RESPONDING TO MOBS: Critics of the NYPD want cops to stand down in the face of violence.
Perversely, the sympathies of New York’s political leadership and media went to the mob. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “NYPD officers just drove an SUV into a crowd of human beings. They could’ve killed them, & we don’t know how many they injured. NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings. @NYCMayor these officers need to be brought to justice, not dismissed w/‘internal reviews.’” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson denounced the van’s driver. “This is outrageous. Driving police vehicles into crowds of protestors is not deescalation.” Publicly funded protest organization Make the Road fumed, “Simply unbearable and enraging. NYPD continues to unleash deadly violence against members of our community.”
Protest does not include the right to block plainly marked emergency vehicles. None of the elected officials or community groups so enraged by the van driver offer an alternative for how a cop should respond when set upon by a violent mob. Civil disobedience is supposed to mean that, in the face of the state’s overwhelming monopoly on force, the protester responds with passive, nonviolent resistance. But today’s radical Left leaders, like AOC, have inverted that logic: in the face of mob violence, police should go limp, de-escalate the conflict, and hope that they don’t get burned to death.
Related: “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.
Read the whole thing.
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