Amerika

If you’re eccentric like I am you may also be one of the six or so people in Alabama who enjoy a cold pint of beer and a rugby match at your local drinking establishment. For those of you more centered on the DSM axis of reference, bear with me please as I use a common rugby occurrence to spin an analogy to explain what is happening to urban crime in America. The perpetrators, career criminals and ne’er-do-wells are asking questions of the defense. The like the answers they are receiving, so the crime rates are going higher and may well do so exponentially until some of those answers they receive are different.

In rugby, a team asks questions of the defense by getting the ball to a large, fast bloke out in space and forcing their opponents to have to tackle him. If the defense gets the bloke down or figures out how to deny him ball, they pass the test. If instead, Jonah gets to successfully Lomu, the opposition gets to learn just how long an eighty-minute match truly is. The aforementioned Great One, Jonah Lomu gives us a flavor of how one properly asks questions of a defense in the video below.

James Comey directs the FBI in the United States. He partially got the job because of his willingness to oppose previous US President George W. Bush on civil libertarian issues surrounding the Global War on Terror. Current President Barack Obama now learns that Comey considers himself above partisan politics when Democrats are in office as well. Comey is a hard person to satisfy. Under Bush II, he accused the police of raping civil liberties. Now, in the Glorious Reign of Obama, he accuses them of being bedroom no-shows instead.

Maybe something in policing has changed. In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad guys from standing around, especially with guns? I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, “We feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars.” I’ve been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.

More accurately, in the wake of recent political pushback from both the Left and the Establishmentarian Right, police forces have decided they will acquiesce to the will of the loudmouthed. They are no longer policing people who do not want to be policed. The police are a law abiding citizen’s defense against the underworld. That defense is being asked questions. The answers are about the answers Jonah Lomu used to receive once he got that head of steam built up. Thus, we learn just how long and painful things can get when the defense does not give a good account of itself.

Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being American cities—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas. In Washington, D.C., we’ve seen an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000 souls, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.

This is occurring because police have been perversely incentivized. They are avoiding controversy instead of stepping hard into the tackle with conviction. Fred Reed described how this process worked in one of his old Cop Columns for the Washington Times.

“Fred — After having read your article on 11/20/00 I have to state that YES!! We on the P.G.P.D for the most part are now looking the other way. After almost [deleted]years on the job I find this disheartening but a necessary fact to survive in today’s, what appears to most officers, an ANTI-POLICE environment. We are even being told by some supervisors to keep a low profile so “you’re not next on the front page”! I became a police officer to help people [deleted] years ago in P.G. County . . . but I now share the attitude of most officers, just let them eat each other, we have to survive.

Yes, society’s line of defense is being asked questions. If the answer continues to be “just let them eat each other”, then you, the law-abiding citizen now need to reevaluate the risk-reward decision implicit with living in a major US city. If these decisions get reevaluated on a major scale by lots of citizens and the major firms they work for, this will have a massively deleterious effect upon both the economy and sociology of Post-modern Amerika. This is what happens when the defense gets asked some questions they don’t have many good answers for.

Tags: black lives matter, ferguson, police, race riot