We Need Real Solutions, Not Ridiculous Pipe Dreams

This new mania for dismantling (or effectively dismantling) municipal police departments is quite possibly one of the dumbest things I've seen the left embrace in a long, long time.

I have an acquaintance on Facebook who was stationed in Panama City after Operation Just Cause, when police presence in the city was virtually nonexistent due to the collapse of the government. Here's some of what she had to say about the results:

1. First the few police that remained, banded together and stopped Americans so that they could get extort money.
2. All the stop signs and stop lights stopped working (government was gone as well) which meant that if you weren't a native of the city, you didn't know to stop at certain streets and wait for thinning traffic. But yea.. no traffic laws ... At least they still went on the same side of the street.
3. Anyone with any money lived in enclaves with guards. They bought their own security. Most women didn't go out anywhere with out family.
4. Anyone with a few bits of something were robbed by machete and/or beaten.
5. There were pockets of lawfulness where certain students who take over a block and guard it. They would pull together residents as militias. They would block the streets with bricks and other things so they could guard their neighborhoods. It was this alone that brought Panama City back to civilization because the students went block by block until they had the large about of the residents safe from riots.
6. Even after being their for four years when they had police, summer was riot season... including beatings and molotov cocktails. They liked to target the "bridge of the Americas."
7. All military personnel (US) were under curfew and were not allowed to go anywhere unless they were with two or more people.

When the stop lights began to work, certain individuals would pull people from their cars and beat them. I heard of a few assassinations happen too. Plus no one went anywhere without a big knife, gun, or AK47. 

It was terrifying because the first few months I was there some of the Panamanians would slip through the fences into the base and snipe. It pretty much died down after awhile and when the government went back, they went back to hating their government and stayed away from the US military. 

Two soldiers were driving a hum-vee on the main road and someone shot into the vehicle, killing the driver. When the US (and the military) asked for the killer (turned out he was a Senator's son), no one could find him. They packed him up and sent him to Cuba ... 

So it looks like the rich are fine and everyone else lives in a war zone.

The idea that we can completely replace professional, armed law enforcement with social workers and community members "trained in de-escalation" is pure fantasy. It is based on a utopian, Rousseau-inspired worldview that posits that people, as a rule, are basically good until they are corrupted by societal factors such as poverty and/or oppression. But anyone with a modicum of common sense knows this is emphatically not the case.

I'm a teacher. I've worked with small humans. They're adorable, but they're also absolute barbarians long before society has had much of a chance to influence how they behave. If a child sees a toy he wants, he will do anything - including pushing another child over - to get it. If you decline to give him a lollipop, he will sneak around you and steal that coveted sweet from your cupboard. And this is true of all children -- whether they're well-provided for or not.

And adults? Adults are more likely to be civilized due to experience and upbringing -- but even adults are not beyond pursuing what is evil and base for the sake of their own selfish desires. If crime is driven solely by society's failure to provide, how the hell does one explain white collar criminals, who presumably aren't struggling to survive from day to day? How do you explain kings (or dictators) who continually steal from their subjects despite their undeniable position of privilege and relative affluence?

Human nature is not innocent. While we all certainly have the capacity to be good, we are not naturally virtuous. Pro-social behavior comes from moral training; it does not magically appear once the body is housed, clothed and fed. So sure: you can dump money into so-called "community investment" (and we can discuss what will and will not be truly helpful), but all the welfare in the world will do nothing to fix the fundamental malady. Some people will simply scoff at education and employment programs in favor of crime because the latter requires no effort or skill and is often quite remunerative.

Thus, if you take our police away, you will get Panama after the fall of Noriega. That's a certainty. And the people who will suffer most, as my acquaintance relates, will be those who can't afford to pay for their own private security details. Gosh, I wonder how many black folks will find themselves in that unprotected category?