Page 47 - 1Proactive Policing

Pro-Active Policing

The legitimate state monopoly over the means of violence is a condition in which a state‘s security
forces operate lawfully under a legitimate civilian authority, where actors conduct themselves in

accordance with democratic norms and principles of good governance.122 This condition exists
when armed groups from the conflict are disarmed, demobilized, and reintegrated into society and
a military and police force is vetted, retrained, and monitored on human rights principles.

Many states in Latin America, Africa and Asia lack the monopoly of violence, identified by Max

Weber as the foundation of the state, and thus the capacity to govern effectively. In this paper we
develop a new perspective on the establishment of the monopoly of violence and the formation of
the state. We build a model to explain the incentive of central states to eliminate non-state armed

actors (paramilitaries) in a democracy. The model is premised on the idea that paramilitaries may
choose to and can influence elections. Since paramilitaries have preferences over policies, this

reduces the incentives of the politicians they favor to eliminate them. The model also shows that
while in non-paramilitary areas policies are targeted at citizens, in paramilitary controlled areas
they are targeted at paramilitaries.

Every time you hit a pothole in the road, every time you see a policeman writing someone a ticket
on a road with potholes, ask yourself, "Why is no one writing tickets for unsafe potholes? ―The

simple answer to the pothole question is:

We create governments to monopolize violence to coerce compliance with laws, to mitigate the

Law of Nature. Men seeking to control the power of government, seek power to apply violence to
other men, exempt themselves from violence with sovereign immunity.

The police kicked down the crack house door and served a search warrant after detaining the
residents at gunpoint. "That is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is the monopoly on

violence." - President Obama Soldiers are authorized to kill during war. Normally this is the highly
illegal act of murder.

The monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is a political concept formalized by the
sociologist Max Weber, in his 1918 speech Politik ALS Beruf (Politics as a Vocation).

Weber argued that the state cannot be characterized by its ends, since there are very few goals
which no state would ever seek to achieve, and no particular task which is both exclusive to the
state, and also unique to the state.

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