Escape from reality

John Carpenter’s 1981 movie “Escape from New York” depicts a future where Manhattan had been turned into a maximum security prison run by the inmates from which no one can escape (creating something of a sticky wicket when Air Force One crashes and the president’s ejection pod lands in it).

The movie is interesting because of its depiction of an unorthodox but presumably cost-effective form of incarceration — simply throw all the prisoners together, pull up the drawbridges and let them fend for themselves; thereby creating a Hobbesian state of nature out of which they must reestablish order with the most dubious of human material.

“Escape from New York” comes to mind these days because various postGeorge Floyd trends are converging that seem to foretell a future of anarchy and soaring crime rates in our inner cities, with the “inmates” free to terrorize not just other inmates but also law-abiding citizens who can’t easily escape.

The “defund the police” movement is the most obvious of these trends and is based on the premise that combating racism means getting rid of or at least substantially reducing the presence of law enforcement in our inner cities (even though a large percentage of police officers patrolling such crime-ridden neighborhoods are themselves Black or Hispanic).

This demonization of the police is having a demoralizing effect across the country and encourages what has been called “de-policing,” whereby police understandably seek to avoid confrontations with minorities that might escalate and invite accusations of brutality and racism, with the “serve and protect” part suffering accordingly.

The left is eagerly searching for examples of such racism and brutality in order to uphold the systemic racism narrative, and has proven adept at using omissions of fact, distortion, and even outright lies (“hands up, don’t shoot”) to make various incidents fit that definition. And it is unsurprising that police officers would become increasingly reluctant to get into situations that might provide the fodder. They are also, and ominously, fleeing urban police forces for less hostile environs or simply resigning en masse.

There is therefore an inverse relationship between the degree of difficulty of policing and the degree of difficulty when engaging in crime — make the police officer’s job harder, and you make the criminal’s easier; reduce the likelihood of apprehension and punishment, and you increase the amount of crime.

A third trend, in addition to defunding police departments and demonizing their members, involves efforts to end arrests for crimes minorities are arrested more often for. In a repudiation of the kind of “broken windows” criminology that helped to make New York and other cities livable again in the past few decades, police officers are now being instructed by a new cadre of radical left district attorneys to no longer enforce certain laws, even laws involving resisting arrest (in short, don’t arrest minorities for this or that any longer, and don’t charge them for resisting arrest if they resist being arrested for something else).

The idea that we should decriminalize behavior long considered criminal because it is disproportionately committed by minorities takes “defining down deviance” and the “racism of low expectations” to new extremes. It also guarantees that we will get more criminal behavior in such places (and probably, per original “broken windows” logic, more violent crime as well, perhaps suggesting a logical next step of decriminalizing that too).

Finally, that continuing bastion of progressive wokeness, the city council of Seattle, is reportedly considering a new kind of get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of a proposal to create a “poverty defense” for a range of crimes, including assault, trespass, and theft.

Claiming that arrests for such offenses are “racially disproportionate”(which is true, if not necessarily because of racism), Seattle’s top public defender, Anita Khandelwal, argued that “in a situation where you took that sandwich because you were hungry and you were trying to meet your basic need of satisfying your hunger … . That conduct is excused.”

Why, if poverty can be used as a basis for acquittal when committing crimes, people should refrain from committing crimes when living in (ambiguously defined) poverty was left unexplained.

Apparently, in Seattle, poverty will pay when it comes to crime, handsomely so. And the cost will be, again, borne by the law-abiding poor.

Additional incongruity is added when realizing that the poverty defense is being proposed as the Seattle police budget has been cut by 18% and the number of homicides in the city has reached a 10-year peak.

It doesn’t take, as the saying goes, a rocket scientist to figure out what will happen when you cut police budgets, order police to no longer make arrests for various offenses, and provide a ready-made “poverty” exception for others.

It is also difficult to see how race relations will improve and white racism will decline if Blacks, who already commit a dramatically disproportionate number of crimes, are encouraged to commit still more.

Thus, we are left to wonder what kind of people will want to live in places like Seattle. Other than criminals?

Lord of the Flies … People who can will leave, if they aren’t already. People who can’t, disproportionately minorities, will be stuck behind.