Popular misconceptions

Are popular.

A variation of the image from yesterday. Still AI.

To my shame I forget the name of the man who taught Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure at the 65th Panhandle Regional Law Enforcement Academy, but he was an extremely intelligent, extremely articulate man who had the gift of making the bland Texas Code of Criminal Procedure interesting.

During a break, he was chatting with a group of students, and suddenly asked what I thought was a very obvious question: “Can anyone tell me why we have law enforcement?”

Well, duh. You need to have cops to protect the good guys, right?

His response: “Nope. Your job is to support civilization, by protecting the bad guys from the citizens.”

Yes, I’m sure that most of us had the same expression you are showing right now, because most everyone shares an extremely popular misconception.

He went on to explain that in the absence of someone dedicated to preserving the peace, sooner or later the “good men, and true” of the area get fed up with lawlessness. And once those “good men” get fed up, their solution to lawlessness tends to be … direct.

If you’re a lucky critter, they show up with baseball bats, and you check out of the ICU in a month or so, short about half of your IQ points. If you’re not lucky, they show up with rope, or guns, or hammers, or gasoline … and someone gets to bury what’s left.

In Africa, as a child, I remember a brief period when whomever was allegedly running Nigeria at the time kind of forgot about Warri. As humans do, a couple of enterprising bugsnipes decided to take advantage of the situation, and ran feral for about a week.

That ended when a mob swamped one of their vehicles on the main road and dragged the head man out of it. I can still remember the expression on his face when they finally stood him up in the crossroad — an odd mixture of terror and frozen resignation. He never even struggled when they jammed the tyre over his head and onto his torso.

If you’ve had any experience in Africa, you know that the frozen resignation didn’t last much longer. And — mercifully — neither did he.

The rest of the dacoits buggered off with a quickness, and somebody from the government — the Nigerian Army, IIRC — came back in a couple of days and took credit for the sudden outbreak of peace.

I realize that there are people reading this thinking, “A little outbreak of vigilante justice doesn’t sound all that bad.”

It is that bad. Because humans are, well, human. Mistakes will be made. “Collateral damage” is a thing in mob justice, too. People who don’t need killing will get killed. People who never did anything other than be An Odd will wind up — as we used to say “Crayons For Christmas” and drooling in the sunlight.

On top of that, understand that folks will — not ‘may’, ‘will’ — come to your vigilance rides with lists. Rivals. Wrongthinkers. Competitors. Outsiders. You know —THEM. An extra corpse or three added to the butcher’s bill kind of gets overlooked in all the chaos.

As for the folks on the other side of that coin:
You’ve had a several year run of being kittenish, rioting and destroying everything you feel like, but citizens are starting to get fed up. If the government can’t get you under control … did you read the early part of this essay?

Once those “good men, and true” are Done With Your Crap, there’s going to be terror, and pain; baseball bats, guns, fire; and people on your side are going to die, probably very badly.

Like it or not, civilization will have basic laws. Like it or not — again — those basic laws will be enforced. One way or another.

You may trust me or not, but it is a far, far better thing to have the impersonal State enforce those basic laws, than to have a berserk mob show up with weapons and flammables to your front yard at zero-dark-30 to do it.

Knock it off, you little honyocks. Before someone does it for you. With a Louisville Slugger.

Ian