By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, June 02, 2020
Restoring order to America’s cities isn’t a complicated
proposition.
All it requires is resources and determination and a firm
rejection of the longstanding progressive fallacy that an overwhelming police
presence is “provocative” and “escalatory” and must be avoided.
As has been established across decades of civil
disturbances, it is police passivity that emboldens mobs. When the cops stand
by, or don’t show up or, even worse, run away, it is a permission slip for
destruction. They might as well supply the spray paint, bricks, and hammers for
the crowds, and beckon them into the local Target or Nike store to take
whatever they want.
Out-of-control looting is almost always a failure of
municipal resolve or police tactics, and we have seen plenty of just such
cowardice and foolishness over the last several days, most notably in Minneapolis,
ground zero for this spasm of urban disorder.
In a display of sloppy wishful thinking at the worst
possible time, the city’s leaders decided last week to vacate the third police
precinct. Mayor Jacob Frey explained that they believed this would be “a way to
both help de-escalate and prevent hand-to-hand combat.” Instead, it allowed for
a major escalation, as protestors gleefully torched the police building, in the
worst symbol of official abdication of this crisis so far.
During the first couple of nights of violence,
Minneapolis barely managed to arrest anyone.
For his part, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz,
hesitated to mobilize the National Guard lest he seem “oppressive,” apparently
unaware that his target audience wasn’t a social-justice seminar at Oberlin
College but provocateurs and nihilists who were going to take every inch they
were given and make it a mile of broken glass and looted goods.
President Donald Trump has been a steady fount of
inflammatory and crude statements over the last week, but when he blasted the
“total lack of leadership” in Minneapolis, he wasn’t wrong.
All that state and municipal leaders need to know about
controlling riots is obvious from a cursory review of the history.
Consider the worst disturbance in recent times, the L.A.
riots. They began when about two dozen cops retreated before an angry crowd
after the Rodney King verdicts, some of them literally running away. The mob
descended on the intersection of Florence and Normandie and began beating Anglo
and Latino motorists, completely unmolested by the authorities for hours. Some
police reported being ordered to leave the area—and then being ordered not to
return. A couple of squad cars drove through the intersection without stopping.
The rest is history: days of violence, more than 60
people killed and 2,000 injured, and in excess $1 billion in property damage.
By the end, thousands of federal troops were in the city.
Back in 1970 in his classic book on domestic unrest, The
Riot Makers, Eugene Methvin identified police absence or pullback as the
accelerant on riots. It was a huge factor in the Watts riots in 1965. The same
dynamic held in a Philadelphia riot the year before (an officer there expressed
exactly the same sentiment as a retreating LAPD officer in 1992, “The hell with
it. Let them do what they want”). In Detroit in 1967, cops retreated, and the
authorities underestimated the forces they needed as a riot devastated the
city.
It is simply not true that rioters will be quickly sated
if they are allowed to break and burn things freely. Disorder feeds on itself.
Looting one store, overturning one police car is never enough.
There is no alternative to imposing curfews, zealously
enforcing them, arresting violators, and calling out the National Guard if
there’s not enough police manpower for the job. This doesn’t escalate the
violence, it stops it.
Over the weekend, Minneapolis finally got more serious about policing itself and saw a drastic diminishment of destruction. Anyone who doesn’t want American cities to burn should take note.
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