Vigilante killings are the opposite of "law and order." bit.ly/32tIr1y
Seriously though, experts have long known how to prevent the kind of violence that happened in Kenosha on Tuesday night. It starts with law enforcement sending the militias home, rather than treating them as allies.
The state undermines its own monopoly on the use of violence when law enforcement officials allow armed civilians who share their politics to cosplay as auxiliaries. This sort of thing is extremely dangerous.
The thing that made Tuesday night's killings in Kenosha such a scary escalation of the fight over police violence in the United States is that they appear to have been perpetrated by an armed civilian.
By allowing armed civilians to "help" "maintain order," law enforcement is giving tacit sanction to those civilians' use of violence.
This sort of leniency “has created a monster that’s going to be hard to contain,” Mike German told @elainejgodfrey. Read more here: bit.ly/32tIr1y
@elainejgodfrey Armed vigilantes "assisting" police officers don't only make situations more dangerous for other civilians... they make them more dangerous for police.
@elainejgodfrey One of the things I'm consistently grateful for about this (very difficult) moment in American history is that civilian-on-civilian political violence has not yet escalated to the scale that we saw in the 1960s and 70s.
Law enforcement + political leaders have a responsibility to make sure that it doesn't get there. That starts with, at the very least, not encouraging aspiring vigilantes.
I suppose I should also mention that although there is a literal meaning to the phrase "law and order" I'm using above, some people who use the phrase don't necessarily intend the literal meaning. They often mean this:
