“Suicide by Cop” – Spinning Out of Control

By carl ballou @ Shutterstock.com

The United States today is engulfed in violence – political violence of street protests, rising urban crime, cops shooting suspects or being shot at by suspects, or the routine violence of homicidal shooters.

Asked if she was inciting violence by urging demonstrators “to get more confrontational,” Maxine Waters snapped back that this isn’t “about violence.”

Daniel Henninger in the WSJ reports that in New York City there have been 100 murders, 180 in Chicago, and at least 97 in L.A. Don’t forget, Henninger reminds readers, this is only the fourth month of 2021 and these individual deaths are barely noted.

Urban killing and other crime runs as background noise to the more publicized street protests, cop incidents and serial shooters.

It might seem like a stretch to conflate political riots, violent inner-city crime and individual shooters, but I’m not so sure they aren’t related.

Obviously something is spinning out of control in the U.S. Whatever status quo exists to mitigate each of these forms of violence, it isn’t working anymore. It is failing.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

Or, as with last summer’s political street protests, the former lines and limits have been erased. That July’s Democratic National Convention passed without one person addressing the destruction in numerous cities was a big event, a turning point, for U.S. society generally.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

Or, as with last summer’s political street protests, the former lines and limits have been erased. That July’s Democratic National Convention passed without one person addressing the destruction in numerous cities was a big event, a turning point, for U.S. society generally.

Somehow, that internal brake on behavior eroded, and now we too often find ourselves dealing with the grim, out-of-control results. An epitaph is the awful phrase of the mother of the FedEx shooter in Indianapolis, who informed the authorities that she feared her son was going to commit “suicide by cop.”

The system let him fall through the cracks, as it did in 2018 in Parkland, Fla.—as it has with other shooters. Made passive by its own rules, the public mental-health system—the so-called administrative state—has proved incapable of providing basic protections for individuals and communities. Whatever the reasons, the resulting catastrophes proliferate. More gun-control inevitably will be another such administrative failure.

This is a consequentially dangerous error of judgment. They are absolving young men of personal responsibility for acts of violence against their neighbors.

The reality across the U.S.—on the streets of protest, in the toughest neighborhoods or in the minds of the homicidally deranged—is that the simple and utilitarian concept of behavioral “pushback” has lost consensus support.