Opinion: Many CA cities to begin privatizing police forces
Image by Thomas Hawk
Pirate Wires's Dean W. Ball predicts a wave of free market-ification in local jurisdictions like San Jose, when it comes to firefighting, education, and—yes—even police.
California is not unique among American cities and states, many of which exhibit similar problems. But it does exhibit them more dramatically than anywhere else in America. No single phenomenon explains what has gone wrong. Instead, California typifies a fractal-like breakdown of responsibility, competence, trust, and purpose we have seen again and again in American bureaucracy and government. Repair is possible in theory, but unlikely in practice.
What we are likely to see instead is the gradual replacement of heretofore public services with private versions of those services. These private services are not novel: private police, firefighting, schools, and other services have existed in American life for well over a century. It’s just that their size and relevance is likely to grow. And facing a threat to its power, you can expect the state to fight back.
Struggles in education have been in the headlines for decades, with private schools, charter schools, and homeschoolers on one side and the public school system on the other. California has among the highest rates of exodus from its public school system of any state in the country. Between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the state saw a reduction of approximately 420,000 students, representing a 6.7% decrease. Comparatively, data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that from fall 2019 to fall 2023, just 18 states experienced public school enrollment declines exceeding 4%, with California among the states witnessing the most significant drops of more than 5%. This is a particular threat in wealthy areas, where public schools rely on de facto mandatory “suggested donations” from parents because of Proposition 13, a state law that caps property tax increases and with that, school budgets. As you might expect, California’s lawmakers — in thrall to the teacher and other public school employee unions — are constantly fighting this exodus.
Even in the more obscure domain of fire prevention, this conflict is already unfolding. Private firefighting services have worked alongside the Los Angeles Fire Department during the ongoing fires in Los Angeles. Some of these services are personally contracted by home and business owners, while others are provided by high-end property insurance companies like Chubb and Pure, who specialize in ensuring luxury assets. On top of this, some homeowners have even purchased six-figure private fire hydrants for their homes for both city and private firefighting forces to use.
Rick Caruso, the real estate developer and principal opponent to Los Angeles’ current mayor in the most recent election, used private firefighting to preserve his upscale Palisades Village Mall. Many other homes and businesses were saved throughout the devastated parts of Los Angeles by private firefighting services. In principle, this should be a fact everyone can celebrate: there are homes, businesses, and other buildings standing intact today because of private firefighters.
But that is not how some see it. Caruso attracted viral criticism on Twitter for daring to use private firefighters. Some wealthy Los Angeles residents took to social media to find private firefighters and were excoriated for their efforts to protect their homes, possessions, and, sometimes, no doubt, their pets. This is a collectivist mind disease of the highest order: we must all suffer together in the name of equality — or really, if we are to be honest, in the name of the state.
Pushback against private firefighting goes beyond mere rhetoric. Emergency first response is, indeed, a key state function — and like virtually all state functions in California, its employees are part of public sector unions. They do not take kindly to others intruding upon their turf.
In 2018, the State of California passed AB 2380, a bill intended to put private firefighting services in their place — or, as the statute itself describes it, to “[declare] that firefighting and fire protection services are a municipal function and a public good to be provided by public agencies and their employees.” Among other things, the bill directs state agencies to develop regulations to ensure that private firefighters “shall, whenever possible, focus on prefire treatment activities and pretreatment of values-at-risk and other nonemergency activities.” In other words, back off.
In short: California has endangered their citizens through public policy at every step of the way, even though each step was in the ostensible “public interest.”
Read the whole thing here.
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