Naked Wizard Tased By Reality from Tracy Anderson on Vimeo.

The arrestee in the video above is subject to physical violence in the course of his arrest. This, despite the fact that the police started out with reasonably-polite requests and persisted in those requests for a significant amount of time. But no matter how polite a police officer starts out, his or her requests are always backed up with the threat of violence.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that The Jack-Booted Liberal is not a pacifist. I believe that violence can be morally right. The most clear-cut examples are cases where violence is used to stop an immediate, otherwise-unavoidable threat of death or grave bodily harm. I find more ambiguity, however, in cases where violence is used to stop a fundamentally non-violent activity. If a person is nude in public, a police officer goes to arrest them, and the person resists, then the officer will use violence to effect compliance. That violence will start out mild and will escalate until the nude person is either in custody or dead.

This escalation of violence is enshrined in the system. No, I’m not suggesting that it would be legal for a police officer to kill a non-violent, non-resisting person. That wouldn’t be necessary, because by the time lethal force was employed, the offense would have escalated from, “public indecency,” to, “resisting arrest,” to, “assault on a police officer,” to, “attempted murder of a police officer.” The system is set up such that the act of failing to submit to arrest for a non-violent offense can, itself, be interpreted as a violent offense which then morally justifies a violent response. This escalation is invoked even for the most minor of offenses. You can’t be arrested for a parking ticket, but if you don’t pay the ticket, a cascade of charges will result that will eventually mandate your arrest, at which point violence is on the table.

Ultimately, a police officer’s job is to arrest suspected criminals and gather evidence that can be used to convict them. Without arrest powers, an officer’s requests are no more compelling than anybody else’s. The nature of arrest is that it is counter to the preferences of the arrestee, and so the power to use physical coercion—violence—is granted to officers. The potential for lawfully-applied physical violence is what differentiates a police officer from any other nice person who has a preference about your behavior. If a police officer was allowed to say, “Oh well, I guess you don’t want to be arrested then. Nothing I can do about it. Carry on!” then arrest as a concept would be toothless, and there wouldn’t be any point in granting arrest powers to police officers at all. And without a means of enforcing laws, there wouldn’t be any point in having laws at all. In fact, laws without enforcement wouldn’t be laws at all. They’d be requests.

So, what have we got then? Laws imply the need to enforce them, which implies the need to grant arrest powers to law enforcement, which implies the use of violence. Laws imply the use of violence. The existence of laws requires the use of violence to enforce them.

I wonder whether that’s okay when the law prohibits a fundamentally non-violent activity such as public nudity. My sense of morality is that violence is definitely justified in response to violence, although it might not always be the smartest strategy. I feel much more ambiguous about the use of violence in response to non-violent offenses. If a person insults me, wears clothing that I don’t like (or no clothing at all), plays their music too loud, or uses language that I object to, I don’t believe that it is moral for anyone to use violence against them in response. No actual harm is being done in those cases, so how is it morally justified to do harm in response?

Conclusion? If it is not morally justified to use violence in response to a behavior, then it is not morally justified to have a law prohibiting or requiring the behavior. Based on that premise, I question whether laws against non-violent offenses like public indecency should even exist. It is immoral to use violence against those who are not doing any real harm. The existence of laws against non-violent behavior requires immoral behavior from police officers who are legally obligated to use violence to enforce the laws through arrest. We should not put police officers in a position where their moral sense conflicts with their legal obligations. We should not put ourselves in the position where immoral violence is legally required to be used against us.