“A nation that will not enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.”
~Ambrose Bierce
Well, one Jordan Neely is dead and the Marine who put him in the fatal chokehold has been identified as Daniel Penny.
No charges have been filed but the usual suspects are already howling for his blood, most notably the Rev. Al Sharpton.
“I’m looking at the video. You got one man choking and the other holding him down. They all need to be in front of a grand jury,” Sharpton said.
Sharpton over the course of his career has incited riots in which 11 people were murdered but remains a free man.
Protestors have been flooding the subway and jumping on the tracks to slow down the system. Ironically making the stations more crowded than they’ve been of late as subway ridership has been way down due to crazy people aggressively panhandling and attacking people at random. Such as the Asian lady who was thrown onto the tracks in front of a train, or the Asian lady who was beaten to within an inch of her life, or the gay man pummeled by someone shouting homophobic slurs… examples multiply.
Sharpton, AOC, and “Public Advocate” Jumaane Williams are calling this a hate crime by a White Supremacist. Photos of the incident however show Penny was one of at least two men restraining Neely and the other is black.
This incident brings into focus a feature of life in some of our largest cities. Street crime is making certain urban areas unlivable and the law is doing nothing to suppress it. Suspects arrested are often back on the street before their victims can get home.
Felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors. Flash mobs looting stores unopposed has become common enough for some retail outlets to abandon the inner cities.
And by now everyone knows about the homeless encampments of Los Angeles and the feces-coated streets of San Francisco.
There’s no point arguing over solutions, the solution is known. Put crazy people in mental institutions and criminals in jail. Don’t pass laws with harsher sentences, enforce the ones we’ve got.
Rudy Guiliani actually succeeded in making New York more livable but since then the people of the Big Apple have seen fit to elect mayors and city councilmen who are in that old right-wing trope, “soft on crime.”
Inevitably when anyone advocates for letting the police do their jobs and backing them with convictions and sentences, people who don’t live with the problem will accuse them of advocating a “police state.”
So I’m going to let them in on something I discovered while living in actual police states and recovering police states. “Soft on crime” is not a bug in liberal democracy, it’s a feature of dictatorships.
The paradox of police states is that they have lousy police.
No I don’t mean brutal and cruel, I mean undertrained, under-armed, and not good for much but marching around in threes. (Because, “One can read, one can write, and the other to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.”)
The heavy hitters in law enforcement are special units devoted to suppressing dissent.
Leftist intellectuals who live far from the gritty reality of the streets tend to see criminals as “Primitive Rebels” in the title of a book by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Dictatorships have little interest in suppressing crime, and in fact are sympathetic to criminals. (Read Soviet-era prison literature and you’ll notice criminals formed an aristocracy in the Gulag lording it over the politicals.)
And they are ferociously hostile towards citizen self-defense.
The clamor from the Left is for Penny’s blood, and I greatly fear they will get it.
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