This news post on the riots in Cleveland pretty much affirmed my suspicion that law enforcement downtown got caught off-guard by the protest. While I’ve lived in the area ne’er-do-wells are able to pull this kind of stunt once, but then thereafter law enforcement in northeast Ohio will be wise to the scheme and squash it. Subsequent protests were much smaller and never gained any of the same “steam”. This is such a consistent pattern I long ago decided this wasn’t by chance and that the city leaders (the oligarchs who call the shots, not the politicians) do not want their city, their home, run into the ground (despite the city’s best efforts).
Contrast this with Minneapolis where apparently the city leaders and politicians want to leave a smoking crater where their city now stands. What is interesting in their quest to close the police department is that they have the paradigm mostly backwards. Yes, police officers are “peace officers” and usually their presence, or the threat of their presence, is enough to keep things somewhat law abiding. However, one of their primary responsibilities is the protection of criminals. Would the rioters have been dealt with more, or less harshly if there was no law enforcement? How long would criminals like Fentanyl Jesus have been around if he was only subject to street justice instead of government justice?
In some ways the elimination of incompetent government law enforcement would be a plus for the law abiding, though certainly actual law enforcement would become more medieval with clans regulating their interactions with other clans and criminals dealt with in harsh fashions. I certainly favor the Cleveland method of law enforcement, but in Minneapolis, if given the choice between law enforcement/city leaders which stand by as the city as the city is burned and looted, and no law enforcement, I’d probably choose the latter, which, is why it won’t come to pass.
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