On the Crime Shortage

         On the Crime Shortage

          Written in the late 2010s

 

          I think that police brutality is caused by 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 80s-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; the flip side of a crime-control surplus. Nonetheless the war-on-crime continues. The warrior-cops just resort to warring on inferior targets, like the innocent, or the compliant, or protesters, or journalists, or the family dog, or… anyone. If they cannot find crime, or imagine it, then then must commit it themselves.

Fortunately there is a solution; when a policeman commits a crime, then let us relieve him of duty, and then prosecute him. This alleviates both the crime shortage and the crime-control surplus.

There are similar shortages of terrorism and war, and surpluses of their control; and these have similar solutions.