Errico Malatesta Archive
Written: 1922
Source: Published online by LibCom.org
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
GINO [Worker]: I have heard that you discuss social questions in the evenings and I have come to ask, with the permission of these gentlemen, a question of my friend Giorgio.
Tell me, is it true that you anarchists want to remove the police force.
GIORGIO: Certainly. What! Don't you agree? Since when have you become a friend of police and carabinieri?
GINO: I am not their friend, and you know it. But I'm also not the friend of murderers and thieves and I would like my goods and my life to be guarded and guarded well.
GIORGIO : And who guards you from the guardians?...
Do you think that men become thieves and murderers without a reason?
Do you think that the best way to provide for one's own security is by offering up one's neck to a gang of people who, with the excuse of defending us, oppress us and practice extortion, and do a thousand times more damage than all the thieves and all the murderers? Wouldn't it be better to destroy the causes of evil, doing it in such a way that everybody could live well, without taking bread from the mouths of others, and doing it in a way so that everyone could educate and develop themselves and banish from their hearts the evil passions of jealousy, hatred and revenge?
GINO: Come off it! Human beings are bad by nature, and if there weren't laws, judges, soldiers and carabinieri to hold us in check, we would devour each other like wolves.
GIORGIO: If this was the case, it would be one more reason for not giving anybody the power to command and to dispose of the liberty of others. Forced to fight against everybody, each person with average strength, would run the same risk in the struggle and could alternatively be a winner and a loser: we would be savages, but at least we could enjoy the relative liberty of the jungle and the fierce emotions of the beasts of prey. But if voluntarily we should give to a few the right and the power to impose their will, then since, according to you, the simple fact of being human predisposes us to devour one another, it will be the same as voting ourselves into slavery and poverty.
You are deceiving yourself however, my dear friend. Humanity is good or bad according to circumstances. What is common in human beings is the instinct for self-preservation, and an aspiration for well-being and for the full development of one's own powers. If in order to live well you need to treat others harshly, only a few will have the strength necessary to resist the temptation. But put human beings in a society of their fellow creatures with conditions conducive to well-being and development, and it will need a great effort to be bad, just as today it needs great effort to be good.
GINO: All right, it may be as you say. But in the meantime while waiting for social transformation the police prevent crimes from being committed.
GIORGIO: Prevent?!
GINO: Well then, they prevent a great number of crimes and bring to justice the perpetrators of those offenses which they were not able to prevent.
GIORGIO: Not even this is true. The influence of the police on the number and the significance of crimes is almost nothing. In fact, however much the organization of the magistrature, of the police and the prisons is reformed, or the number of policemen decreased or increased, while the economic and moral conditions of the people remain unchanged, delinquency will remain more or less constant.
On the other hand, it only needs the smallest modification in the relations between proprietors and workers, or a change in the price of wheat and other vitally necessary foods, or a crisis that leaves workers without work, or the spreading of our ideas which opens new horizons for people making them smile with new hope, and immediately the effect on the increase or decrease in the number of crimes will be noted.
The police, it is true, send delinquents to prison, when they can catch them; but this, since it does not prevent new offenses, is an evil added to an evil, a further unnecessary suffering inflicted on human beings.
And even if the work of the police force succeeds in putting off a few offenses, that would not be sufficient, by a long way, to compensate for the offenses it provokes, and the harassment to which it subjects the public.
The very function they carry out makes the police suspicious of, and puts them in conflict with, the whole of the public; it makes them hunters of humanity; it leads them to become ambitious to discover some "great" cases of delinquency, and it creates in them a special mentality that very often leads them to develop some distinctly antisocial instincts. It is not rare to find that a police officer, who should prevent or discover crime, instead provokes it or invents it, to promote their career or simply to make themselves important and necessary.
GINO: But, then the policemen themselves would be the same as criminals! Such things occur occasionally, the more so that police personnel are not always recruited from the best part of the population, but in general…
GIORGIO: Generally the background environment has an inexorable effect, and professional distortion strikes even those who call for improvement.
Tell me: what can be, or what can become of the morals of those who are obligated by their salaries, to persecute, to arrest, to torment anyone pointed out to them by their superiors, without worrying whether the person is guilty or innocent, a criminal or an angel?
GINO: Yes... but…
GIORGIO: Let me say a few words about the most important part of the question; in other words, about the so called offenses that the police undertake to restrain or prevent.
Certainly among the acts that the law punishes there are those that are and always will be bad actions; but there are exceptions which result from the state of brutishness and desperation to which poverty reduces people.
Generally however the acts that are punished are those which offend against the privileges of the upper-class and those that attack the government in the exercise of its authority. It is in this manner that the police, effectively or not, serve to protect, not society as a whole, but the upper-class, and to keep the people submissive.
