Law enforcement is something I grew up around. My father was a police officer, and now my brother is as well. Growing up around police makes for an interesting childhood, but it gives you some insights about society and pulls the veil back on the reality of the world we live in a bit. I'm grateful I got to have these truths shown to me, and to be honest, I think what I learned should be common knowledge.
For starters, the society you live in is kept clean and stable by that thin blue line. If you were to peek behind that line, you'd find nasty things are waiting just behind that thin veil. Suicides, drug use, transients, violence, and more are something many are blessedly free from witnessing because these brave people put on a badge and a gun every day and hold the tidal wave back.
The number of people who don't know how close they actually are to things that would horrify them is proof that police are doing their job.
But as great as our men and women in law enforcement are, they do have their limits. Crime prevention is often a practice, not a perfected art. Culture shifts, changing policies, and more can make what used to work to prevent crime more or less useless.
Moreover, the police are not an endless army. There are only so many bodies to go around, and since there is no Minority Report "pre-crime unit," a crime typically is well and committed by the time police arrive.
This is a point that Jasmine Crockett clumsily made recently. As my colleague Eli Shephard reported, Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett said that police don't actually protect people; they're pretty much there to file the paperwork after:
“Law enforcement isn’t to PREVENT crime! Law enforcement solves crime, okay? That is what they are supposed to do,” she said.
Read: Crockett Says Police Aren’t Here to Protect You, Just File the Paperwork After
I regret to inform you that while she's wrong about crime prevention – this is a huge part of police work, and their very existence is a preventer of crime alone — she's still half right.
Let me give you some statistics you may not know.
Crime is usually a pretty speedy thing. Most street-level assaults, such as muggings and robberies, last around 30 to 90 seconds. Smash and grabs could take anywhere from three to six minutes. A person can steal a car in two minutes if they've got some skill.
The recent murder that has struck the United States, that of Iryana Zarutska, took all of five seconds.
Read: I Think We Have Enough Proof About the 'Care' Democrats Have for Women Now
Compare that with the average time it takes police to arrive once called, which is about seven to 10 minutes in cities, and just a tad less in rural areas, and police look more like a clean-up crew than an actual crime prevention organization.
Let me give you another worrying statistic, and it's one that we learned during the Black Lives Matter riots.
The average police presence is 2.1 officers per 1,000 citizens, according to Congress. This doesn't mean that even that number is out protecting the citizenry, as officers need to rest and have time off. The closer number is 0.7 percent of officers per 1,000 citizens at any given time.
If even just one percent of a city's citizens decided to riot, the police would be completely overwhelmed. Any higher than that, and the police effectively become useless. The National Guard has to become involved to have any hope of stopping the city from coming apart.
This number varies from city to city, of course, but the gist of it all is that it doesn't take much to put the police on the back foot. This is why I'm going to say something that I'm going to need to take a shower after saying, but Crockett has a point... but maybe not as good a point as she intended.
My dad was the first person to point out to me that the police are a limited force, and he made it very clear that for law and order to truly be kept, safety begins with the citizen, not him.
He was, and is, a huge advocate of people buying guns and learning how to use them properly. He believes real gun education should start early and continue throughout a person's life.
And he's right. Defensive gun use by citizens is a high deterrent to crime, and while the data can range from thousands to millions, even on the lower end, thousands of people kept safe because they had a firearm for protection is proof enough that guns work.
I'm sure this isn't the conclusion Crockett wants anyone to reach, but it's one of the most valid and proven options for solving a crime problem. It's incredibly difficult for a criminal to commit a crime when the victims, or even bystanders, have a way to turn the tables.
Logic says that if a criminal has to weigh his or her life versus the crime, the chances that they'll choose their own life are pretty high. While it won't prevent every crime from happening, embracing our national identity as a gun culture would put more firearms in the hands of good people, and that would definitely give criminals something to think about when they go to harm someone.
