The BlackLivesMatter movement, and the wider groups of people concerned with racial prejudice in policing or with abusive (or “militarized“) policing have some tough challenges ahead. The nation as a whole is experiencing dramatic increases in crime rates, after years of having them drop; and people have new concerns about whether the federal government is importing jihadists along with innocent refugees and installing them around the country as their neighbors.
Homicide is up 63% this year in the nation’s capital. Washington, D.C. is experiencing package thefts off porches all around town, a rash of home break ins in formerly working class but now gentrifying Brookland (which had its first single family home sale for over $1 million this year), constant car thefts in upper middle class American University Park, and people ringing door bells to see if anyone is home and then running away if anyone is home in the high income Palisades neighborhood. While this is going on D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton plans a meeting with Secret Service officials for one single D.C. resident, Barack Obama, who had someone jump over his fence.
Chicago, which, like D.C., is one of the cities with laws going farthest to disarm civilians, remains one of the highest crime cities, with about 500 people murdered annually, fairly unchanged over the past 4 years. St. Louis homicide rates increased 38% between 2015 and 2014 and 30% between 2014 and 2013. San Francisco violent crime increased 16% in the first half of 2015. In Houston crime overall dropped 6% but homicide increased by over 12%. In Los Angeles, crime is up 12% but violent crime is up by 20%. May of 2015 was the deadliest month in Baltimore since 1972, with homicide shooting up as arrests for all crimes dropped, in the wake of failed Democrat mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake mismanagement of the Freddie Gray case; Rawlings-Blake will not seek re-election.
Most Americans, outside of the bubbles of the left and BlackLivesMatter, think the recurring cases of black men being killed by police – Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald – are all different cases, with some of those killed violent criminals and some completely innocent victims of vicious, sadistic, police brutality. Some of them are also aware that police often kill innocent white people – often marginalized white people who are homeless or mentally deficient, but sometimes suburban, middle class whites like John Geer of Fairfax, Virginia – and the left and the BlackLivesMatter take no cognizance of these cases or of the fact that police also tend to try to cover them up.
The question is: why so much police brutality – lethal brutality – and how can it be changed? Why do some black residents of Chicago feel the need to destroy Christmas trees and shut down Black Friday retail sales in order to be heard about Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot Laquan McDonald multiple times after he was down – a police officer whose file shows multiple complaints about abuse and racist incidents?
How else would they get a response from Democrat Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who has disarmed law abiding citizens, black and white, with gun control, and then told them to rely on a police force some of whose employees exhibit all the customer service of any government bureaucracy, from the IRS to the Veterans Administration.
This raises lots of questions. One is how we could make police more responsive to customers, trying to imagine some type of market-based or market-like reforms, incremental ones that could solve some problems now and be understood by voters immediately (without having to engage the hypothesis of purist libertarians who think protection and defense can easily be provided purely on the market)?
But it also raises another question for BlackLivesMatter supporters of the Democrat Party and its candidates: If the police, whose bosses you vote for and salaries (and pensions) you pay for with your taxes don’t care about you, because you can’t fire them and shop elsewhere, what makes you think the healthcare bureaucrat you visit at an Obamacare clinic will either? And why are you voting for a party that saddles you with more and more bureaucracies that control more and more of your life, who you cannot fire and who do not have to care what you think. Or whether you live or die.
The Insomniac Libertarian 
