Tate Fegley | The Libertarian Institute

How Privatizing the Roads Would Help Stop Police Brutality

by Tate Fegley | Aug 22, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Advocates of a free society so frequently field the objection “Who will build the roads?” or some variation thereof that it’s become a meme. Much effort has been put into answering this question, including books on the privatization of roads and highways. What has received relatively little attention is what effect road privatization would have on the role of government police, which is surprising given the existing relationship between roads, police, and drivers. Indeed, most of what police do is related to the road. According to the US Department of Justice’s most recent report on contacts...

How ‘Wandering Cops’ Exacerbate Police Abuse

by Tate Fegley | Jun 16, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

In a previous post, I discussed how fired police officers are often able to get their jobs back by appealing their termination to independent arbitration and thus how only time will tell if the officers involved in the arrest and death of George Floyd will remain fired. Even if they are unable to return to their jobs as Minneapolis police officers, this does not mean that their law enforcement careers are over. There is growing recognition of the phenomenon of the "wandering officer," or, as the great journalist of law enforcement abuse William Norman Grigg called it, the "gypsy cop." The...

Why Its Hard To Fire Abusive Cops

by Tate Fegley | Jun 3, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

What does it take to fire a cop? In comparison to several other high-profile cases in which a police officer has killed someone on video, things have moved remarkably fast in the George Floyd case. The other four officers involved in his arrest were fired from the Minneapolis Police Department the following day. By comparison, Fellow Minnesota officer Jeronimo Yanez, who on July 6, 2016, shot and killed Philando Castille in his vehicle after Castille informed him that he was armed, was not relieved until after he was acquitted for manslaughter and reckless discharge of a firearm on May 30,...

There Is No ‘War on Cops’

by Tate Fegley | Oct 30, 2017 | Featured Articles, Justice

With the FBI releasing the 2016 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted data this month, reports on police deaths have once again found their way into headlines. Such reports offer a great illustration of how reporting the same facts in different ways can dramatically change how big a problem seems to be. Also interesting is the information that is reported depending on the media outlet. NPR, for example, emphasizes the number of police killed with firearms specifically, rather than the general category of “feloniously.” Fox News will emphasize the “War on Cops” narrative while...

There Is No 'War on Cops'

by Tate Fegley | Oct 30, 2017 | Featured Articles, Justice

With the FBI releasing the 2016 Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted data this month, reports on police deaths have once again found their way into headlines. Such reports offer a great illustration of how reporting the same facts in different ways can dramatically change how big a problem seems to be. Also interesting is the information that is reported depending on the media outlet. NPR, for example, emphasizes the number of police killed with firearms specifically, rather than the general category of “feloniously.” Fox News will emphasize the “War on Cops” narrative while...

End the State’s Monopoly on Policing

by Tate Fegley | Mar 30, 2017 | Featured Articles, Justice

Compared to the general population, advocates of a minimal state and those of a stateless society overwhelmingly agree on a vast majority of political issues. I wish to argue here that there should be at least one more agreement between them than there traditionally has been: policing services need not be monopolized by the state and would be more efficiently provided by the private sector. Almost every individual who has argued for the desirability of having policing services provided in a free market does not stop there, but applies the same reasoning to other services monopolized by the...