Devon Eriksen
@Devon_Eriksen_
Everything you have been taught, all your life, about the police and the courts and the justice system is a lie. Take all your mental images, everything you learned in primary school, every episode of “Perry Mason” or “Law and Order” or “The Rookie”, crumple them up, throw them away. Banish them to a corner of your mind prominently labeled “fairy stories for little kids”. That is not how any of this works. The police do not exist to protect you from criminals. Detectives do not exist to investigate crime and find the offenders. Courts do not exist to find the guilty and punish them.
Before there were detectives, before there were police, before there were courts or even codified law, those who offended the community were stopped. They were found. They were punished. They were found, stopped, and punished by a mob of their neighbors.
First courts, then police, then detectives and investigative agencies were introduced, not to catch criminals, but as an alternative to mob justice. But that wasn’t because mob justice doesn’t protect you, punish criminals, or keep order. It does those things just fine. No, these things were introduced because mobs sometimes lynch the wrong person, or punish the right person disproportionately to the crime. Police and courts exist to protect the accused from your outrage. They exist not create justice, but to focus it, tame it, point it in a safe direction. As western civilization became powerful, rich, technologically advanced, refined, we began to be able to afford the luxury of scruples, principles… philosophy.
We advanced beyond the mere need to keep order, and developed systems for tempering vengeance and order with justice, and ultimately mercy. It was difficult and complex, but we could figure it out. It was expensive, but we could afford it. And it worked. Not perfectly, but so well we forgot it was a substitute for the mob.
And agents of the justice system forgot that they are not warriors and paladins who fight to protect, but arbitrators and diplomats who balance opposing interests. They began to fancy themselves sheepdogs who protect the sheep, forgetting that sheepdogs don’t protect sheep. They herd sheep. Wild sheep are protected by rams. They forgot where the word “rampage” comes from. Because when police and courts and officers of the law fail to be an improvement on mob justice, then mob justice will return. It will be as brutal as ever. It will be as capricious as ever. It will punish some of the innocent along with the guilty. But it will do what mob justice always did. It will stop anti-social thugs from re-offending, either through fear and deterrence, or the dirt of a shallow grave.
The first people to get fed up and inflict street justice will, of course, arouse the ire of the system. Even when the police don’t do their jobs, they will not suffer anyone else to do them instead, lest it come to light that they are a luxury, not a necessity. But police are only numerous and powerful enough to stop the small minority of people who can’t behave. They cannot deal with an entire society of outraged, angry, violent men, decent men, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, who are tired of having their decency mistaken for weakness.
Police can treat men who try to stop criminals as if they were criminals, arresting them, charging them, imprisoning them, trying to deter the rest.
But mobs can treat the police who try to defend outlaws as they were outlaws, by administering street justice to them as well. This is what the UK is on the verge of. It just depends how long it takes more of the population to decide that they have little to lose in opposing a system that already plans to take everything away from them and leave them with nothing.
People are tough. Civilization is fragile. Plan accordingly.
People ARE tough👍