Dr. Walter Block made waves recently with his claim that stop-and-frisk policing is compatible with libertarianism. On the surface, the claim seems entirely lunatic; surely Judge Napolitano is correct when he labels it the act of "an authoritarian police state." One thing I’ve learned over the years, though, is that, while one may not always agree with Dr. Block, it is always and everywhere a mistake to disregard him. If Dr. Block thinks a thing, it should be regarded as a position reasonable people may hold, and this is no exception. So we can stipulate that it’s reasonable, but is it correct?
First, we should dispense with the case of private police. If the police are entirely private, operating on private property, then there is clearly no libertarian case to be made against stop-and-frisk. If it is my property, I can set whatever conditions I desire on its occupancy, and that includes submission to random pat-downs. If you don’t wish to submit to my stop-and-frisky police, then your solution is simple: leave (or do not enter) my property. Is this "authoritarian?" Perhaps, but it should be noted that a proper libertarian society would permit such pockets of authoritarianism as long as the authoritarians restrict themselves to being authoritarian over their own property.
That aside, we turn to the more difficult question: can a libertarian support a stop-and-frisk policy among government police in a non-libertarian world? It seems difficult to see how, but Dr. Block provides the following argument, after "stipulating that the purpose is not to stop victimless crimes like drug selling, but, rather, crimes with victims such as rape, murder, theft, etc.:"
Suppose members of gang X are raping a woman, and members of gang Y stop the Xers from so doing. Are the Yers justified in protecting the woman? I claim they are. Are the Yers good guys? No, they are gang members too, and often engage in just such depredations. But, in this single isolated case, if you ignore their real crimes, they are good guys…
Therefore, the government cops are in the same position as the Y gang is. In this one instance, they are justified. They frisk someone they deem suspicious, he has weapons, he confesses he was about to commit a crime, and cannot do so because he is arrested.
It is important to note two things before we proceed. First of all, Dr. Block has not in any way conceded that government police are compatible with libertarianism. He is stipulating the existence of this illibertarian institution — not an unreasonable thing to do, given that they do seem to exist whether libertarians like it or not — and then is looking at one specific action of that institution. Second, we are emphatically not talking about stop-and-frisking people to see if they’re carrying whatever random things the government has declared verboten; we are searching for evidence of real crimes.
Dr. Block concludes that, much like one gang stopping another gang from committing rape, government police that legitimately fought real crime by stop-and-frisking would be justified. Two problems immediately present themselves to my mind, however. For the first one, let’s take an analogy of our own. Assume that gang Y is stalking down the street, and comes upon gang X raping a woman. They intercede to save her, but it turns out that gang X was actually performing a crime drama, and no "saving" was necessary. Would we, as libertarians, be so ready to applaud gang Y in this case? In other words: was Frank Drebin right?
Unless we wish to make the rather unlikely claim that the police will stop-and-frisk only bad guys in the process (or aftermath) of committing their crimes, we need to deal with the case in which the stop-and-frisk victim has done nothing wrong. Dr. Block later concedes that "s&f is indeed a rights violation, but only if and only if the target of the s&f is entirely innocent," which seems to put the nail in the coffin; given that, in the real world, it is effectively impossible to hold the police accountable for their crimes even when they murder people in cold blood, a libertarian cannot possibly condone giving the police yet another tool that can potentially be used to violate people’s rights, and blithely assume that the justice system will take care of the fallout.
The second problem comes in when Dr. Block begins to argue that stop-and-frisk reduces crime. I’m willing to stipulate here, for the sake of this argument, that he is correct; stop-and-frisk policing does indeed reduce crime. Libertarians are against crime, after all, so, if it didn’t create a whole bunch of new crime of its own, wouldn’t stop-and-frisk be something we would support?
If we were still in the anarcho-capitalist realm, the answer would most assuredly be "yes," as we discussed above. Here in the wide, wide world of nation-states and government police, however, there’s a problem, which is: how do we know stop-and-frisk reduces crime efficiently? I assert that there exists some price which is too high to pay for even a 100% reduction in crime, much less for the far more modest reductions we may actually see. When police services are provided by a government monopoly rather than by competing firms in the market, it is impossible to know how much is actually being spent as against how much is being received; as Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book Socialism: "where there is no market there is no price system, and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation." It is literally impossible to know how much a given rate of crime prevention is worth (in treasure and otherwise) without a market in crime prevention. As such, even assuming away the rights difficulties, I can’t see a path toward libertarians supporting government police stop-and-frisk. At the very least we can be assured that it will be far too expensive, for when was the last time a government program actually came in under its already-bloated budget?
In conclusion, I’m afraid I must dissent from Dr. Block here. There are two major problems — one deontological and one utilitarian — that must compel a libertarian away from the stop-and-frisk policy.