears. They will strike terror in the hearts of the vulnerable. That ideal will remain, before God, undeserved and dangerous for us.

Second, there is an abiding, inherent contradiction in the appeals of many Reconstructionists. It is here, after all, that the loudest cries arise about “Christian America,” the influence of the Bible in our founding documents and Constitution, and above all, the Bill of Rights. Yet for many of these same people, there has been no greater destruction of the country than when the many racist and often brutal local regimes were forced by centralized power to abide by the dictates of the Constitution!  

It is amazing to me that so many people in this movement speak with such affection and pride about the biblical foundations and consistency of our constitution, especially the recognitions in the Bill of Rights, yet then in nearly the same breath decry the fact that the Supreme Court incorporated the Bill of Rights onto the states!

If the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights truly are as biblical as we say, why would we not want state and local governments that either meet or exceed them? Or on the other hand, if these localities were so Christian in their culture as some people say to begin with, why were the biblical rights of the federal level not secured for so many at the local and state level? Worse yet, why did it take so long, and a war, for it to get changed? Apparently, these localities were not biblical to begin with, and the states were running interference and providing cover for them to get away with failing to live up to the biblical standards in the Constitution.

My view is that while not everything done by the federal government and courts has been right, at least many of the abuses against minorities, immigrants, and the poor have been remedied and brought into line with what most of us would agree are the biblical principles at least visible still in the Constitution. Perhaps we don’t like the centralized package through which it eventually arrived, but if the local powers had been moral and upright to begin with, the centralization would have never been required and probably would never have happened. Again, this is a result of judgment; but it is a judgment that is at least a happy one insofar as it alleviates the plight of many afflicted people.

If we ever intend to lift the centralized aspect, we are going to need a grassroots alternative in place, already active and working well, upholding the rights of all involved, before any program of decentralization takes place. Again, this means actively confronting the racial animosity, prejudice, police abuses, and much more first. It means a true moral revolution in the hearts of individuals, and a completely revamped view of a true citizenry-police power arising from that moral populace.

Rushdoony’s Mixed Bag on Police

It is unfortunate that Rushdoony did not remain consistent with the biblical principles in his views of police throughout his career. In some cases, he was not even consistent within the same setting.

He was inconsistent in seeing biblical principles in one context (say “law and order” in general) while overlooking other crucial ones (say the deprivation of rights of blacks in various ages, for example). In other cases, he may simply express the biblical concern at one time (placing all government power under accountability to God’s law strictly, allowing no government infraction) while neglecting such views in another context (lamenting the loss of unjust police powers, such as in use of force laws).

I am not sure what fully accounts for such disparities, if any one thing does. I do get the sense that when looking purely at biblical, exegetical, or some deeper historical issues, Rushdoony tends to get it right and call for truly biblical standards (more like his seven points for policing, etc.). Yet in other places he seems to be pandering to a readership, or even broader conservative political views, like when he speaks of how great things were in the good old days or exalts “law and order” without qualification, even when it would entail unspoken police abuses.

Here is an example of the mixed bag of which I speak. Rushdoony here speaks of a simpler time in law enforcement. Note closely that it was professionalization and networking of police forces which marked the spoil of it:

Well, when this country was started, law enforcement was in the hands of local constables and justices of the peace. The justice of the peace was not a lawyer. You did not need a lawyer to go before a justice of the peace. He was a man who had a good reputation locally and knew his Bible. And he tried a case in terms of general Christian, biblical, legal premises, equity. Now that was how, until our childhood in most of the country, not the cities, law was handled . . . by a justice of the peace and a local constable. But the justices of the peace were dispensed with. They were not lawyers and somehow the excellent law enforcement they had provided for generations was no longer valid. And the constable gave way to trained police who were tied in with other police groups. Every country in history that has had a centralized police force has wound up in tyranny. It has had a KGB or a Gestapo. And that is exactly where we are headed now. And this is why we have the confiscations we do. If you should have a passenger in your car who has a couple of marijuana cigarettes in his pocket, unbeknownst to you, you can lose your car. (Rushdoony, Easy Chair, “A Federal Police Force,” https://pocketcollege.com/transcript/RR161BZ142.html)

