When I was younger, I had a family member in the trade of supplying medicinal cannabis to people with various conditions, including Huntington’s disease. One day the New Zealand Police caught wind of his operation, so they came to his house, arrested him, and chucked him in a cage with rapists and murderers for nine months.
He came out damaged – not physically, but with a transparent case of C-PTSD. Evidently the nine months of constant physical threat caused serious trauma and brain damage. He came out paranoid, aggressive, bullying, abusive and impulsive, seeing threats and dangers everywhere. Another casualty of the War on Drugs.
Shortly afterwards (in 1990), I was watching the television news with some of my family when there was a report about a Police officer who had died falling from a helicopter sling during a cannabis recovery operation. Upon hearing this, my family cheered. Comments about how the only good pig was a dead one were made. A dead Police officer was a dead enemy.
Our family suffered greatly from the law against cannabis, and we are far from the only ones. This century alone, tens of thousands of Kiwi families have been destroyed by cannabis prohibition – destroyed by New Zealand Police officers who mindlessly enforced a cruel and unjust law written by scum politicians.
The net result is that everyone in my family – like tens of thousands of others – hates the Police. We don’t see them as heroes keeping the community safe, but rather as the footsoldiers of tyrannical filth – no different to the enforcers of every other despot.
Upon hearing such things, most mainstream Kiwis react with denial. My family must just be really fucked up, most people conclude. But mainstream Kiwis, secluded from the underbelly of society, don’t understand that there is a large segment of the New Zealand population who hate the Police and consider them the enemy of anyone who wants to live freely in peace.
Many such Kiwis are wondering how “fugitive” Tom Phillips has managed to evade the New Zealand Police for so long. The part of New Zealand in which Phillips is hiding is not so big, the Police have surveillance capacities that most of us couldn’t dream of, and Phillips has been featured on television several times. Why haven’t they got him yet?
Based on the fact that my own family has harboured people on the run from the law, I can make a good guess. In all likelihood, Phillips has an entire community of people looking out for him. They know that the Police are looking for Phillips – and that makes him the good guy, the same way that Sauron hunting for Frodo made Frodo the good guy.
Because law enforcement has always eagerly served tyrants, there have always been communities that served as Underground Railroads, helping to keep the victims of oppression free from “justice”. In principle, there is little fundamental difference between an Underground Railroad hiding escaped slaves from the authorities, and a hypothetical community of social outsiders hiding other people falsely accused of being criminals, whether political dissidents, spiritual sacrament users or Tom Phillips.
I can all but guarantee that there are at least a hundred people who know where Tom Phillips is, and they’re all keeping quiet because they hate the Police, knowing them to be agents of tyranny. Almost certainly those hundred personally know victims of previous human rights abuses carried out by New Zealand law enforcement. These people feel that by defying the Police, who are evil, they are doing good.
Understanding why Tom Phillips has so many supporters is a matter of understanding why the New Zealand political establishment has so many enemies. And this has a simple explanation: the New Zealand political establishment is evil, and has a history of causing suffering to innocent people without moral justification.
There is only one possible solution to this dilemma.
It’s not to reform the Police. The Police will always be the same: unthinking dogs obeying their masters. They’re incapable of being anything else. In practice, the Police are a tool, like an automatic rifle. Used wisely, they’re capable of preventing great harm. Used unwisely, they’re capable of inflicting great harm.
Therefore, our solution is to reform the political class, so that they do the right thing, and do not direct the Police to cause harm. All victimless crimes must be abolished. Those who made crimes out of victimless actions have to be punished. Those who waged the War on Drugs on the New Zealand people have to be tried with treason.
If we want the New Zealand Police to operate in harmony with the population they’re policing, and not as an America-style cudgel of the state with which the population are beaten into submission, then we need a new policing philosophy. Perhaps one in which individual Police officers were empowered to – or perhaps even obliged to – disobey unjust laws. This may be impossible without a New Zealand Constitution.
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