The irony is that liberals who have undercut the capacity of the police to cope with flash mobs leaving the average citizen defenseless, will be the first to decry the private citizen resorting to self-help.
The problem is not really the logistical capacity of the police to respond, nor is the problem the digital technology which has altered the balance of power between criminals and police, the problem is the culture has worked against the rule law and left the police more and more isolated in the struggle for criminal justice. If the process of acculturation beginning with parents and extending into the schools, the churches, and the neighborhood disintegrates or, worse, actively operates to promote criminality, the police will never be fully able to cope because the culture will find a new tactic to overwhelm them.
Not only the institutions named but the criminal justice system itself which is designed to operate after the fact of crime has been rendered ineffectual by the left. The courts are overwhelmingly delayed and most criminologists will tell us that the effectiveness of punishment varies inversely to the length of time required to inflict it. It also varies with the consistency with which it is applied. On both of these counts the court system fails to intimidate would-be criminals from committing crimes. The deterrent value of punishment has been attenuated.
If drugs, prostitution, and gambling are activities so ingrained in the culture, then to use the criminal law to prohibit them is to alienate the justice system from the culture. Consider immigrant Irish and immigrant German lack of respect for anti-saloon laws in places like Chicago at the turn of the last century or national Prohibition two decades later. Respect for the rule of law is lost and that culture begins to condone other kinds of crime which have real victims. A Che Guevara, Jesse James, mentality metastasizes throughout that culture so criminals become heroes and crime becomes a virtue.
This libertarian/broken windows analysis is interesting because there is overlap and contradiction. But whether you buy the libertarian side of this argument which has been outlined above, the broken windows analysis has certainly found support among conservatives. The presence of signs of minor crimes unpoliced, physical deterioration of the environment and moral decay in a society generates scorn for the criminal law system.
Every time we chip away at the moral underpinning of a civil society, we cast a heavier burden on the police and the criminal justice system until it ultimately gives way under the pressure and fails to achieve the impossible. Civil society disintegrates not just in the inner-city but across the board.
The difficulty in establishing a civil society in places like Philadelphia is that we have race consciousness dominating the problem. As Nathan Bedford is tiresomely liable to pontificate, all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial. So if the police attempt to engage with the problem by initiating a broken windows philosophy of law enforcement they are accused of racism. Moreover, the problem has become so ingrained in the African-American culture that broken windows enforcement is seen as tyranny. Even the churches will reinforce that point of view, witness Rev. Al.
So the whites who are an entirely alien culture to the average African- American "community" either throw money at the problem if they are liberals or resort to self-help, like arming themselves, if they are conservative. Both kinds engage in white flight. So the vortex deepens.
The cultural divide has now become so deep and so broad that the mayor of Philadelphia has finally been moved, even though an African-American liberal, to address the problem. But excoriating youths who are the mass-produced exemplars of their culture might address the problem but it advances no solutions.
No real solution can be applied to this problem so long as the principal exploiters of the African-American community are African-Americans. They have a vested interest in maintaining the misery. Until the wretched victims of this left-wing/Democrat party shake off the cultist mentality of the ghetto there is no hope. There is no critical thinking going on in the ghetto, there is only the most outlandish conspiracy theory and victimization dominating all thought. One sees the same phenomenon in the Arab street and it is the equivalent international characteristic that we find in our inner cities.
The result in both cases is ignorance, poverty, bloodshed and societal disintegration. Until the Arab street abandons its mullahs we are in for a decade-long fight for survival as a representative democracy which tolerates infidels. Until the African-American inner-city abandons its benighted, superstitious, racist, defensive, and paranoid mentality and those who profit from it, we will see more and more flash mobs or their equivalent.
More police will not ultimately solve the problem. The culture, like a river erupting its banks, will simply swarm around them.
