When President Trump held a press conference at the White House, in which he declared that he has federalized the Capitol police force, he made the excellent point that there are 3,500 officers in that district, yet Mayor Bowser is requesting 500 more. “That’s a lot of police officers for a small area,” he said. He went on to say that more cops wouldn’t be needed if they were allowed to do their job. Trump announced that he will deploy the National Guard and that Attorney General Pam Bondi will be taking command of the Metropolitan Police Department and DEA administrator Terry Cole will be interim federal commissioner of the force.
Bondi said, “Let me be crystal-clear. Crime in D.C. is ending, and ending today. We are going to use every power we have to fight criminals here.”
It’s easy to assume that such talk is just the repetitious rhetoric that we’ve heard from political leaders for decades. We’ve been hearing them say that violent crime will not be tolerated on the streets of our cities, as if saying it will cause the rampaging thugs to reform their wicked ways. Yet with no strong action to back it up, the rapists, muggers, carjackers, et al. will have a good laugh as they continue to rip off the decent people of their communities.
The problem is that the bad guys have no fear of the good guys. However, what Trump has embarked on will change that equation. When law enforcement personnel know they are backed up by courageous leaders at the top of the government, we’ll soon see how quickly chaos ends.
Every city has a trained army of cops who know how to curb crime, and they risk their lives every day to accomplish that goal. But how many of them are going to risk jail terms, lawsuits, and public condemnation each time they get involved in a violent confrontation? When cops read about their fellow officers being thrown under the bus for doing the job they were trained to do, they’re very likely to hesitate when they arrive at a crime scene. That hesitation often costs them, and others, their lives. Keep in mind, there are savage people who prowl the streets every day looking for easy prey. The only thing that deters them is police presence, and even that is becoming less worrisome to the recidivist thugs because they have no fear of the feckless system that masquerades as justice.
When criminals don’t fear cops, how safe is the average civilian? During my experience working in high-crime areas for 20 years with the NYPD, I learned that residents of most neighborhoods want tough cops on patrol. They’re afraid to go public with their support because they have to live in those areas where such support has resulted in brutal reprisals. Many feel as though they’re hostages in their own homes. Those who live in low-crime districts have no idea what it’s like to be as afraid to walk in the street as it is to remain in one’s residence.
Hence, whether it’s the nation’s capital, or any other municipality in our country, we must come to a time in which we agree to let cops do their job. Not only do they know who the reprobates are, but they know where they are.
When reducing crime in any area, a good start is to break up the gangs that terrorize whole sections of that zone. My plainclothes investigation squad and I knew who the leaders were, and we took them to a place where we could reason with them. If they didn’t get our drift, we took a different approach; we showed up at one of their secret strategy sessions and tried reasoning with them in front of their fellow thugs.
I’ll leave the reasoning approach to your imagination. But suffice it to say, when you introduce thugs to the raw tactics they use against innocent people, when they know what it feels like to be rushed to a hospital, when they feel the pain and the fear that they’re used to perpetrating against their victims, when they no longer have control over their circumstances and no one to appeal to for help, it’ll change their attitude toward others in their orbit. Moreover, when they learn that any further criminal behavior will result in similar types of behavior modification, they’re likely to abandon a life of crime.
Some liberals will read this and say we took the law into our own hands. Au contraire, we did what the law is supposed to do: We curbed crime and punished criminals. If those oblivious handwringers lived in the vicious jungle known as urban America, instead of their ivory-tower gated communities, they’d be cheering us on, too.
Image via Pixabay.