It's a story straight out an old Western: The town lives in fear of the local
outlaws, who seem to do as they please, when they please, to whomever
they please. The town marshal rides tall in the saddle and looks great
in the uniform, but he's impotent when it comes to fighting crime. "We
need a new marshal around here!" cries the mayor. "The guy we
got is a good-for-nothin' bum!" The town's elders agree, and the
feckless lawman is stripped of his star and sent packing. Enter the new
marshal, the bright and brash slicker from the big city back east. "Here's
our man," the mayor announces as the hired gun gallops into town.
"He'll have this town cleaned up lickety-split! Those durned outlaws'll
be a-quakin' in their boots and headin' for the hills!" Great story,
so far, but here is where reality stubbornly diverges from the script.
Rather than head for the hills, L.A.'s outlaws have challenged the new
marshal to fight it out in the streets.
Jack Dunphy
NRO Columnist
Shortly after taking office, William Bratton, the new chief of the LAPD, issued a directive instructing that he be notified, at any hour of the day or night, of all homicides occurring in the city of Los Angeles. I don't think the chief is getting much sleep these days.
The headline in Thursday's Los Angeles Times read: "Get Angry, Bratton Tells L.A." The accompanying story told of the 16 murders that took place between Friday and Tuesday, bringing the city's total to 594 for the year thus far, already surpassing last year's total of 587. On Tuesday night alone, one person was killed and six others wounded in three separate incidents. Bratton is rightly indignant at these numbers, and he called on L.A.'s citizens to share his indignation. "I'm very disturbed and angry," he said in an interview. "I need this city angry about gangbangers shaping the perception of Los Angeles."
Indeed, people living outside of South Los Angeles seem rather blasé about this eruption of violence as long as it remains confined to "those people" living "down there." Perhaps there would be more anger if suburbanites came home from work to find blood puddled on their sidewalks and their tidy streets ringed by crime-scene tape, as do people living in L.A.'s rougher neighborhoods. And compare the press coverage of L.A.'s crime wave to the sensation of the so-called sniper killings in and around Washington, D.C. last month. John Muhammad and John Malvo are accused of killing ten people and wounding three others over the course of two weeks, and that story was front-page, above-the-fold stuff every day from coast to coast. Of L.A.'s recent troubles, there was naturally a front page story in the L.A. Times, but a quick Internet search for coverage in some of the other major papers revealed a page-2 story in the Washington Post, a few paragraphs off the AP wire in the New York Times, and nothing in either the Chicago Tribune or Boston Globe.
Sadly, Chief Bratton used the occasion of all this bloodshed to call for more gun-control laws. "Existing laws are not adequate to control guns in this city," Bratton said, sounding more like a politician than a police chief. "Too many people here are comfortable carrying [illegal] guns."
I have been and will remain the chief's supporter. No one was more grateful than I to see him replace Bernard Parks, who blithely oversaw the LAPD's downfall, but here I must respectfully dissent from the chief's call for additional legislation. It is not the state of the law that affords this level of comfort to armed criminals. They know perfectly well that carrying a gun is illegal, but they also know the law has no teeth as long as the hysteria over racial profiling constrains police officers from stopping them, searching them for weapons, and otherwise deterring them from their predatory ways. Consider: As of July 31 of this year there had been 299 murders in the city of Los Angeles. Of the victims, 141 (47 percent) were Hispanic and 134 (45 percent) were black, reflecting a pattern that has remained steady for the last few years. Detectives had identified 158 suspects in these crimes, of whom 69 (44 percent) were Hispanic and 64 (40 percent) were black. There were eight whites (5 percent) identified, as well as 17 (11 percent) of what LAPD record keepers label as "others," primarily Asians and Middle Easterners. Based on what I have observed since July, there is no reason to believe the year-end totals will produce anything but a similar breakdown among both victims and suspects.
But under the terms of a federal consent decree imposed in the wake of the Rampart scandal, LAPD officers are required to report the race of nearly every person they stop in the course of their workday, and in the current political climate, woe be to that officer whose numbers reflect anything even close to those listed above. In other words, everyone knows who's doing the shooting around town, but if you go out and try to do something about it you'll soon have Maxine Waters and the assembled masses of the No Justice, No Peace Hallelujah Chorus camped out and traipsing across your front yard.
Another lingering effect of the Rampart scandal is the de-clawing of the LAPD's gang units, the officers of which now spend much of their time in their offices producing reports required by the consent decree. In one recent murder, two suspects were seen driving away from the scene in a very distinctive type of car. There was a time not so long ago when such a car's description would be put out to the cops on the street, and some of them would know instantly who owned it and who his friends were, for they would have stopped the driver every time he drove so much as one mile-an-hour over the speed limit. But not today. That style of police work has been abandoned in the interest of sparing the delicate feelings of our local hoodlums.
William Bratton rode into town on a wave of political goodwill, an asset one hopes he doesn't squander on some quixotic campaign for more gun-control laws. Our murder epidemic is as much a failure of gun control as the Holocaust was of poison gas control.
There are some bad hombres out there, Marshal Bratton. Get the posse together and go round 'em up. Your deputies are ready to ride.