Will Liberals Now Awaken to the Legitimacy of Police Display, and Use, of Force?

This last week’s invasion of the Capitol by a mob seeking to prevent Vice President Pence from counting the electoral votes and certifying the election result leaves us with very few positives.  The country is rightly shocked that a mob would think it has the right to take the law into its own hands, and that this belief extended even to the most fundamental aspect of democratic self-rule (the peaceful transfer of power through legal process). At least one police officer and at least one rioter were killed in the melee.

There may be one silver lining, however.  Liberals (and not a few libertarians) may have awakened to the previously Neanderthals-only idea that we need police with sufficient numbers, weapons, confidence and authority forcibly to keep the peace against those who threaten it.

It has been Holy Writ for years among a wide swath of liberals and libertarians that the police are a menace.  We have too many of them, they use force too readily and get away with it too routinely, they carry military-style weapons to cow “mostly peaceful” protesters or even just citizens minding their own business, and they ignore “de-escalation” and other Give Peace A Chance strategies like bake sales and midnight basketball in favor of giddily cracking heads.  This sort of thinking got perhaps its most prominent display last year when a bunch of thugs wearing the “you-dare-not-question-us” mantle of racial justice simply took over a few blocks of Seattle.  The feckless mayor, who had long since forfeited the moral and intellectual capital to confront brazen lawlessness, could do no better than proclaim that it wasn’t really criminality, it was the reincarnation of The Summer of Love.

No one, liberals especially, has mistaken last week’s Capitol mob scene as the kickoff to The Winter of Love.  Instead, they understand for once (since it was a right-wing riot) that lawlessness is both horribly corrosive to the rule of law and dangerous (since people can get killed).  Indeed, those who once furiously denounced the police for over-preparing and over-reacting are now at least equally furious in declaring that the Capitol police, and maybe the DC police as well, were too complacent and ill-prepared, and that once it became clear there would be a serious attempt to breach the halls of Congress themselves, took insufficient action to get the rioters under control.  Such Leftist outrage is all over the place, see, e.g., here, here, here and here.

Well welcome to reality, ladies and gentlemen.  Your years of telling the police that they’re a bunch of thugs, that they’re over-weaponized and trigger-happy, that they need to take a step back, that they should take more to heart First Amendment values and understand citizens’ anger  — yes, all that came home to roost and you don’t like it one little bit.

You shouldn’t.

You should understand that the rule of law has real enemies.  They have used force and will do so again.  The always-and-ever claimed righteousness of their cause (from “Stop the Steal” to “White Fragility” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”) can be debated endlessly, but when the mob is coming at the Capitol, or the university, or city hall, or the mom-and-pop convenience store, or the precinct station, the time for debate is over (for the moment) and the time for a bold, confident, and effective police force has arrived.  It is needed, not to satisfy some stuffed-shirt Reaganesque or Putitanical vision, but to secure the basics of ordered liberty.  It’s also needed  —  if this does more to appeal to you  —  to save the lives of those in the mob.  When the all-out combat breaks out, there is a risk that some of those involved, both protesters and police, will die.  It happened this week.  If the police next time are similarly ill-prepared and cowed, it will happen again.

Consider:  If a visibly well-armed and densely-packed perimeter of police had been surrounding the Capitol grounds when the mob approached, and there had been a bullhorn announcement that anyone attempting to breach the line would be stopped with whatever force was needed, subdued, and taken to jail immediately  —  if that’s what had happened, would we have seen the outrage we had this week?  Would lawmakers have been hustled out to a “secure location”?  Would anyone have wound up in the morgue?

We’ll never know for sure.  But experience tells us that muscular deterrence works.  At least it should have been given a chance.

In order for it to have a chance next time, at least two things have to happen:  The authorities have to have the moral and political capital to do it, and the mob has to know that the rule of law has teeth.  Right now, thanks to years of liberal, libertarian, academic and think-tank banshee attacks on police and policing, we are seriously lacking in both.