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?

300% Done

I'll just let the Fave represent my current mood.

As I mentioned in my last post, virtually every American agrees that what happened to George Floyd was profoundly unjust. Indeed, on my TL, I've seen conservative after conservative propose a number of systemic fixes - including mandatory body cams and the end of qualified immunity - to address the problem of police brutality. Because even though such incidents are statistically uncommon, they are - for everyone - completely unacceptable.

That doesn't mean, though, that we must accept every. last. response to Floyd's murder. That doesn't mean we must accept the terroristic violence now engulfing many of our cities.

"But RG, can't you see that people have a right to be upset?"

Of course they do. We all have a right to our feelings. And yes: what happened to Floyd was hideous and should inspire outrage and a desire for reform. But I don't want to live in a society in which the left's apparent standard for a "justifiable reaction" is the universal. Please, for God's sake, imagine the chaos that would actually wreak. Imagine what would happen if we let every aggrieved individual take his anger out on anyone who happened to be in the way. No one - whether black, white, or polka-dotted - would feel safe!

Target didn't kill George Floyd. AutoZone didn't kill George Floyd. Uncle Hugo's didn't kill George Floyd. That black business owner who lost his bar didn't kill George Floyd. The people who might've moved into that block of affordable housing didn't kill George Floyd. St. John's Episcopal Church didn't kill George Floyd. If you approve of these riots, you're endorsing the targeting of innocent entities who weren't there and had nothing to do with said murder. Is that really what you mean to do? Think. THINK.

"RG, why are you valuing property over lives?"

Flag on the field! False dichotomy! You can in fact protect both simultaneously.

If the choice is between rescuing a baby from certain imminent death and preserving a wall, then sure, you knock down the wall for the sake of the life in danger. But I would like anyone who's throwing the above bull excrement at me to please - please - explain how trashing a neighborhood is going to result in any real change in how our police departments are run (and therefore save lives). Give me the citations and show your work. Because from where I sit, destroying a bunch of downtown businesses will change no minds and will only ruin lives. What, do you think those stores - and the jobs they represent - are just going to magically come back and everything will proceed as it did before? If so, you are unbelievably stupid.

No: I can already see where this is going to go because I live in the real world where actions have consequences. Some of those businesses simply won't return. Others will increase their prices to pay for their insurance premiums and loss prevention costs. And ultimately, the poor "marginalized" people you say you care about will see their standard of living decline as they struggle to find work and/or basic staples -- which, of course, will get you all howling about how racist and unfair it is that things cost more in inner city areas than they do out in the 'burbs because second and third order effects are things you just can't wrap your substandard brains around.

When you attack the economic lifeblood of an area, you are endangering lives, not saving them. Human beings are not meant to suckle forever at the government teat. Where there is little work, there is deep despair, drug addiction, high suicide rates, and other signs of social disorder. Why? Because we all get genuine, lasting meaning from our labor. So spare me this nonsense that I'm somehow callous for being concerned that businesses are getting looted.

Besides, the rioters are hardly limiting themselves to property damage. They have also been caught on camera beating business owners bloody. Don't those lives count?

"How else are we going to get people to listen?"

We were all ready to listen before the fires were lit. We all agreed that something needed to be done. But now? Now people are rapidly losing sympathy for your cause. It's the same thing that happened in 1968: the disorder at the Democratic Convention ultimately helped to elect Richard Nixon. When you stomp around threatening and injuring people who aren't guilty of the crimes you wish to see punished, the victims of your indiscriminate fury will start pining for your abject defeat and humiliation. And yes, I'm seeing that very longing already in the polls and on social media. The "Rooftop Koreans" are being lionized again. A lot of people want Trump to send in the military to restore order. And at the gun shops, business is brisk.  You had a whole nation behind you for about two seconds -- until you squandered it by LARPing as revolutionaries. Good job. Slow clap.

So how do you get people to listen? Drop all that critical race theory BS that has zero connection with reality, stop demanding that we white people bend the knee for crap we didn't actually do, and focus on the actual facts on the ground. Because to be perfectly blunt, "white people" are not the only ones at fault for the problems currently bedeviling the black community. The sooner "anti-racist" activists accept that - the sooner blacks are encouraged to own their own crap instead of foisting it all on outsiders - the sooner we can all have a real conversation.

This is probably not a unique statement, but...

... jumping straight to the racism/white supremacy angle each time a black man is killed in an incident of police brutality is extraordinarily pernicious. White people - especially poor white people - get abused by the cops as well. (See also: John McWhorter's fair discussion here.)

Like all other observable social problems, the roots of police brutality are multivariate. Sometimes, I'm sure, the racism of the officers - or the department - involved is a factor; there's no sense in denying that. But socioeconomic status and overzealous lawmaking certainly play roles as well; indeed, these factors are, in my view, vastly more important.

Let's focus on the overzealous lawmaking in particular. As events of recent months have amply demonstrated, the US harbors a significant population of "Karens" who feel that everything they don't like should be banned by law -- and that everything they do like should be mandated by the same. For a Karen, it's not enough to, for example, offer clear scientific guidance to the American people in re: slowing the spread of the Kung Flu and then let us make our own personal risk calculations based on that information. No: a Karen wants all of us to be coerced by the force of the state to close our supposedly "nonessential" businesses and/or radically change how we go about our lives. A Karen, in short, thinks she knows best and should make decisions for the whole.

But each time you marshal state troops to modify people's behavior, you increase the number of times those people will come into negative contact with law enforcement officials. And when you increase negative contacts with the cops, you increase the likelihood of violent - and even deadly - encounters.

Not to be all libertarian, but: when you call in the state, you're implicitly agreeing that violence is an acceptable means to enforce your desires. True: the state does not always respond violently when someone has violated one of its rules. But the threat of violence is always there. If you refuse to comply with the state's dictates, eventually - if you're stubborn enough - you will see the barrel of a gun.

Perhaps one way to reduce fatal encounters with the cops, then, is to simply reduce the number of laws we have on the books. Because in my living memory, a number of people who were killed by the police were essentially killed over nanny-ish regulatory infractions that needn't have been treated as crimes at all.

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Now, to shift the focus a bit: I also think it's crucial not to over-sell the problem of police brutality. When an innocent person is killed by the cops, it's always and everywhere a crime that should be punished to the full extent of the law. And we should definitely work to reduce the chances of such events as much as we possibly can. But we must also be careful not to accept narratives that assert police routinely gun people (especially black people) down in the streets for no reason -- because such claims are just not true.

Outlets like The Washington Post keep running tallies of all individuals who are killed by police officers in the US, but based on my examination of their data, they inflate the numbers by conveniently failing to make distinctions between justified and unjustified fatal encounters. If you drill down to the victims who are truly innocent, you discover that those deaths are exceedingly rare -- that your chances of being unjustly killed by the police are very, very low whether you're white or black.

As we can see in the overwhelmingly horrified response of the law enforcement community to what happened to George Floyd, most police officers are decent, professional people who simply want to protect their communities. Calling them pigs and treating them like they're murder-happy psychos is deeply irrational -- and dangerous.

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Also irrational? Burning down a neighborhood to express your rage.

Virtually every American wants to see George Floyd's killer go to jail. Popular opinion on this is basically unanimous. But as soon as you start looting stores, trashing people's small businesses, and torching affordable housing - or openly encouraging those activities - you become a domestic terrorist, not a promoter of genuine justice.

Seriously: eff you, Antifa. I hope Trump does go after you with extreme prejudice because you're not helping.

And that, I think, is all I have to say about this week's news.

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