Happy Monday!! Another week is upon us and I hope everyone had a nice weekend. As always, today’s post is by Stephen Hall. And, as always, thank you Stephen!!
On Lauren Southern’s current speaking tour of Australia, “tour organisers (sic) will be charged $68,000 for police presence at her events.” Thus I think it a fitting topic to discuss the relative merits of charging event venues for police protection as opposed to private security.
On the one side is cited the cost incurred to the city as well as the intentionally controversial nature of the speaker as justification for charging for police protections. “Victoria Police . . . say that the quoted cost of security for the event is actually $230,000 but will only charge Miss Southern and event organisers (sic) $68,000.”
Also important to note before getting into the discussion, “police . . . said Victoria Police have a right to charge for a police presence at events however Ms Southern and event organisers (sic) have said they did not request the security.”
A little background is that this “bill . . . was imposed after violent far left activists turned the streets of Melbourne into a bloody scene when far right activist Milo Yiannopoulos arrived in Melbourne for his speaking engagement.”
There are many aspects to this issue, and my short articles cannot possibly do them all justice.
Obviously the perspective of Ms. Southern and the tour promoters is that they are being punished, fined if you will, for the illegal actions of the leftist rioters of the city, while the city is claiming that they are merely being required to help defer some of the costs which their presence is imposing upon the city.
So, who is responsible for the costs? What seems like a strait forward question is not so easily answered.
It is easy to say that the speaker is the one creating the venue and thus naturally liable for the costs of the reaction to their event, as one @Shanders1982 noted, “It’s not a fine,it’s a % of the cost to supply a lot of people to safely manage her event.This includes police, traffic control etc.Many large event in a major cities have to put these measures in place,she hasn’t so Melb have done it for her & she needs to cover some of the cost”
Which would make it sound like a typical security at a public event, except that it is not. The police are not there just as a run of the mill event hosting, but directly in response to a history of leftist violence, rioting, and political intimidation as referenced in the previous Milo event.
This also ignores the very fact that population centers like Melbourne benefit financially from being the focal point of controversial political debate with more than offsets their costs, so that the city itself profits from the controversy but wants to throw off its costs upon others.
This is not the normal crowd control which one would reasonably be expected to pay at a concert, festival, or sporting event. This is a public speaking even where such costs are generally covered by security at the venue.
Important distinction, it is not the crowds of attendees which are in need of controlling, but specifically non-attendees, protestors. While an entertainment event could expect that a portion of the proceeds from their ticket sales might go to covering organization, traffic, and security, in this case the costs are not covered by the ticket sales because the people creating the costs are not buying tickets.
So it would seem an unjust argument that attendees should bear the costs of protestors, or that the sponsor should incur costs of people trying to actively prevent their sponsored event at all. The organizers derive no financial benefit from the protestors, so why ought they bear the costs?
Which brings us to the next financial issue, namely that the people creating the costs to the city are the protestors, whom one presumes to be of the four million citizens of the city. It is difficult to bill the protestors for the cost of their protests.
Protests are not overtly sponsored so there is no one directly to whom to send the invoice. The police cannot charge ticket sales to the protest in the way the sponsors of the event may charge attendees.
One can sympathize with the city in wanting to offset the costs such an event might generate and the speaker being protested makes a simple and easily identifiable target, after all they are the ones it could be said the police are protecting.
Which brings us to the specter that the speaker at such an event is hiring the police, even if it is against their will. Will the Melbourne police be actually working for Ms. Southern? After all, she will be the one paying their salary.
One balks at the idea of making the police mere rent-a-cops, as many security guards are often called, but isn’t that what they are selling themselves as? Justice and police protection for hire?
If you fail to pay the police will they not protect you? Will they start charging a daily rate to investigate crimes like in that scene from the movie Heavy Metal? One might expect the police to hold a different position in society than mercenaries or hired guns.
Of course that notion would imply that the tour organizer actually had a choice in whether or not to pay the extra protection money, which they claim they never requested. That would put an even darker spin on the idea being that the police are charging money like a protection racket.
That is clearly not the case because in a protection racket one is protecting the payer not from other people but from one’s self. This is not that type of shakedown.
The police are not really there to protect the guest in their city who has come to speak, though they are also protecting her as well, the police are really there to protect the citizens of the city from other citizens of the city, the protestors.
So while some may view it as protecting the citizens of the city from the riots and protest caused by the speaker, not blaming the rioters themselves, their fellow citizens, others can easily view it as protecting the guests who come to their city like Ms. Southern.
Still others simply blame her. As @Shanders1982 put it, “She has come into a city that many of its citizens consider what she is speaking as racist, sexist and it a lot of cases hate speach. When you a saying things such as this she is expecting & wanting a reaction to boost her profile . . . .”
Which is the political aspect which cannot be ignored in this situation, that many people’s perspective upon this issue is more contingent than it should be on which side of the political fence the speaker sits. Though people often feign that both sides do this therefore it is fair, the truth is that it is overwhelmingly leftists who are violently protesting and rioting.
Reminiscent of the street protests between the communists and fascists in depression era Germany, violence in the street is reemerging as a common political tool of socialists.
However, one must look at the one-sided nature of the violence and the resultant “billing” of police services to recognize that if it is not a fine, it becomes at the very least a tax on speech. Essentially a conservative tax, or in some case, an alt-right tax, imposed not by the government but thy the rabble.
Even if it is not the intention of the government or the police, the effect charging one side of the political spectrum to speak publicly because of the potential violence of the other side then there is quickly a political oppression of any voicing of dissenting viewpoints.
A careful analysis of who is causing the problems is essential in determining the proper response, and it appears that no such analysis has been conducted regarding this situation. At least I hope that is the case as the alternative leads to conspiracy theories.
One final note, it is the very job of the police to protect people from the lawless anarchy of others. It is not an extraordinary expense but the entire purpose of their existence. To refuse to protect people from those who would riot, those who would commit crimes, would be a complete abandonment of their very function.
In the words of President Calvin Coolidge regarding another police force who chose to neglect their duties of employment, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