You were talking of thieves. Who is more of a thief than the owners who get wealthy stealing the produce of the workers' labor?
You were talking about murderers. Who is more of a murderer than capitalists who, by not renouncing the privilege of being in command and living without working, are the cause of dreadful privations and the premature death of millions of workers, let alone a continuing slaughter of children?
These thieves and murderers, far more guilty and far more dangerous than those poor people who are pushed toward crime by the miserable conditions in which they find themselves, are not a concern of the police: quite the contrary!...
GINO: In short, you think that once having made the revolution, humanity will become, out of the blue, so many little angels. Everybody will respect the rights of others; everybody will wish the best for one another and help each other; there will be no more hatreds, nor jealousies... an earthly paradise, what nonsense?!
GIORGIO: Not at all. I don't believe that moral transformation will come suddenly, out of the blue. Of course, a large, an immense change will take place through the simple fact that bread is assured and liberty gained; but all the bad passions, which have become embodied in us through the age-old influence of slavery and of the struggle between people, will not disappear at a stroke. There will still be for a long time those who will feel tempted to impose their will on others with violence, who will wish to exploit favorable circumstances to create privileges for themselves, who will retain an aversion for work inspired by the conditions of slavery in which today they are forced to labor, and so on.
GINO: So even after the revolution we will have to defend ourselves against criminals?
GIORGIO: Very likely. Provided that those who are then considered criminals are not those who rebel rather than dying of hunger, and still less those who attack the existing organization of society and seek to replace it with a better one; but those who would cause harm to everyone, those who would encroach on personal integrity, liberty and the well being of others.
GINO: All right, so you will always need a police force.
GIORGIO: But not at aII. It would truly be a great piece of foolishness to protect oneself from a few violent people, a few idlers and some degenerates, by opening a school for idleness and violence and forming a body of cut-throats, who will get used to considering citizens as jail bait and who will make hunting people their principal and only occupation.
GINO: What, then!
GIORGIO: Well, we will defend ourselves.
GINO: And do you think that is possible?
GIORGIO: Not only do I think it is possible that the people will defend themselves without delegating to anyone the special function of the defense of society, but I am sure it is the only effective method.
Tell me! If tomorrow someone who is sought after by the police comes to you, will you denounce him?
GINO: What, are you mad? Not even if they were the worst of all murderers. What do you take me for a police officer?!
GIORGIO: Ah! Ah! The police officers' occupation must be a terrible one, if anyone with self-respect thinks themselves dishonored by taking it on, even when they think it to be useful and necessary to society.
And now, tell me something else. If you happened upon a sick person with an infectious disease or a dangerous madman would you take them to hospital?
GINO: Certainly.
GIORGIO: Even by force?
GINO: But... You must understand! Leaving them free could harm a lot of people!
GIORGIO: Now explain to me, why do you take great care not to denounce a murderer, while you would take a madman or a plague-stricken person to hospital, if necessary by force?
GINO: Well… first of all I find being a policeman repugnant, while I consider it a honorable and humanitarian thing to care for the sick.
GIORGIO: Well you can already see that the first effect of the police is to make the citizens wash their hands of social defense, and actually place them on the side of those who rightly or wrongly the police persecute.
GINO: It is also that when I take someone to hospital I know that I am leaving them in the hands of the doctors, who try to cure them, so that they can be at liberty as soon as they no longer are a threat to other people. In every case, even if incurable, they will try to alleviate suffering and will never inflict a more severe treatment than is strictly necessary. If doctors did not do their duties, the public would make them do so, because it is well understood that people are kept in hospital to be cured and not to be tormented.
While on the contrary, if one delivers someone into the hands of the police, they seek from ambition to try to condemn them, little caring whether they are guilty or innocent; then they put them in prison, where, instead of seeking their improvement through loving care, they do everything to make them suffer, make them more embittered, then release them as an even more dangerous enemy to society than they were before they went to prison.
But, this could be changed through a radical reform.
GIORGIO: In order to reform, my dear fellow, or to destroy an institution, the first thing is not to establish a corporation interested in preserving it.
The police (and what I say of the police applies also to the magistrates) in carrying out their profession of sending people to prison and beating them up when there is an opportunity, will always end up considering themselves as being opposed to the public. They furiously pursue the true or assumed delinquent with the same passion with which a hunter pursues game, but at the same time it is in the interests of the police that there are more delinquents because they are the reason for their existence, and the greater the number and the harmfulness of delinquents grow, so does the power and the social importance of the police!
In order for crime to be treated rationally, in order to seek for its causes and really do everything possible to eliminate it, it is necessary for this task to be entrusted to those who are exposed to and suffer the consequences of crime, in other words the whole public, and not those to whom the existence of crime is a source of power and earnings.
GINO: Oh! It could be you are right. Until next time.