No Quarter For Criminals
Are we that afraid as a society to take necessary action against those who intend to do us harm?
After a delay, the FBI’s crime statistics for 2021 have been released. The numbers, which you can review here, show that the rise in crime across the country isn’t an illusion. USA Today provided a contextualized summary of the data release:
The FBI reported a 4.3% estimated increase in murders in 2021 and a negligible 1% decrease in overall violent crime Wednesday, relying on an alternate reporting system. At the same time, officials acknowledged about 48% of the country's eligible police agencies, or 9,700, had not submitted 12 months of data to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) by the March 14 deadline.
Some of the largest agencies in the country, including the New York Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Phoenix Police Department, had yet to submit any data to the system, the officials said.
More:
But analysts immediately urged caution in ascribing meaning to the new report.
"With so many agencies failing to report a full year of data for 2021, this year’s annual crime data release will have significant blind spots," the Brennan Center for Justice said in an analysis of the report.
"It will probably be impossible to speak of a precise 'national' murder rate or 'national' violent crime rate for 2021... Policymakers will have to exercise great care when using this limited data," the Brennan analysis concluded.
It’s hard to believe that more data would paint anything other than a gloomier picture concerning personal and public safety in America today. If some of the largest agencies in the country in places like Los Angeles and New York didn’t contribute to the FBI’s crime statistics and the numbers are still this bad, one would expect them to be even worse than they are had they been included.
Almost all violent crime increased in Los Angeles during 2021, with only burglaries and rapes down. The NYPD reported a 7.4% increase in violent crime in 2021 from 2020 and is currently seeing a 32.68% increase in crime 2022 from 2021. Left-wing policy centers like the Brennan Center for Justice should, therefore, be careful what they wish more: more data may only prove what’s becoming increasingly obvious.
It’s been a veritable theme of this blog to get readers to begin viewing crime not as merely a social phenomenon, the cost of living in a free society, but as a form of low-intensity conflict. Crime is something which exists in any society even in the best of times, but it’s also an issue that can easily become politicized. The simplest way to explain why is because crime and criminals are effectively a form of resistance to the existing order. People who think the existing order is somehow flawed or unjust are, unsurprisingly, the same people who tend to contextualize or downplay criminality, or outright endorse it. Therefore, crime is a proxy war, a way to inflict harm on the perceived enemy, without getting their own hands dirty. This proxy war can be extremely effective when the authorities, through anarcho-tyranny, enable and even abet criminals in the pursuit of progress and social justice.
It’s a crisis when the state, the institution which is supposed to protect us, doesn’t hold up its end of the social contract. It’s an even bigger problem when crime, an issue which supposedly affects all of us, is something the public is at odds with each other over. When we can’t decide whether we ought to regard criminals as predators or as victims, when we’re more concerned about society’s attitude and behavior towards criminals than we are about that of the criminals, there will never be consensus as to how to handle the problem. Without consensus, there’s paralysis and with paralysis, comes inaction.
These thoughts came to mind watching a series of videos and reading about various criminal incidents which took place recently. One comes from the United Kingdom, which is dealing with a similar breakdown of the rule of law as the United States:
Assuming the backstory is true, you’d think the security guard would be supported by witnesses for doing his job, yes? But listen to the audio: did you hear that woman scream, “He’s a young boy, leave him alone, please!”? Or the cowardly man who intervenes not to assist the security guard, but to restrain him? What’s going on, here? Have morals dropped so much that being a boy means you can steal, fight your way out of arrest when you get caught, and not suffer any immediate consequences for your actions?
Here’s an incident which occurred in Maryland. After a violent criminal attempts to murder a man on the ground by shooting him in the head, a citizen bravely intervenes by kicking him in the head. He’s joined by a woman and together, they attempt to subdue the man. But notice the masked man in a bright-colored shirt about halfway through, who seems more concerned about how the woman is treating someone who just tried to execute someone else in broad daylight:
This kind of thing is infuriating. Are we that afraid as a society to take necessary action against those who intend to do us harm? It’s one thing if we could rely on the authorities to prevent crime and also deal with it appropriately when it occurs. But too often, criminals commit the crime, doing the damage before ever being accountable. In some cases, they’re never caught and get away with it. Again, these things happen during the good times as well as the bad, which is why it’s so important to be able to deal with criminals when they’re actually committing the crime, not after the damage has been done and not just leave it up the “professionals” who seem hopelessly unable to stop it from happening.
