Lawless

Lawless:

I warn you that what follows is not pleasant, and you may wish to skip this entry entirely if you do not wish to consider unpleasant thoughts at this time. I will hardly hold it against you, for this is a deeply unhappy time, and we have all had enough misery. Still, it is important to think things through plainly.

Probably what has been shocking people most about the hurricane damage is the chaos in New Orleans. We must remember the state of New Orleans before the disaster: a background crime rate that was one of the highest in the country; police forces, and indeed a political structure, that were notoriously corrupt. It is of no surprise that, having failed on every normal day to achieve their basic tasks, the city's government failed to achieve what would have been a heroic undertaking even for the most disciplined and efficient of governments.

There is another reason, though, that the chaos has been as bad as it has been. Reuters found someone from Sri Lanka to articulate it:

Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is.

Well, properly, one can see where it is not. It is not in New Orleans.

The same argument was voiced in a dire prediction from the ground, which was carried by InstaPundit. Law Professor Bill Quigley wrote:

[T]he problem for New Orleans is that everybody who had their health, had money and had a car, they left. Okay, so we have probably 100,000 people trapped in the city right now, maybe 50,000 or 60,000 people in the Superdome who are there without electricity, without flushing toilets, without food, without water. And they are people who had to walk over there or take a bus, because they didn't have a car to get out.

There are people in nursing homes, there's people in these little hospitals all over the place.... So who's left behind in New Orleans right now, you are talking about tens of thousands of people who are left behind, and those are the sickest, the oldest, poorest, the youngest, the people with disabilities and the like, and the plan was that everybody should leave.

That is to say that only two kinds of people remain in New Orleans in any numbers: the underclass, among whom the predatory criminal population is vastly higher than among any other class of people; and those too frail or poor to move, which is to say, those who are naturally easy prey. All the elements of society that normally restrain violence and chaos have been stripped away by the evacuation.

This was not the case in the tsunami, because it fell instantly upon the people. Everyone was there -- militants in their jungles, tourists in their hotels, the poor and the rich and the people of every class. If this had been an earthquake instead of a hurricane, the chaos would be far lower in New Orleans. But we have left the worst predators, in a city where they are already accustomed to running rampant, alone with the most vulnerable possible prey. It is natural, and unavoidable, that hideous things should follow.

Our society does not rely for its order on our police forces, our National Guard, or indeed very much on the government at all. We are not a security state, like China, with uniformed servants of the state posted everywhere to enforce order. By and large, order is kept in America by middle-class Americans. In those parts of the inner cities where poverty is rampant and there is no middle class to speak of, there is always serious disorder -- the background murder rate for New Orleans, say, or the rate in much of Washington, D.C.

But we must institute such a security state in New Orleans for the duration, because American society is no longer there to restrain its criminals. Everyone with a stake in American society and also the power to help enforce its norms has been removed from the city. There will now be no order except by main force.

That would be a tremendous task even if those people given over to instituting that force did not have to deal with flooding, and the engineering challenges that go with it. Yet they do have to deal with it, which means that the application of force must be that much more stern.

That is the only way to protect any of the vulnerable peoples left in the area. The predators have been turned loose, by the evacuation as much as by the disaster. Civilization was packed up and removed from what was once a city, but which is now a jungle as dark and perilous as any in imagination.