First, this idealized vision may itself have been beset by racist and pro-slavery aspects which simply go unstated here. In many places, this was undoubtedly the case. So, it was not so Christian and ideal overall. But even if we take it to be Christian and ideal, the end of it Rushdoony says (at some point in the late 80s or maybe early 90s) was marked by “trained police who were tied in with other police groups.” In other words, again, the police of today are not the police he was defending in 1965 in Nature of the American System. The new system, in other words, has more in common with those communist systems against which Rushdoony was warning us back then. To defend these institutions today is to defend the tyrannical, socialized varieties.

The mixed bag of which I speak gets even worse in that very same discussion when Otto Scott immediately moves on to blame Reconstruction in the South for the increase of federal power in police. This is to be utterly blind to the moral and institutional forces which led to the need for Reconstruction to begin with, and the racism that ruled under Jim Crow for 100 years afterward and some even beyond.

Worse, it is historically inaccurate. The first federal police force was created as result of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This southern-backed measure created federal police with the power to retrieve escaped slaves throughout the North, as well as to forcibly deputize anyone, on the spot, under penalty of law for refusal in the attempt to catch such an alleged slave. (So much for “states’ rights.”)

To be fair, however, Scott does on multiple occasions decry the use of civil asset forfeiture in use already at that time. This is great! These guys are great when they stick to principle!

Speaking of principle, Rushdoony in another place announces a general principle we can apply in all police situations:

The state has no right to violate God’s law, Thou shalt not steal, and paper money is theft, and what you call a hidden tax is actually hidden theft. I cannot hold to the immunity of the state from moral judgment, and yet this is precisely what is the most prevalent opinion in most evangelical and orthodox circles today. You mustn’t criticize. The state isn’t under the law, and some go a step further and say we are not under the law, which probably accounts for their lack of morality. (Rushdoony, “Theft in Law,” https://pocketcollege.com/transcript/RR130AZ93.html.)

“Immunity” is an interesting word here, in light of the abuse of qualified immunity in the news today. Cops are most often immune from prosecution for their mistakes, even when they violate people’s civil rights. Rushdoony’s principled view of God’s law over all institutions forbids such a thing. The state is not immune when it violates God’s law. Its thefts, murders, assaults, rapes, kidnappings, and batteries must be prosecuted!

Further, Rushdoony expresses the very high standard the state must overcome when prosecuting alleged criminals. Our Fifth Amendment, he says, is grounded in nothing short of the biblical standard (here’s that glorious, biblical Constitution we mentioned!):

According to George Horowitz, in his influential study, The Spirit of Jewish Law (1953), the Mishnah spoke of confession, not in relation to court procedure, but that, on conviction and before execution, the condemned man was asked to confess his sin in order to be received of God. In fact, “a confession, of course, could never be used against a defendant to assure his punishment on earth.” (sec. 338, p. 641). The importance of this is very great; it meant that, because a confession was inadmissible evidence, torture was not and could not be used. This preserved the person of the accused from torture, the third degree, or any other like method of extracting a confession. It meant that justice required evidence gained by lawful means.

Thus, the whole of biblical law worked, first, to protect the accused from lawless methods of compelling a confession. Since a confession in itself is not evidence in biblical law, we have all the ingredients of what in the United States became the Fifth Amendment, the immunity of the accused from being compelled to testify. The biblical legislation goes further than the Fifth Amendment, in fact. (Rushdoony, “Justice and Torture,” Chalcedon Position Paper No. 68)

Rushdoony had to be aware, through all of his reading on law and order, that police routinely violated this standard throughout the country. Why he rarely addresses them in terms of current affairs, I do not know. But at least he gets it right here when he discusses principles. We can then test his other discussions against this standard, and when necessary, find them wanting.

