Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late

Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.

The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.

From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.

As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.

Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.

And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).

A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.

But now enter the blogosphere. The point about the blogosphere is that there is no “nationwide TV” for the Bad Guys to tune in to. There is no The Clue, that Moose, or The Media, knows all about, and either isn’t saying or is broadcasting. There are just lots and lots of clues, and it’s anyone’s bet which of these is The Clue. There is no private filtering process, or mob agreement about which is The Clue. The Clue (as it later turns out) is being circulated and acted upon by whoever thinks it might just be The Clue, long before it has become universally established as The Clue.

Result: the likelihood is that the Bad Guys never see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late. They don’t catch it on TV because it isn’t there yet. The first they know about their vehicle and its number being The Clue is when a small gang of amateur partisans for The Clue catch them. Thousands of other amateur partisans for other clues are off chasing moonbeams in different parts of town and in different states, which is a terrible waste of all that public spirit, but so what? And at least they did their bit to divert the attention of the Bad Guys.

Okay this is blogging, and I’ve made my one point. (Blog postings ought typically to contain only one point.)

But bear with me please. I do have a few further points to append to this one point. First, and I know this sounds sloppy, but commenters, please try not to get bogged down in the factual particulars of this particular case, which I may well have got wrong on this or that detail. That’s not my point here. I’m not trying to prove anything here. I’m merely illustrating a belief that, for all kinds of reasons, I’ve slowly come around to believing. I’m taking my turn preaching this sermon to the converted, and I want the converted to join in with perfecting the sermon. Even if The Clue in this particular case had a slightly different history to the one I’ve just recounted, this is only relevant if it bears on the general principle that I’m here pushing: the non-centralisation of the anti-Bad-Guy information and the non-centralised-control of the anti-Bad-Guy action taken on the basis of that information, therefore the Bad Guys can’t see the clinching anti-Bad-Guy action coming at them until it’s come. Stick with that principle, please.

Second, the non-converted, thinking with the majority view about the need for military operations to combat, e.g., serial killers, are bound to react to the above by saying, sorry, you are talking about a mob, and a very angry and impulsive one at that. Just because they are sitting at computer terminals instead of charging around in white robes with bits of rope doesn’t make them any less scary. You are talking wolves.

Good point. I am absolutely not arguing that whoever catches the Bad Guys should be able to string ’em up then and there. On the contrary, I favour the vigorous re-assertion of the principle of “innocent until proved guilty” idea which, because only The Good Big Government tends to do the hunting and prosecuting and punishing of Bad Guys these days, has been so severely eroded in recent years. Clearly, everything should be gone into in a court, and the possibility that these alleged Good Guys who caught these alleged Bad Guys might have got it all completely wrong, and have caught some completely innocent people, should be taken very seriously indeed, and the possibility of punishing these not-so-Good-Guys (bad Wolves) if they have really overdone it should definitely be considered.

US citizens may argue here that this innocent-until-proved-guilty principle still applies in the USA. Fair point. But that’s details. The abstract principle here is the general untrustworthiness of alleged Good Guys (wolves), in, you know, countries generally, not the detail of how these things are done in the USA. Maybe my Britishness is showing here, because we used to have a system like the one I’m recommending here, but for several decades now we’ve had the “leave it to the police and trust the police” paradigm in place. This probably makes me especially aware of the alternative paradigm: don’t leave it to the police, but don’t altogether trust the people who have replaced them. (Digression: the scariest paradigm of all is the one we arguable now have in Britain, which is “leave it to the police even though you don’t trust them”, which is the inevitable result of them mis-handling their former monopoly of trust.)

And finally, I am not here arguing for any immediate “reforms”. I am arguing for a different and opposite way of thinking to the usual one, and in many ways a way of thinking which, as soon as it is widely thought, can start being widely done, reforms or no reforms. I want a paradigm shift (and don’t miss the comments on that). I want a shift from a world in which it is assumed that public safety can only be achieved by surrendering or by trading individual freedom and individual citizen initiative in exchange for more security, to a world in which public safety is pursued precisely by contriving more individual freedom and more citizen initiative. (The trade-off we are constantly offered between security and freedom is, as it always has been, a false bargain based on a false assumption )

There are many other “points” involved in such a paradigm shift than can possibly be touched on even in a very long blog posting like this one (and my apologies if you have read this far but believe that you needn’t have been imposed upon so much).

Finally finally, I am well aware that I am absolutely not the only one thinking along these lines. Glenn Reynolds himself has been pushing this attitude (see also the link at the top of this), and linking to others who are doing likewise. Commenters please tell me/us of more.

Because we don’t just need packs to catch Bad Guys. We are going to need pretty big and vocal pack to win this argument.

But think of the reward. It will be acknowledged not only that “freedom” does washing machines better. Freedom will also be seen to do the very fabric of civilisation itself, better than all the rest.

Freedom doesn’t need an externally imposed framework, it can create that framework, be that framework.