If only. These days, criminals have more rights than law abiding citizens. If you dare lay a hand on one of them in an attempt to defend yourself or help someone else, better pray there’s fifteen different camera angles capturing what happened. Especially if you’re white.

I was a kid when the Bernie Goetz subway shootings happened. People claimed he was acquitted on the more serious charges (he was convicted only on an unlicensed firearm charge, IIRC) because the jury was mostly white. But people forget that crime in Manhattan was bad at the time, and the jurors were from Manhattan, so they likely lived with that fear day to day. And at least some of the men he shot continued with their criminal ways in the years that followed.

By the time the civil trial rolled around (different racial jury makeup, also I get that civil trials have a lower burden of proof than criminal ones), crime in the city had dropped a lot, and people viewed what Goetz did through the lense of the conditions of the day, rather than the conditions that existed when the incident happened.

People decried the tough on crime policies of the Giuliani mayoral era, but it was those same policies that allowed those same people to move out of their parents’ sleepy cul de sacs in the Midwest, come live in the boroughs, and treat the city like a playground.

Nowadays, soft on crime polices are pushed by people who live in doorman buildings and gated communities, who never set foot on public transport, and are completely divested from what day to day life is like for the average person. The cloud people virtue signal about racism and crime policies because they live their lives in a manner that allows them to insulate themselves from the very people they champion.

The rest of us, the dirt people…we just have to suck it up and deal with it. It’s not an accident. It’s very much intentional. The criminals are wielded against us as a cudgel by the cloud people, who are very much invested in keeping us afraid and under their thumb.