How many shootings like those last night in Dallas before American police officers, like their counterparts in France and Britain, refuse to enter minority neighborhoods? Doing so makes those neighborhoods, more so than today, essentially lawless zones, free-fire zones where anything goes.
Who will be the main sufferers of that refusal? The minority residents of those zones, residients who will be victimized by their neighbors essentially with no recourse except revenge via their local "godfather."
Who will be the main beneficiaries of police abdication? Gangs and gangsters, sellers of "protection." How does this benefit the minority community? Fewer will end in prison but far more will end up mutilated and dead, victims in Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all."
As Heather MacDonald and others have pointed out, the primary beneficiaries of "broken window" policing have been the law-abiding members of minority communities. Many are alive today because "stop and frisk" enforcement has taken, or kept, guns off the street. Now the "Ferguson effect" is reversing those gains and police abdication would make it much worse.
