By T.B. Lefever:
I’m seeing reports tonight that the Brazilian coastal region of Espirito Santo is experiencing a warzone-esque crime wave never before seen due to a six-day strike put on by police in the state’s capital city of Vitoria. In just six days of a city without police, the streets have run crimson with the blood of over one hundred homicides. I have written at length about the lack of pay and respect for the profession in many areas here in the States. We can debate the morality of an entire police force going on strike, but it is of no surprise to me that these issues I have written about are the nexus between police in Brazil staying home and the complete anarchy that has resulted.
Back in 2014, a time-wasting Copwatch delusionista named Jose Martin was given probably the only soapbox he ever had other than his video camera by Rolling Stone Magazine when they published his poorly thought-out “Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: Six Ideas for a Cop-Free World.” Rolling Stone saw an opportunity to profit off of officer-involved shootings and boy, did they take it with this one. It is possible that the echo chamber that is the Rolling Stone was so deluded that they actually shared the words that were defecated onto paper, but I happen to think that even their people knew the article fell apart like wet toilet paper as you read it. What is perhaps most amusing is that the commentary has held up even worse over time.
I didn’t expect much when I read Martin’s piece other than the typical vilifying of police officers that I became accustomed to from dealing with them in person while on the job. Copwatchers live in this alternate universe where the police are the source of all the world’s problems, and senseless murders, rapes, home invasions, and robberies are just something that “the man” scares us with on the news. You can conclude with confidence from the title alone that his article is not worth reading, but here in 2017, the opportunity to point out its many fairytale qualities seems too good to pass up. So let’s begin.
According to the author, our nation’s judicial system needs to get in line with something the comparatively miniscule San Basilio de Palenque community in Columbia does. It’s called “restorative justice”; they essentially hold community court to reach agreements between offender and victim without punishments administered by law enforcement or judicial processes. Martin bolsters this argument by actually using the notoriously murderous Irish Republican Army and “hippy communes” as shining examples of entities using a similar approach.
In a Copwatch world, all 319 million of us living here in the States can thrive under this system without the need for police or an “adversarial court system” that issues stay-away orders to wife beaters, monitors parolees, and jails societal parasites stalking our children. Why have law and order when you can plant a car bomb in Paddy’s Chevy for smacking around your sister instead? I don’t even want to know what they do to rapists in hippy communes. Tickle torture? By the way, aside from ongoing reports of the Columbian government hoarding food and starving out its population amid mass economic depression and societal unrest, the country is doing just fine. Right?
I’ve heard the argument for better mental health evaluation for gun owners, but Mr. Martin goes off the rails when he states that there would be no need for police if we treated cases of mental illness more efficiently or if mental health was not “used as a trap door for social control.” It’s like these folks will say just about anything to denigrate police officers. It looks like an entire police force worth of guns in picturesque Brazil are off the streets and only a hundred families are mourning the loss of their mostly drug-trafficking loved ones in the past six days. History sure is redeeming you, sir.
In what I almost took as satire, the author calls for “decriminalization of almost every crime” but only really talks about the decriminalization of marijuana. If you decriminalize everything, then there is technically no crime and no need for police who are tasked with preventing it. This is, of course, a non-argument. We can talk about marijuana being legal. It’s 2017. What we can’t talk about ever is making theft, assault, rape, murder, etc. legal. Society has set the bar low enough in that regard that everyone should be able to meet it or face the consequences.
Surely, we could just have anarchy like our South American neighbors and watch the bodies pile up as the drug trade tears apart both itself and the community it’s entrenched in. If that is the solution people like Jose Martin want to see, they can get used to feeling like hostages in their own homes. The hashtag Espedesocorro# (Espirito Santo needs help) is making its way around the international Twitter-sphere to prove this very point.
In addition to the violent bloodbath, two hundred vehicles were reported stolen in just the capital city of Vitoria during the course of a single day. That is ten times the normal average number of stolen cars in the entire state of Espirito Santo for a 24-hour period. In less than a week of anarchy, the state’s retail association has reported a loss of almost 29 million US dollars. Stores aren’t opening, and when they do, people are last-minute doomsday prepping or looting. What happens when you have complete chaos, Mr. Martin, is that the government institutes martial law. The 1,800 state police officers who are sitting at home because they have not been paid the paltry wages they normally receive on time have been replaced by military and federal police forces to restore order and bring this area back from the brink of falling off a cliff. No one wins here.
When people like Jose Martin so arrogantly pontificate about a world without police, they talk about the many programs that already exist in conjunction with police efforts. The use of unarmed mediation and intervention teams or civilian patrols are discussed, and police officers are just nixed from the equation rather than implementing a holistic solution where multiple resources are being used in unification.
Martin and his lemmings advocate the implementation of ex-criminals in crime-dense communities as mediators and role models, which is a fine tool when used properly—but it should never be used without the direction of police and other volunteers who have tried to make themselves better without stepping on the heads of everyone around them through criminal enterprise.
Gang units across the country have worked with ex-gang members to put on seminars for kids to provide clarity on the realities of a self-destructive, dead-end lifestyle that gang affiliation carries for far longer than I have been on the beat. Police athletic leagues around the country have taken teens in a downward spiral of criminal and gang activity and turned them into Olympic-caliber athletes. Take police out of the formula and let’s see how any of that works out. Hint: Espedesocorro#
I want to conclude with a quote from Edmund Burke, who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That is happening right now in Espirito Santo. The first stage of Mr. Martin’s social experiment has been put into place, and the results have been tragic. It is being reported that the police strike could spread to the greater Rio de Janeiro area just in time for one of the world’s most popular international carnivals three weeks from now. Let’s get the boys their paychecks and put them back on the streets, shall we?
T.B. Lefever is an OpsLens Contributor and active police officer in the Metro-Atlanta area. Throughout his career, Lefever has served as a SWAT Hostage Negotiator, a member of the Crime Suppression Unit, a School Resource Officer, and a Uniformed Patrol Officer. He has a BA in Criminal Justice and Sociology from Rutgers University.
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