40 Million Out of work. Probably free to go to a riot.

This week’s riots were probably made worse by 40 million out of work people who need some entertainment after a couple of months on lockdown at home.  That 40 million is out of work because of state government orders closing down their employers. 

Many of our citizens are law abiding.  I don’t have any numbers, I hope that the law abiding are the majority.  A large number of citizens are lawless.  Again, I lack numbers but I sincerely hope we have more law abiding than lawless citizens.  The most lawless have close encounters of the cop kind and wind up in jail.  The medium lawless will take advantage of a riot to pick up a new TV or a new computer, but usually don’t engage in burglary and shop lifting for fear of getting caught.  Only the police and the courts keep the lawless citizens in check.  I am hearing calls from the left to abolish the police.  God help us if that ever happens.  The lawless will over run the country.  We need police and courts to keep the lawless in check.

   The police have a strong sense of comradeship.  They stick together.  It is extremely hard for a police department to lower the boom on misbehaving cops, because the department is made up of cops and all cops feel they need to protect and defend fellow cops from hostile citizens groups.  I’m thinking every department has a few, one or two, maybe more, bad cops who ought to be off the force.  But they don’t get the boot like they should because of the feelings of solidarity with everyone on the force.

  The only fix for this problem is an independent group of non-cops running an agency that finds bad cops and indicts them and pushes the paperwork thru to get them kicked off the force.  Maybe a federal agency like the anti-trust lawyers group at the Justice department. 

  Or we could use the Cambridge solution.  Cambridge MA, better than twenty years ago, had a very offensive Officer De Luca.  He patrolled the public housing projects in Cambridge and was a real pain in the ass to project residents.  One fine day Officer De Luca’s cruiser became stuck in Cambridge traffic.  Suddenly the doors of his cruiser were yanked open, Officer De Luca was pulled out of the cruiser, and the locals beat the stuffing out of him.  It was noticed that Officer De Luca’s behavior in the projects improved greatly after that.