For example, when he neglects the clear standards of biblical law for broad daylight thefts:

Meanwhile, the police are under attack. . . . In many cities, police are forbidden to fire on looters or rioters. . . . A bill proposed in California would limit the right of the police to use their weapons even further. . . . Similar legislation is proposed elsewhere. (Chalcedon Report No. 26, Nov. 1, 1967.)

Police should never have been allowed to “fire on looters,” unless of course they were threatening lives. Exodus 22:3 is clear that blood cannot be shed over “daylight” property theft alone. Notice this news comes in 1967, at the height of the Warren Court changes. It is not necessarily clear that any specific aspect of those changes applied to this detail specifically, but the national attention given to police abuses, etc., no doubt alone would have been enough to check what before would have been open season for a trigger-happy police.

Rushdoony’s express lament, however, has less in common with the biblical principle and sounds more in line with the general conservative reaction of the era: this was all seen as “handcuffing the police.” Indeed, reining-in bad police practices here he calls police “under attack”!

Disparities in Rushdoony’s expressions grow much worse in some cases. Here is an interesting anecdote he wrote in 1969:

In the early 1920s, in Detroit, my father went one day to meet a newly-arriving immigrant, an elderly priest. The old man’s life had been spent in the Near East and Europe; he came directly from the Continent. After their greeting, my father asked certain plain questions about conditions in the Old World, and the priest hastily shushed him, indicating the presence of a policeman nearby. My father laughed with delight and explained that, in America the police are our friends and protectors. The old man could not have been more emphatic in his disbelief. On their way home, my father stopped at a home near a school for a few minutes. The school was letting out, and children ran happily to the crossing. The patrolman was a favorite of all the children, and the children competed happily to hold his hand. At this, the old priest broke down and wept openly. This, he said, was the difference between America and the Old World; here, the police were loved by the children and regarded by the people as their protectors; there, the police were feared as political agents.

What has happened since then? If the police have changed, it is generally very much for the better: better trained, more courteous, more honest, and better informed on the law. That old priest, who died in the 1940s, always spoke of the authority and honor of the policeman’s position in America. Things have changed since then. What is the reason? And what has changed?

Very clearly, the police have been the target of a subversive attack; there has been a systematic attempt to discredit the police. Granted, but an attack is a failure unless it finds a receptive people. Why have people been so ready to accept antipolice propaganda? Faults are there in the police as in every group in society, but why this demand for perfection? Why the total hostility to law and order? Some insist that anyone who uses the term “law and order” favorably belongs to the enemy, i.e., is a part of a hated establishment. Why? (Chalcedon Report No. 48, Aug. 1, 1969.)

Did he really think police were so much better in 1969 that this truly idealized view of that old man he presents from 1920? (Not to mention, what would have been the experience and perspective of blacks in 1920?) And was it really due to better training and knowledge of laws? He specifically said in a previous example that it was the move to a trained police force that signified the loss of true police and beginning of KGB-style centralized tyranny!

I honestly do not know what accounts for these disparities. The Chalcedon Reports especially seem to contain such unscrupulous, pro-police views. But they are clearly detached from his explanations of principle, and often do not relate the full situational picture in which he is clearly living and reacting. I can only take many of these conflicted expressions as some political or other form of bias.

Conclusion

If you want my advice, stick with Rushdoony’s more principled, definitional expressions. Then apply them more consistently than he did. Also, do not fall for the attempts of those who take his 1965 essay as directly applicable to today, certainly not in an un-nuanced, uncritical fashion. He was clearly defending a different “police” in that essay. By all points in his own standard, that police does not exist in America any more.

How we go about reforming or replacing what we have, then, will require not only some exegetical effort, but a tremendous amount of personal integrity in a lot of people. It will probably take a genuine revival. But at the moment, it requires some serious courage just to admit the problem we have knocking at our door (or in some cases, no-knocking).

***

(Cover photo: Kate Sheets, cc 2.0)