The Shame of American Criminal Justice: Police Abandonment

It has been universally recognized that protection from foreign invasion and from criminals at home is the primary function and duty of government and the paramount justification for its existence. In America today, the threat of foreign invasion is unthinkable, but domestic tranquility is far from universally guaranteed. For the upper and middle classes, American police protection is superb by any standard, but for the poor, it is not.

Poor neighborhoods have many more criminals living in them, and a frightening percentage of residents there have been through the criminal schools in our prisons, many with advanced degrees, so to speak.  Criminologists have traditionally suggested that flooding those neighborhoods with police presence would only displace crime.  Yet, that is a great idea; when criminals are displaced to wealthy neighborhoods to practice their trade, residents there will pay to flood their neighborhoods with police presence.  The problem is that wealthy citizens do not want to pay for the cost of flooding poor neighborhoods with police presence to control crime while they remain unaffected by it within their comfort and wealth.

The poor neighborhoods in Chicago and many other major cities resemble war zones.  Gangs rule the streets and the schools, and the ubiquitous response from our political leaders is always the same, "there is nothing that can be done” other than to increase the funding of anti-poverty programs.  The Great Society programs begun in the 60's have cost $trillions and it is hard to notice it.  Local political leaders have often used the funding to build their own electoral machines, public-funded, social-service delivery organizations that employ their loyal ground-game workers.  Some even work in partnership with neighborhood drug gangs, as well as with corrupt police gangs.

Can this change?  Anything can be changed with enough political will.  Street gangs have to be confronted as the terrorist organizations that they are with brute force.  Violent neighborhoods need to be flooded with police forces, with as many minority members as possible within them, but sufficient to reestablish order.  Police officers working in anti-drug units should be scrutinized in the same way that we filter agents for the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA; there is a great deal of corruption in these local forces, and drugs are destroying the fabric of society in these forgotten segments of our nation.  The route out of poverty is good education, which, first of all, requires discipline,  accountability, and a safe neighborhood.