Archive for 2024

August 18, 2024

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

Posted at 10:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024

EXCITEMENT ON THE WAY?

Posted at 10:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024

YES, BUT DEMOCRATS REPRODUCE VIA INDOCTRINATION IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM:

Related: Neurosis and the Curley Effect.

Plus:

UPDATE (From Ed): Old and Busted: Red Pilled.

The New Hotness? Abortion Pilled!

Posted at 10:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024

OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024

EVERYTHING IS UNDER (CROWD) CONTROL: The evolution of riot response.

Crowd control has come a long way since the Chicago police department, armed only with billy clubs, sunglasses and a healthy hatred for spoiled college students, beat the daylights out of rioting hippies in summer 1968. In 2005 the department upgraded to the Damascus riot control kit. In those halcyon days, police departments issued press releases about their ability to outfit officers in upper-body and shoulder protectors, forearm protectors, knee and shin guards, elbow pads, protective gloves and gear bags. Such toys are only as good as the willingness to deploy them: the city tallied up $66 million in damage in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots in 2020.

The Chicago department’s new policy concerning crowd control, posted for public comment in June, says that its officers will “remain unbiased and opinion neutral in any communication with individuals within the crowd while affirming that the First Amendment rights of lawful participants are protected.” Democrats were awful lenient about First Amendment-inspired arson in 2020, but you get the sense Chicago authorities expected to be less tolerant of such activities with the eyes of the nation turned toward Kamala Harris’s August coronation at the Democratic National Convention.

They will have the help of the Secret Service — if you can see that as a good thing after the incompetence displayed at the failed assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in July. Chicago PD has said that more than 2,000 officers had forty-eight hours of new training leading up to the DNC. There was also a surge in surveillance equipment covering the city — courtesy of the Secret Service.

Bryce Eddy believes that, even after the summer conventions, there are likely to be more riots due to political upheaval in the coming months. Eddy is on the board of the Center for Security Policy where he has helped partner private security with law enforcement agencies to help train for crowd control. He stood at the frontlines of the riots in LA in 2020.

“Covid and the BLM riots changed so many things,” he says. “Police departments were overwhelmed all over the country. Normally, they would rely on each other for what we call ‘mutual aid.’ But now, there have been agreements between high level security firms and police departments developing to where the security firms can offer additional services and what they call mutual aid, which is, again, usually just between law enforcement departments.”

Flashback to the end of May in 2020: Mayor Moron Destroys America’s Major Cities.

There is a validated playbook for dealing with riots. It is a tale of two riots in the awful summer of widespread racial unrest in 1967. Eugene Methvin’s 1991 National Review “riot primer” laid out the playbook:

In a nutshell: Riots begin when some set of social forces temporarily overwhelms or paralyzes the police, who stand by, their highly visible inaction signaling to the small percentage of teenaged embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is under way. This criminal minority spearheads the car-burning, window-smashing, and blood-letting, mobbing such hate targets as blacks, or white merchants, or lone cops. Then the drawing effect brings out the large crowds of older men, and women and children, to share the Roman carnival of looting. Then the major killing begins: slow runners caught in burning buildings and-as civic forces mobilize-in police and National Guard gunfire.…

The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.

Methvin compared two July 1967 riots. In Toledo, rioters began smashing things, throwing rocks at police cruisers. The authorities resounded instantly and decisively, arresting the thugs, with order restored within 36 hours. No one died. Not so in Detroit, where the authorities decided to allow rioters to let off steam. Five days of violence followed, with more than 40 fatalities and more than 1,000 injured. Property damage was estimated at over $40 million, in 2020 dollars, roughly $300 million. It was the worst rioting in America since the 1863 New York City draft riots, not to be exceeded in scale until the 1992 Rodney King riots.

And there is a lasting loss for failing to do so. South Central Los Angeles never recovered from the double blow of the 1965 Watts and 1992 conflagrations. Detroit and Newark never recovered from the destruction of 1967. Washington, D.C., never fully recovered from the riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As Methvin noted, during the 1991 Mount Pleasant riots in the nation’s capital, the new mayor got a crash course in the right and wrong way to deal with violent unrest:

In Washington, D.C., on Sunday, May 5, a black female police officer attempted to arrest a Hispanic man who was drinking and unruly on a street in the Mount Pleasant area, heavily populated by recent Central American immigrants. The man drew a knife and advanced, the officer reported, whereupon she shot and severely wounded him. The rumor spread that he was dead, shot while handcuffed. A flashfire of violence erupted as hundreds of youths set fire to police cars, smashed windows, and looted. Washington’s new mayor, Sharon Pratt Dixon, at first ordered police to disperse crowds but make no arrests. The second night, running gangs of youths fought a thousand policemen, burning and looting as they spread out. Mayor Dixon then declared a curfew and ordered arrests, whereupon the violence subsided. Police made 230 arrests in three days.

Q.E.D.

Yet that same year, New York Mayor David Dinkins took a “let off steam” approach, as black rioters marched through the streets of Crown Heights shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they assaulted Jews, after a rabbi’s car accidentally struck two children, killing one. A rabbinical student — a student guest from Australia, a more civilized place than was New York City in 1991 — was stabbed to death. (It should be noted that in both the Mount Pleasant and Crown Heights cases, crowds reacted violently to rumors of police misconduct that proved to be false.)

That eternal lesson, however, has once again been unlearned, as the capital’s current mayor, almost as much of a moron as Minneapolis’s America’s moron numero uno, refused to help the Secret Service guard the White House when rioters assailed the residence; the Secret Service, which does know what to do, promptly quelled the violence.

The full due bill for the current mauling of countless cities across the nation, with neighborhoods torched beyond repair, will be in the many billions. Beyond that are the businesses that will never reopen and the lives of innocent property owners and their families ruined. Even worse, the due bill comes on the heels of a pandemic that for a long time will raise the costs of rebuilding and lower potential revenues.

The 2020 riots took many people by surprise, and it probably shouldn’t have; by now we should know: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Speaking of which: Harris/Walz: Mostly Peaceful.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 18th, 2024

I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE RESPECTED THE SECRET SERVICE:

It may be, of course, that people were simply misinformed until recently.

Posted at 12:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024

SUNDAY MORNING OPEN THREAD: How’s it going, eh?

There’ll still be a regular one at the usual time.

Posted at 8:44 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 18th, 2024
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