Anthropology Policing

Just Like Us, You Say

January 16, 2024 by David 205 Comments

Further to previous rumblings on the subject of crime, another small but noteworthy point:

Why, it’s almost as if antisocial tendencies were not neatly confined to only one form of expression.

This reply to the above is not, I think, entirely trivial:

Indeed. As noted in one of our earlier discussions:

If you’ve watched the reality series Cops or Live PD, pathological selfishness is very much a staple, a defining attribute of the assorted misfits and predators. I remember one lengthy pursuit of thieves who’d robbed a store at gunpoint, terrorised its owner, and then fled the scene in a stolen car, and whose bid to escape did costly damage to other people’s property, and caused other road users to veer and crash, resulting in serious injury.

When finally apprehended, the thieves, themselves unharmed, were entirely unconcerned by the horror and destruction left in their wake, or the fact that it was all but miraculous that no-one had been killed. Instead, they were loudly indignant, as if they were the victims of the drama, heatedly objecting to the discomfort of handcuffs, and demanding to know why their phones had been confiscated. While, within earshot, injured children were being rushed to hospital.

Scenes like the above, of which there were many, may explain why progressives disliked the series, dismissing it as “copaganda.” I suspect the actual objection is not so much, as claimed, that the series portrayed the police in a sanitised or flattering light, as the officers were rarely the focus of the viewer’s attention.

The stars of each episode, if that’s the right word, were usually the lawbreakers. They, not the police, held the attention. They were generally the ones driving events, whether those events were alarming or farcical. And so, the series offered a glimpse into the mindset of the criminals – the recurring patterns of malevolence and selfishness – in their own words and by watching their own actions.

And obviously, we can’t have that. It makes pretentious sympathy much more difficult to muster.

Regarding those progressive assumptions and their routine departures from reality, I’d somehow forgotten about this chap:

In Professor Dettlaff’s imaginings, a world without physical consequences for robbery and predation would mean “individuals have everything they need to thrive.” Except, of course, any third-party protection from the aforementioned habitual criminals and assorted sociopaths. This “new, liberated society,” in which policing has been “firmly disavowed,” will, he insists, “truly keep us safe.”

I’d also forgotten about some of the professor’s peers and cheerleaders – among them, fellow educator Leigh Kimberg, who’s all about “compassion, healing, justice and equity,” and announcing her pronouns to random passers-by. She’s also somewhat miffed by expectations of rigour:

It’s quite something to have a supposed educator demanding that the editors of supposedly academic journals stop even the most basic attempts to ensure that key assertions in their publications are not just made-up or wildly delusional. But this, it seems, is where we are.

There’s more to be had via the links above, and in the subsequent threads.

Try not to steal anyone’s car while you’re reading.

Update, via the comments:

Regarding the conceit that habitual violent criminals are “just like everybody else,” Karl suggests,

Nice, white, middle- and upper-class judges and magistrates who went to good schools and live in sheltered, leafy suburbs with motivated policing simply have no understanding of the minds of the criminal scum with whom they deal. Consequently, when they sentence them, they imagine what would deter someone like themselves.

Well, bafflingly lenient sentencing is hardly unheard of, and the irrecoverable pathology of persistent offenders can be difficult to grasp unless one has, regrettably, experienced it first-hand.

As noted here before, those who’ve witnessed or experienced serious, aggressive criminality may have been wrong-footed and inhibited by their own disbelief – their own struggle to process the alien behaviour that they’re seeing. Sociopathic activity and feral predation can – to the civilised – seem bewildering and surreal:

 

It’s also worth noting that the field of academic criminology, in which unrealism and excuses are pretty much the default, is notoriously left-tilted, here and overseas, with liberals and radical leftists outnumbering conservative colleagues by a ratio of around 30:1.

And it occurs to me that people in high-status professions, including legal professions, are more likely to have internalised high-status opinions, mouthed as a kind of social jewellery. And which, at the moment, include opinions such as these. According to which, the creatures treating us as mere prey – suckers from whom things can be taken – are the ones most deserving of our sympathy and indulgence.

Pretentious sympathy, of course. But still.

And so we have competitively activist legal professionals, such as Mr Clive Stafford Smith, mentioned here – a man who believes that the wellbeing of burglars is more important than the wellbeing of their numerous victims, especially if the burglar is a “young black person.” And who regards anger at being burgled and the subsequent sense of violation as plebeian and unsophisticated, while disdaining the victims’ expectations of justice as, and I quote, “idiotic attitudes.”

However, contra Mr Stafford Smith and his peers, the fact that I manage to walk down the street without sucker-punching random people for being the wrong race – or stealing a car and deliberately running down elderly cyclists, killing them, while laughing – is not down to my no longer living in a rough part of town.

To claim that the kinds of creatures who do these things repeatedly, often gleefully, are just like the rest of us – only more oppressed – is farcical and perverse. And a tad insulting.

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