If the Police Aren't Allowed to Do Their Jobs, Other People Will Have to Do Their Jobs

And many people won’t like the way that they do them.

The primary reason people chose to form societies, the reason anarchy doesn’t work, and the first job of government all come down to the same thing: Human beings need law and order not just to thrive, but to function.

In fact, law and order undergirds everything we do to such an extent that you could compare it to the water that fish in a fish tank swim in. Take it away and everything completely falls to pieces.

If there’s no law and order, are you safe to go down the street or even leave your house? Can you let your kids go visit someone in the neighborhood or even play in your yard? Is there a point to building a business or for that matter, stockpiling anything that can be looted from you at gunpoint? Are you safe to drive your car down the street? Ride the subway? Can you even be sure your wife and children will be safe enough for you to leave their side? Can you trust the things you buy in a world without law and order? How do you know that sandwich doesn’t have glass in it? What if the pharmacy sells you sugar pills in place of pain pills? Can you afford to put money in a bank without knowing whether they will give it back to you? If someone wrongs your family or clan, do you need to start a Hatfield and McCoy-style feud over it? Does any of this matter if some foreign country could pour over our borders tomorrow, burn our homes and churches, and then make slaves of us all?

We could go on and on with this, but you get the idea. Law and order are not directly responsible for every good, meaningful, and worthwhile thing in our civilization, but very, very few of those things could occur without it. It’s like the soil, water, and sunshine that make it possible for all of the crops we plant to grow.

That’s why one of the more horrifying trends over the last few years in areas controlled by liberals has been an increasing breakdown of order.

We’ve seen liberal protesters allowed to riot, loot, vandalize property, harass people, block traffic, and create autonomous zones with extremely slow and sometimes no pushback at all from the police. Similarly, in other liberal cities, homeless people have been allowed to pee, defecate, use drugs, and set up camps on public sidewalks, streets, and parks. NYC has always been known for having sketchy homeless people, but my trip last year was the first time I had ever seen a homeless person peeing in the street and another shooting up what I assume was fentanyl openly.

We’ve also seen the Biden administration openly undermine and refuse to enforce our immigration laws. Terrorists, foreign agents, drug dealers, and gang members are undoubtedly pouring across our border along with the illegals that are clearly exploiting our goodwill.

In many cities with Soros prosecutors, we’re seeing widespread, professionalized shoplifting, sometimes violent individuals released with minimal or no bail, and criminals being allowed to go right back on the street without charges after they commit crimes.

Allowing this sort of lawlessness has an enormous negative impact, not just on the quality of life of the people immediately affected by it, but on the whole country. It creates a sense of alarm, disorder, and generalized distrust. It gives people in other nations a sense that America is out of control, falling apart, and can’t be relied upon. It creates fear, depression, and a sense that no competent adults are running the show. There are a lot of real problems, a lot of real consequences, and a lot of real people suffering because so many liberals simply refuse to enforce the law:

We could go on and on with this, but the point is that there are huge consequences for the refusal to enforce order, and many people, quite correctly, find it intolerable. If it continues, this will increasingly lead to people feeling as if they have no other choice than to take the law into their own hands to protect themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their businesses.

In other words, when the police refuse to do their jobs, other people are going to step up and do those jobs and many people will not like how those jobs are done.

That’s certainly what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse. Rioters were allowed to run wild in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Businesses were destroyed. People didn’t feel safe. A number of people, Kyle Rittenhouse included, showed up to protect local businesses. Kyle Rittenhouse got separated from his friends, he was attacked by some of the rioters, and he shot them to save his own life. The rioters were the immediate problem, but the government also deserves plenty of blame for refusing to safeguard their citizens. They should have known better.

In fact, you could go all the way back to the now famous and widely admired “Rooftop Koreans” who protected their shops during the LA Riots. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, they didn’t kill anyone, but they were involved in gun battles and there could have very easily been a large body count if things had gone a little differently:

Many of you may not have heard about the case of Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly, but recently he got off via a hung jury after killing an illegal alien who was crossing his property:

A Nogales rancher who was accused of killing an unarmed Mexican man on his property is now a free man after prosecutors declined Monday to retry the case that ended in a mistrial last week.

...Kelly, 75, was charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Gabriel Cuen Buitimea of Nogales, Sonora, as he crossed the rancher’s property, heading toward the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cuen Buitimea’s body was found 115 yards from Kelly’s patio, where law enforcement recovered nine spent bullet casings from Kelly’s AK-47. The bullet that killed Cuen Buitimea was never recovered.

Kelly also faced a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against Daniel Ramirez, a Honduran national who testified that he was traveling with 48-year-old Cuen Buitimea, as they sought roofing work in the U.S.

Kelly said he fired warning shots above the heads of a group of migrants crossing his property on Jan. 30, 2023. He told a Santa Cruz County detective that a migrant pointed a weapon at him while crossing his property, but earlier he’d told a Border Patrol agent that the group of migrants he saw on his property was too far away to tell if any were armed.

...Prosecutors said Kelly acted with reckless disregard for human life and described him as inconsistent and evasive in talks with law enforcement on the day of the shooting.

On the other hand, many of you have heard of Daniel Penny. He was a former Marine riding home on the New York subway. A deranged homeless man who had been arrested 42 times was making loud and violent threats. Penny and a couple of other passengers moved to restrain him for everyone’s safety. The homeless man died in the process and now Penny faces manslaughter charges.

We also can’t forget lawyers Patricia and Ann McCloskey, who rather famously pointed guns at BLM protesters who were trespassing and shouting threats at them:

All of these cases beg what should be an obvious question: Why were a teenage boy, Korean shopkeepers, a 75-year-old rancher, a guy riding home on the subway, and a couple of lawyers put in a position where they had to do the jobs of the police in the first place? It’s wrong to put civilians in a position where they have to make the same kind of decisions as police officers, but without the training, equipment, or backup. Yet, by refusing to allow the police to do their jobs, liberal politicians are knowingly forcing ordinary people into these situations.

As a society, we shouldn’t want soccer moms trying to decide whether they need to gun their car through a violent protest in the road, business owners trying to figure out how to deal with gangs of shoplifters in their stores, or a mechanic coming home from work trying to figure out whether he needs to defend himself and the people around him from a mentally ill homeless person who’s making violent threats.

One way or the other, the American people are going to insist on having order. If the police won’t provide it, it will have to be provided by other people, in other ways. Those other ways might mean more vigilantes, gangs, militias, private security, or even groups like the Guardian Angels stepping up to secure the public’s safety. That wouldn’t be a good thing and it shouldn’t be necessary, but if the Left keeps winking at the bad behavior of criminals, they’re going to force people to make increasingly dangerous decisions about how to protect themselves in a world where the police are no longer going to do it for them.

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