Police Brutality and the Crime Shortage

        Police Brutality and the Crime Shortage

          I think that there’s rampant police brutality because there’s a crime shortage.

Crime rates have been falling in America since the early 90s, despite wars, recessions, natural disasters and the W administration. I credit the banning of leaded gasoline 20 years earlier, in 1973. That stopped poisoning young brains, and twenty years later crime dropped, just as it did in every other country that banned leaded gas.

In the 60s, conservatives blamed high crime on the ‘criminal element’, meaning blacks, the poor and dissidents; liberals blamed high crime on ‘root causes’, meaning insufficient nanny-state; and it turns out that both were right and both were wrong. The ‘root cause’ was indeed a ‘criminal element’, namely element 82, lead!

Well, we tracked down that criminal element, and we’ve addressed the root cause, and we’re reaping the benefits; but the bloated police-and-prison state created in response to 60s-level crime rates still exists, and it’s still defending us from crime rates that no longer exist.

There’s no longer enough crime to justify the crime-control. Thus, a crime shortage. Nonetheless the war-on-crime continues, despite the crime shortage. The warrior-cops just make do with inferior targets, like the innocent, or the compliant, or protesters, or journalists, or the family dog, or… anyone.

Similarly, there’s a terrorism shortage, and a war shortage.