This is all very true, but with a couple caveats:
50 years ago there was not the volume of laws, rules, mandates,
fatwas, orders, regulations, codes and ordinances that there are now, nor was the technology available to watch everybody, all the time, every time, to find out when they running afoul of one of these millions of unknowable and impossible to comply with laws.
50 years ago cops were not in every corner of society, all militarized, all itching to get their beating on, all armed with the laws above and the surveillance to nail you. There are so many cops now, I can't keep track of them of them all: local cops, county cops, state cops, national cops, homeland security cops, transit cops, housing cops, railroad cops, clam cops, environmental cops, trash cops, internet cops, aviation cops, marine cops, banking cops, park cops, border cops, tax cops, immigration cops, hospital cops, school cops...the list goes on and on...there are over
17,000 various branches of cops in the US today.
50 years ago you could, with just a reasonable amount of caution, do a great deal more every day than what you can possibly hope to get away with now, thereby rendering the cop issue fairly moot.
And I can speak fairly confidently about this as I've watched it all happen in my lifetime and have been "awake" and politically active the whole time.
What I could get away with as a young man would put my young man of a son in prison today.
Anybody of a similar age will say the same thing, I'm sure.
The race discussion stemmed from something in the article.
Eric Peters labors under the misapprehension that things today are somehow different from the way things used to be.
Whenever a self-professed libertarian speaks this complete gobshite, it is the duty of other libertarians to remind him (or in this case, the audience) that police have always, since the very first cop walked the very first beat, arrogated the power to stop, detain, and search at will.
Miranda v. Arizona happened in 1966. FIFTY YEARS AGO. Do you know why Miranda took Arizona to federal court? Hint: It wasn't because cops of the time were protecting the rights of the citizens.
It gets worse. Ever hear of The Wickersham Commission? It was a federal commission that made public, in 1931, for the first time, the fact that US Cops had been waterboarding suspects to get confessions for decades.
When we bring up the fact that blacks have known about this much longer, it's to point out that you only need to talk to a 70 year old black dude to get set straight on "the way things used to be". It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that guys like Eric Peters, as much good as he's doing in the libertarian world, has his head so far up his ass on the "way things used to be" front that he can smell his own kidneys.
Cops have never been good guys. Black people know this.
Any statement to the contrary doesn't just put you at odds with black people. It puts you at odds with everyone else who knows what's up.
