Si Vis Pacem

The videos today are of a sobbing female police officer in the UK crying that nobody from the crowd came to help her. Colonel Kurt points out that the UK has taught its subjects that they aren't entitled to self-defense; how then to expect them to know how, or be willing, to jump in to defend the police? Commenters note that it's even worse that the assailants were Muslims, because in the UK anyone jumping in would also have to fear hate crime prosecutions. The police have to take care of themselves, without necessarily having nearby backup, but it's no longer a hiring consideration whether or not they are physically capable.

Now one place that female police work pretty well is in Japan. Japanese society is intensely rule-following and group-harmony-directed. The odds of violence being turned against the police are very low there, so polite requests from the police and security personnel are usually sufficient. There too, however, they're finding themselves at a loss to deal with the assault situation from Islamic tourists. Fortunately in that case the assault was merely spittle. 

In both of these countries the police are generally not armed, so their congruent lack of physical strength and size is doubly risky. Disarming yourselves and trusting to the kindness of others is only fit for the hoped-for world to come; in our world, a government strong enough to make that viable has proven tyrannical.
For fear of his yasa and punishment his followers were so well 
disciplined that during his reign no traveller, so long as he was 
near his army, had need of guard or patrol on any stretch of road ; 
and, as is said by way of hyperbole, a woman with a golden 
vessel on her head might walk alone without fear or dread. 
And he enacted minute yasas that were an intolerable imposition 
upon such as the Taziks, e.g. that none might slaughter meat in 
the Moslem fashion nor sit by day in running water, and so on. 
The yasa forbidding the slaughter of sheep in the lawful manner 
he sent to every land ; and for a time no man slaughtered sheep 
openly in Khorasan, and Moslems were forced to eat carrion. 

-Juvayni, Ala-ad-Din 'Ata-Malik, trans. John Andrew Boyle, The History of the World Conqueror (Harvard: 1958), 272.

Safe enough for the submissive, but intolerable all the same. 

7 comments:

  1. Glenn Reynolds often notes that, at least in modern societies, the police exist mostly to ensure that (suspected) criminals aren't subjected to mob justice. If the criminals don't have reason to fear the mob they have little reason to cooperate with the police.

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    1. I suppose that's fair. If the police have alienated themselves sufficiently from their society that no one would defend them, they probably have more to fear than the criminals do.

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    2. I suspect the government has trained the populace this way. Taking away their arms and telling them the police are there to protect them engenders a passive, "that's not my job" mentality, I would think.

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  2. It doesn't help when governments, or even just major political parties, alienate the population from the police.

    Eric Hines

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  3. Just a small correction: Japanese police generally carry revolvers, but more discretely than American police. They use a flap-over holster so that the revolver itself is not visible.

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    1. Is that so? The only police officer I encountered during my very brief time in Japan was a female police officer inside the airport security zone. I had turned the wrong way following what appeared to me to be an arrow directing me to do so. She appeared to correct my understanding of which hallway to take.

      If she was armed, it was very discreet indeed. But she was tremendously polite; if all police were such, I imagine people would like them better.

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    2. I know the beat cops wear revolvers. I've seen cops directing traffic who were (or seemed to be) unarmed. Maybe inside the airport security zone they wouldn't carry. I dunno.

      In all of my interactions with them, they've been exceedingly polite.

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