QOTD:
“Anyone with a brain and a bit of historical knowledge could have seen this coming, which is no doubt why it eluded so much of our political class.”
BLUF:
The thing to remember is, ultimately, police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, but to protect criminals from the public. Before the invention of modern police by Robert Peel in London in the early 19th Century, the public dealt with criminals mostly on its own, and usually harshly. Arrest by the police and trial before a court was a big improvement over mob justice.
Now some want to go the other direction. I predict it will end badly.
Back to the future in policing? Civilian militias in American cities
Police being pulled back in blue urban areas has led to neighborhood patrols which lead to chaos, violence, gangs and prejudice.
“When the dawn patrol’s got to tell you twice, they’re gonna do it with a shotgun.” That’s a lyric from Steely Dan, but it also reflects what seems to be a new trend in two of America’s bluest cities: The replacement of police with civilian militias. (The press prefers to call them “neighborhood patrols” since they’re in Democratic cities).
There are some people who might favor this as a step forward for civil rights and racial justice, but the facts to date don’t support such a reading. In two cities where the police have pulled back from urban areas, they’ve been replaced by armed gangs demanding protection money, increased violence and, yes, prejudice against people who “don’t belong.” Anyone with a brain and a bit of historical knowledge could have seen this coming, which is no doubt why it eluded so much of our political class.
The ugly truth is out
But now the lid is off. The New York Times reported the ugly truth last week. Its story opens with Faizel Khan, one of a number of business owners who are suing the city of Seattle for tolerating and even encouraging lawlessness in their neighborhoods:
“Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with ‘a block party atmosphere.‘ “
But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting.
Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.
‘They barricaded us all in here,’ Khan said. ‘And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.'”
How bad did it get? So bad that even the people soliciting protection money were complaining. The Times tells of Khan being solicited by “a Black Lives Matter community guard, in charge of several others. Local merchants pay for his protection.”
But the guard, Rick Hearns, is appalled by what’s going on: “Mr. Hearns has had bad experiences with the police in his own life. He says he wants police reform, but he was appalled by the violent tactics and rhetoric he witnessed during the occupation. He blamed the destruction and looting on ‘opportunists,’ but also said that much of the damage on Capitol Hill came from a distinct contingent of violent, armed white activists. ‘It’s antifa,” he said. ‘They don’t want to see the progress we’ve made. They want chaos.’” Well, chaos is what you get when you stop enforcing the law.
One of the lessons of the decline in crime that began in the 1990s was “broken windows” policing: the notion that if you policed minor offenses against social order, it sent a signal to criminals that larger offenses would not be tolerated. It worked, and crime rates plummeted. Now in cities like Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, New York, and Baltimore, the approach is to tolerate even serious offenses against people and property. It should be no surprise that crime has gotten worse, and that businesses, which depend on order and safety, are suffering.
The failure of neighborhood patrols
When the government doesn’t provide order, people either organize themselves or they pay organized crime for protection. And while people complain — rightly — that police often fail to observe due process, armed neighborhood groups and mobsters are unlikely to do better.
In a Wall Street Journal article on Minneapolis’s neighborhood patrols, you can see that:
“‘It got to the point where crime had no consequences,’ said Tania Rivera, 30, who runs a child-care center with her mother. ‘It was being done deliberately out in the open. Drive-through drug dealing, drive-through prostitution, everything from gunshots to assaults to sex out in the public. Everything you didn’t want your neighborhood to look like.’
So after a number of community meetings, neighbors began constructing a barrier to close off two blocks of their street, first with trash cans, then debris. For a while, a boat on a trailer protected one intersection. Eventually, a nearby iron maker constructed a permanent gate. Police gave their approval as long as emergency responders could get through if requested by the neighborhood.
Neighborhood men also began an armed patrol, kicking out anyone who didn’t belong on the block after dark.”
Kicking out people who “didn’t belong on the block” would be seen as racist and unconstitutional if police did it. The Journal quotes a resident as saying “We’re not proud of that, but it needed to be done.” And it needed to be done because the city of Minneapolis didn’t want to do its job.
Is this a boon to the criminal class? Only in the short term.
The thing to remember is, ultimately, police aren’t there to protect the public from criminals, but to protect criminals from the public. Before the invention of modern police by Robert Peel in London in the early 19th Century, the public dealt with criminals mostly on its own, and usually harshly. Arrest by the police and trial before a court was a big improvement over mob justice.
Now some want to go the other direction. I predict it will end badly.