Let’s think about the “defunding the police” meme that has taken hold in many large cities. The models for where this takes us are out there, in third world countries.
Probably most U.S. cities, unlike Minneapolis, will not disband the police force but merely divert some of the funds committed to police in prior years to social and youth programs. This is what the mayor of Los Angeles proposes to do.
With less funds, city police will reduce staffing and do less patrolling. With fewer police and less on-street presence, crime will rise. Stretched thin, police will do triage and devote scarce resources to the most severe and violent crimes: murder, arson, rape.
Parking enforcement will continue as it more than pays for itself. Burglaries and shoplifting will be ignored, car thefts ditto, much of this already happens. Baltimore is very likely an approximation of the first stages of defunding.
The wealthy will hire private armed security. If these prove too tempting a lawsuit target for the anti-police forces, they will hire thugs to protect their property and persons. The middle class will leave for safer locations, and the poor will huddle in the ruins, even more victimized by their neighbors than is now the case.
Employers will leave, and what remains will resemble the favelas of Rio or São Paulo, drug-saturated slums run by gangs. Very little of the funds diverted from the police will reach the poor, most will be siphoned off into graft and payoffs.
Eventually whole sections of the city become no-go zones, off limits to uniformed police with any interest in living another day, which is most of them. Somewhere along the line the police will go rogue, hit squads of off-duty cops will begin assassinating drug lords and opposition politicians and, viola, you’ve got a Third World city in what was formerly a first world country.
When people become sufficiently terrified and/or angry, they elect someone like the Philippines’ Maduro who declares open season on anyone involved with drugs, followed by an orgy of murder.
The scenario I’ve laid out isn’t a future I anticipate with any pleasure, and doesn’t have to happen, but it definitely is possible. If it happens, I will observe it long-distance from an undisclosed rural bastion.
