Our Founding Criminal Fathers and Modern Crime
September 11, 2026
by William P. Meyers

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Why it is hard to police America

2026 is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, marked by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Today, September 11, 2026, is also the anniversary of the Saudi terrorist attacks on America, notably the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and presumably a jet headed towards either the White House or Congress.

In Seattle, elsewhere in the United States, and out in various places around the world, crime is a major topic. Because there is so much of it. Crime is complicated, it is a variety of actions and even failures to act. People argue about what specifically should be treated as criminal. Here I will take an irreverent look at the Founding Fathers, the men who preached independence from England, who fought, who wrote the Constitution, and in particular some of its first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. For most Americans it is enshrined like a religious document. It should not be.

Seattle is not what I would call a high crime city. But that is because I lived in New York City in the 1970s. Now that was high-crime. Two of my personal friends were victims. One, a male, was robbed of a cash payroll. The other, a female, was physically assaulted, but not raped. One day a policeman came knocking on our door saying a dead junkie had been found at our doorstep. Another friend went to buy some crystal meth and ended up dead, in one of the many abandoned houses of that era. On the plus side, rent was cheap. A few years later, in what was supposed to be a safer area, in Brooklyn, a woman was murdered near our house, in the street, in an incident likely fueled by crack cocaine. Organized crime was still around in strength in those years, too.

Crime in Seattle is currently not that bad, unless you fall victim to it. These last few weeks have seen an uptick in street gun battles, but the kind of armed holdups of people walking about that were common in the 70s in decaying post industrial cities are infrequent. The main crime is theft. Cars get stolen, businesses get broken into, and shoplifting has become a wholesale business. Then there are the weird crimes committed by drug addicts, ranging from pointless property destruction to deadly assaults. Many crimes are homeless on homeless.

Seattle citizens are divided on how government should deal with crime. There are two main camps, which I will call progressive and conservative, though those labels can be deceptive, and the smarter citizens see some value in both approaches. Very broadly, progressives in Seattle want to treat crime as a social problem. By helping the criminally inclined, in particular by providing counseling and social services instead of punishment, progressives believe they can minimize crime while maximizing social justice. The conservative camp notes that the Seattle police are overwhelmed and often take hours to respond to reports of crime. In the rare cases where criminals are arrested (usually because they are caught in the act) the court systems (city for misdemeanors, county for felonies) are quite lenient. Hence criminals are not afraid, or very afraid, of the police, the courts, or the government.

Returning to this essays theme, there are two very different reasons criminals are not convicted even if arrested. One is progressive judges (the opposite of hanging judges). The other is the Bill of Rights, or at least its modern interpretation.

Now we need to dig into history. We need to understand the Criminal Fathers, the men (or women) who had an interest in minimizing justice and maximizing profitable criminal enterprise.

I often like to begin with the Somerset Decision of a British high court in 1772, but let us begin with an even more familiar to most Americans: the Boston Tea Party. This took place a year later, in 1773.

The British Parliament passed the Tea Act in order to remedy the reality that smuggled tea in the American colonies cost less than legitimate tea. It actually reduced the price of legal tea, and the tax collected on it, by allowing the East India Company to move the tea directly from Asia to the colonies without having it transit England where wholesalers marked up the price before shipping it on to Boston, Virginia, etc.

So who organized the resistance to less expensive tea? The smugglers. Big time smugglers, who were (and are still) called merchants. Criminals. A WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) version of the 20th century Mafia or today's Sinaloa Cartel.

Even in the 1700s crime was complicated. Consider the second leg of the Founding Criminal Fathers tripod: slavery. Today almost every American admits that slavery was criminal in nature. In 1772 many people already thought that, but not those who committed the crime. If slavery was outlawed they would lose much, if not all, of the wealth they had accumulated. Hence criminals fought to keep slavery legal in the United States until they were defeated in 1865. In 1772, in Somerset v. Stewart, an English court said that slavery was not legal in England. The implication was that it was not legal in the British Empire, in particular in the American colonies. That upset criminals like George Washington, the Lee family, Thomas Jefferson, and thousands of other slaveholders. In our era many liberals are embarrassed by the slave holding Presidents (and Congressmen, and Supreme Court Judges, and private citizens) of America before 1865.

The third leg of the colonial criminal tripod was stealing the lands of Indians (indigenous peoples). Stealing may not include buying Indian land, but it probably does include most Indian territory given up in treaties with the original colonies or later with the United States federal government. The British, to keep their costs and military losses down, had set a western boundary to the colonies, thus protecting at least the tribes to the west of the Appalachian mountains. George Washington and many others used the Revolution to gain the opportunity to steal more Indian lands, greatly enriching themselves.

So in addition to ordinary criminals, who were subject to the harsh laws of that era, there were the upper class criminals. Not everyone who wrote or voted on the Constitution were criminals, but a lot of them were. Rather than detailing that, let us proceed to how the Constitution protects criminal behavior. [At the same time, protecting the innocent from being prosecuted as criminals.]

Article I, Section 9 grants the right to Writs of Habeas Corpus. It also prohibits Ex Post Facto laws.

Article IV, Section 2 guarantees the right to a trial by jury.

Amendment IV (Fourth Amendment) limits searches and seizures by police.

Amendment V (Fifth Amendment) says no person (including criminals) can be compelled to testify against themselves, "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

Amendment VI details the rights of accused (including criminals) to public trials by jury, and "to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

Amendment VIII says excessive bail and fines are prohibited, nor may punishment be cruel or unusual.

Now we are used to these laws, giving rights to those accused of crimes, and are taught to be proud of them. Surely we do not want an innocent or falsely accused person to be punished.

The first reality to consider is that, both then and now, part of the planning of almost all crimes is to evade detection. You do not need to worry about the police or courts, or your legal rights, if your crime is not detected (in the sense of being attributed to you.)

I have seen no statistics, but presumably the smuggling of tea and other goods, to avoid taxation, was possible only because the criminal enterprises were good at it. Some, like John Hancock, seem to have mixed legitimate business with smuggling.

Theft is, without a doubt, the most common criminal enterprise. Unless the thief is caught in the act, it is a hard charge to prove. Many goods look identical. It is hard to prove a particular item is stolen. Even if caught with a provably stolen good, you can claim it was paid for in good faith. Smuggling is not always just about avoiding import duties. Often the smuggled goods are stolen.

So of course criminals want a mass of procedures to be required to convict them. "Why, that tea, officer, that is not stolen tea. I have 100 pounds, sure, but that is because I am a big tea drinker. You can't seize that as evidence of a crime without a warrant. And I want a lawyer. And if some prosecutor can convince a jury to convict me, why, the fine cannot be excessive. Say, would you like a pound of tea, it is very fine imported tea, your wife would appreciate it very much."

Crimes of commerce may seem to be in a different category than crimes of brutality. An armed robbery with witnesses, or in which any witnesses are killed, seems different than a quiet theft. A rape implies a witness, but not necessarily one that can identify the rapist in court.

While our laws protecting citizens from unjust prosecutions may do just that, those laws make the burdens of proofs high. I spent a week of my life on a jury where there was a video of the defendant stabbing his wife to death with a kitchen knife. We found him guilty, and as a writer I found it interesting, but on the whole it was a waste of resources. Police who should have been out preventing or investigating other crimes were brought in to testify, as was the coroner, and other witnesses.

Of course there should be a balance, but I believe in Seattle, and in much of America, the balance is out of wack. If progressives (I used to consider myself one, but they adopted too many out-of-touch with reality positions for me] want to change society so that it does not produce criminal behavior, fine, I am all for that. But I am against shoplifting and other forms of theft because they drive up the prices for honest, non-criminal consumers. I am against selling drugs that destroy people's lives. And I am against the big crimes, crimes against the earth, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

I think we need to make it easier to detect and prosecute crimes. I think the sentencing by courts should be sufficient to convince those who have committed crimes to go straight. Throw in some counseling with the jail time and the restitution to victims. I think police should be held to high standards, but not made to feel arresting criminals is pointless.

We can do better in Seattle. But given human nature, we probably won't. We need the City Council to make sure that punishments fit the crimes, an adequate budget for the police to prevent crimes or arrest criminals, and a court system that does its job. And voters who pay attention to reality instead of ideologies that explain everything.

I meant to rag on defense lawyers, both court-appointed and independent, but I will save that for another time.