Police Say Just Give Criminals Your Car Keys
A while ago news broke that Toronto police, facing a crime wave, have offered new instructions to citizens: leave your keys at the front door for criminals.
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi is heard telling citizens and reporters at a recent community meeting.
When I first saw these claims on social media, I thought it must be fake news. But Toronto police confirmed it in a statement.
“Police are concerned about an escalation in violence, where all sorts of weapons and firearms are being used to steal vehicles, and that includes during home invasions,” the statement reads.
Police have a point about surging crime. Car thefts are up 25 percent over the last year in Toronto, news agencies report, and many of the crimes involve crooks breaking into homes and snagging car keys.
When you watch the footage of masked attackers kicking in doors — many of whom are armed, according to police — one can see a certain logic to the guidelines. If the invaders find the keys quickly, it reduces the likelihood of an encounter between a homeowner and a potentially armed group of criminals.
Still, there are obvious problems. Put aside for now that your car (and everything in it) is being stolen. There’s also the problem of incentives.
We talk a lot about incentives (and disincentives) in economics. They are the drivers of human action. We make countless decisions every day, consciously and unconsciously, based on incentive structures around us. You needn’t be an economist to appreciate their power.
“Incentive structures work, so you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do,” Steve Jobs told author Brent Schendler many years ago, “because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.”
The late Charlie Munger once said that if you showed him the incentive, he’d show you the result. And though incentives can get rather complicated, at their most basic level they are rather simple. A good incentive structure rewards good behavior and punishes bad.
Anyone who has trained a dog or raised a child understands this. You don’t give a dog a treat after he poops on your carpet; you give him a treat after he sits (or does whatever task you want him to do). You might reward a child with ice cream for getting a good grade on a spelling test, but not for throwing a tantrum at the grocery store.
Which brings me back to Toronto. By telling residents to leave their key fobs at the front door for criminals, police are essentially incentivizing burglary and theft. They are making it easier, not harder, to steal vehicles, diminishing the time it takes to commit the crime, thus lowering the risk involved.
One needn’t have a Ph.D in economics to understand this is likely to have an obvious adverse effect: an increase in car theft and home invasions in the city.
‘The Inviolable Domicile’
The police in Verhoeven’s film may have been ineffective, but at least they were trying to fight back. This is in contrast to the Toronto Police Service, whose lengthy list of home invasion tips was conspicuously absent an obvious response: homeowners exercising their right of self-defense.
This is strange, because the inviolability of the home is a legal concept that stretches back to before the birth of Christ.
“What is there more holy,” asked Cicero, “than the house of each individual citizen? Here is his altar, here is his hearth, here are his household gods; here all his sacred rights, all his religious ceremonies, are preserved.”
What we sometimes today refer to as the “castle doctrine” existed in the days of the Roman Republic.
“The domicile was seen as inviolable,” the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges wrote in his celebrated history The Ancient City. “According to a Roman tradition, the domestic god repulsed the robber, and kept off the enemy.”
The Not-So-Inviolable Domicile
The legal right to protect one’s home, with defensive violence if necessary, is a concept more than 2,000 years old in the Western tradition. And it’s a legal precept you’ll find not just in the US but in Canadian legal charters.
“A person’s home is inviolable,” Sec. 7 of Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms explicitly states.
Apparently, not everyone sees the home as inviolable, even against violent intruders.
“You can’t use a gun for self-protection in Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau flatly stated in 2022. “It’s not a right that you have.”
This isn’t true, however. The Canadian government might not allow you to cite self-defense as a reason to obtain a firearm, but Canadians do have the right to defend themselves and their property, so long as the actions are deemed “defensive” and “reasonable.”
This right was recently tested when a 22-year-old Ontario man, Ali Mian, opened fire on a group of men who broke into his home and attacked his mother. One intruder was killed, and Mian was charged with second-degree murder. The charge was later withdrawn, however, apparently after prosecutors realized the shooting was a textbook case of self-defense.
Canada’s demonstrated legal protections for self-defense only make Trudeau’s callous dismissal of them all the more peculiar.
After all, the right to self-defense has a broad popular appeal and a rich intellectual tradition. It is present in the Bible and defended by thinkers as diverse as Confucius, Mencius, and Malcom X, who bluntly stated, “I am not against using violence in self-defense.”
The philosopher John Locke carved out perhaps the most robust defense of the right of self-protection in his Second Treatise on Civil Government:
I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him.
If you find yourself where your constitutional rights are being violated or you are being accused of a crime because you defended yourself thank God we are still in the United States and give Winslow Law a call at 843-357-9301.
May God Bless You, Your Business, and the United States of America,
Tom Winslow