Civil Disobedience in the City Where the Criminals Do Not Fear the Police

Via David Hardy of the blog Of Arms and the Law comes this piece in PajamasMedia by Jack Dunphy entitled Chicago: Where Criminals No Longer Fear the Police. Jack Dunphy formerly wrote for the National Review, which is where I first became aware of him, or her. "Jack Dunphy" isn't his real name. He chooses to write under a pseudonym because he is in fact a member of the LAPD. The title says it all. Criminals do not fear the police, so that the murder rate in that city is one of the highest in the country.

A quote to give you a taste of what the article is about:

And it gets worse. Three Chicago police officers have been murdered in the last two months, the most recent of whom was Michael Bailey, who at age 62 was only weeks away from retirement. On the morning of July 18, Bailey had finished an overnight shift guarding the home of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was in front of his own home cleaning his new car, which he had bought as an early retirement gift to himself. He was still dressed in his police uniform when someone tried to rob him. Police officers everywhere accept the risks to life and limb attendant to the job, but it’s generally taken for granted among cops that the uniform will serve as a deterrent against being robbed on the street. What level of depravity has a city reached when a uniformed police officer is no safer from a street robbery than anyone else? More important, what is to be done about it?

I can't think of a better way to illustrate the ineffectiveness of the Chicago police than that. In the midst if this, Mayor Daley wants to make it as difficult for the law abiding citizen to have a gun to defend himself as possible. But the normally law abiding apparently have a solution for that: it is called civil disobedience. Confronted with the fact that the City can't even defend its own on the one hand, and the criminal element on the other, the citizens of Chicago make the only rational decision possible: to arm themselves.