With the horrors unfolding in Cleveland, citizens commonly cry that the cops should have known, should have figured out the situation, should have put together the myriad clues when three girls disappeared within a few years and a few blocks of each other.
I disagree. Taxpayers bizarrely credit cops – who are usually pretty dim bulbs, Lt. Columbo notwithstanding – with the intellect and drive to “solve” crimes. Few seem to realize cops exist primarily to steal more of our money on the State’s behalf while protecting its infrastructure and functionaries. If they can catch a kidnapper here and there and keep the serfs contented, fine, but usually they can’t. A coven of donut-eaters aren’t going to look at information and deduce the solution any better – and probably not even as well – as anyone else. Those who believe otherwise are unfair to cops.
Which of course means we should abolish police departments. Imagine if the Cleveland PD didn’t exist and the victims’ families had hired investigators whose livelihoods depend on finding missing people and things. How speedily would the three families have been reunited with their daughters? Ridding ourselves of badged leeches is not only one of the best services we can render liberty, it would also protect and rescue criminals’ prey.
While we’re at it, imagine if any of the girls had carried a pistol – a routine idea in earlier decades that now horrifies lily-livered Americans. The modern antipathy towards self-defense kept those girls chained in that house as surely as Ariel Castro did.
8:02 am on May 9, 2013
