[W]hat other kinds of conduct would you expect from people who want to make lifetime careers out of the lawful exercise of violence against others? The state operates on no other principle than that of the use of coercion - deadly, if need be - to enforce its will upon others. We need to get over our grade-school conditioning that "the policeman is our friend" and recognize that the entire state system is nothing but the institutionalization of violence. The common police motto "to serve and protect" does not embrace you and me as the objects of such purposes.

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.