It is an unlovely truth that there will always be some measure of violence in any society. Professional law enforcement managed by local and state government, working within laws established by representative republican government, is the best system you can get.
No system is perfect, of course, and the bigger any system gets, the more imperfections creep in. Calls for more community involvement with the police recognize this truth. We should understand that ALL power turns sour as it grows centralized and moves further from the people.
It's a question of accountability, of skin in the game. You can see this from the bloodthirsty politicians and celebrities who are egging the riots on from the safety of their walled estates and armed guards, who lost their minds when THEIR neighborhood is threatened.
If you want community, local, and state control over the police - and you should - you must also accept responsibility for the failures of those systems. Nationwide riots over the failure of decades-long single-party rule in Minneapolis obscure and deflect responsibility.
After all of this carnage, do you think any of those actually responsible for the system that brought that knee to the back of George Floyd's neck feel more responsible, more accountable, more fearful of the wrath of voters - or less, because anger is nationalized and deflected?
Long before riots and looting begin, charges of white privilege, systemic racism, 400 years of slavery, etc. short-circuit that system of SPECIFIC accountability. When everyone is "guilty," no one is responsible.
Collectivists and authoritarians LOVE these vague allegations of social crime. It's how they see every issue. Their goal is to make all citizens feel like criminals so they will accept more punitive state power. Their ethos is guilty until proven innocent - and you can't be.
If everyone is busy blaming "society," nobody is looking long and hard at individual bureaucrats and elected officials. This is why totalitarians LOVE "confessions" of social guilt, struggle sessions, innocent people admitting they're guilty just by living their lives.
You can't fall for those tricks if you really want local authority and responsibility. You can't let hideously inept officials in a corrupt system hide behind national riots and media indictments of the whole of society. One-party establishments have little to fear from voters.
And you must understand that if you "burn the whole system down," what replaces it will inevitably be worse and more unjust. You're seeing that right now with the carnage of these riots and the "let it burn" attitude of Democrat officials. Anarchy is fundamentally unjust.
Anarchy is generally followed by authoritarianism, which - as you can see by looking at places like China - immediately begins making itself look "better" by crushing dissent. "Justice" means no complaints because the complainers are intimidated, imprisoned, or dead.
You're not doing yourself any favors by rioting and protesting to overload the system, increasing the chances of dangerous encounters with both citizens and law enforcement. The outcome will NOT be a new system that cares more about justice and the little guy, believe me.
The people who devised these "overload the system to effect change" strategies were not nice, compassionate folks who wanted liberty and justice for all. They were totalitarian leftists who believe in power by any means necessary. Their students run the modern Democrat Party.
The world those people are trying to build most certainly does NOT include greater dignity for the individual, more justice for everyone, freedom to pursue your dreams or speak your mind. You want more "community involvement?" They want the OPPOSITE: total central control.
You won't find justice in the hands of roving gangs, frightened citizens defending themselves, OR an all-powerful central government using force to pursue its own agenda. Your best chance, by FAR, is what you have now: local government, local police.
Your job is to remove the impediments to that system working properly. It has been gummed up by allowing bureaucrats and officials to abuse it for their own benefit and dilute accountability, beginning with the most basic of all: getting fired for doing a lousy job.
You're never going to restore accountability by letting anarchists, terrorists, and opportunistic thugs hijack the situation and distract from the INDIVIDUAL issues at hand: who messed up, who abused the system, and who enabled them.
Those hijackers work in the service of an ideology that believes in NO ACCOUNTABILITY AT ALL. They think their agenda should be imposed as law, subjected to no disapproving voters, all important decisions made centrally by people you rarely see and never get to vote against. /end