In short, America needs an anti-crime culture, as displayed by Irish youths in defense of a friend who had his phone stolen:
Instead, we have this. Apathy and inaction in the face of blatant lawlessness. We have people trying to restrain those trying to stop criminals. No wonder we, including men, just sit and watch as people, including women, are victimized by crime. Trying to stop crime is considered more problematic in our culture than committing it!
I want to leave you with one more story in closing. Over the weekend, 56-year-old Tommy Kim, who had run a wig shop for 20 years in Fashion District of Los Angeles, was murdered after being stabbed by thieves who stole a wig from his business. KTVU with the story:
Tommy Lee immigrated to the United States from South Korea and owned a wig shop in the Fashion District for about 20 years.
On Saturday, around 1:15 p.m. near the intersection of Wall Street and Olympic Boulevard, two 17-year-olds approached Lee and tried to rob him. The robbery ended with the store owner being stabbed to death.Both suspects were eventually arrested following the incident. Neither of the names was released due to the fact that they were minors.
More:
"They were looking at a wig. And then all of a sudden they made a run for it. Tommy had a record of being tough and going after robbers," the landlord said. "He started chasing them around shopping center and then the boy pulled out a knife and shanked him right in the heart."
Lee's business had been targeted by robbers at least several other times before Saturday's deadly incident. His death marks the latest in violent crimes happening across Los Angeles County.
There are images from the incident which I won’t post here. I’ll remind you, however, that this country suffered a moral panic in early 2021 due to the perception that Asians were disproportionately the victims of violent crime. The hashtag #StopAsianHate featured prominently across social media, until, one day, it all but disappeared and the issue quit receiving national attention.
What happened? Is it White supremacy? That certainly was the perception when #StopAsianHate was the current thing. If that’s still the case, why isn’t it still the current thing? Maybe it’s because it’s actually not a matter of White supremacy and the constant assault and killings of Asian-Americans can no longer be politicized to the Left’s satisfaction?
Instead, there are platitudes about not risking your life over property and not provoking criminals into a violent response. Did compliance spare this man from great bodily harm?
The idea that your life isn’t worth property has become meaningless. It’s effectively an unconditional surrender and a recognition of criminal supremacy. If citizens aren’t allowed to defend what belongs to them and the state is unable to prevent these sort of incidents from occurring or react too late, who really runs our world? Are the authorities really in charge?
All these blog posts later, everyone should know the answer to the question. It doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. I don’t know if a backlash is coming; none of us should be holding our breaths for it. Decadence is an absurdly powerful force and the Regime has done a tremendous job in demoralizing and terrorizing people into cowering in compliance, as evidenced by the incidents above.
But the more these incidents occur, the more likely someone will eventually step over a line which sets off a conflagration that cannot be extinguished, only burned out. Often times, it’s the innocent who end up suffering and paying the price for state and society’s inability to deal with obvious problems. Just ask the family of Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old Black girl who was shot and killed in March 1991 by 51-year-old Soon-ja Du, a Korean woman who wrongly thought Harlins was attempting to steal from her store. The killing, combined with the Rodney King beating earlier the same month, resulted in a total breakdown in the rule of law a year later.
As I’ve said before, high-level calamities often have low-level beginnings.
UPDATE: Rod Dreher had a short, but sweet take on our society’s increasingly self-destructive approach to crime. Read the whole thing, but I want to highlight this part, because it comports with what I’ve said here:
It's like Stockholm Syndrome. These progressive loonies sympathize with those who terrorize them, as long as the terrorizers are from a sacred victim group. Same thing happens in Europe all the time. A few years ago, I saw a news report about a German woman who was raped in a park by a Middle Eastern immigrant. She reported it to the police -- and was mobbed online by progressives who accused her of making life hard for a poor suffering refugee. How does that happen to people? How do they come to hate themselves so much that they are prepared to endure rape, the killing of their pets, and all manner of violent crime if committed against them by minorities?
This is how you get Bernie Goetz. This is how you get fictional characters like Dirty Harry. And this is how you get the suburbs.
If the crime wave in this country constitutes a low-intensity conflict, it’s one we’re waging on ourselves.
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
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