Some thoughts on the relationship between civilization's fragility and the use of force

 It's important that I don'r frame this in some kind of boneheaded hot-take way. 

A quick conclusion would be easy to draw, and it wouldn't be entirely off the mark. 

But let's be thorough about this. If our ultimate goal is a society with more heart, a culture that's not myopic, we need to consider every aspect of this. 

I'm speaking of the role of guns in our assurance - as individuals, as families, as communities - that there is sufficient public order for us to feel basically safe. 

Four recent news items:

Sunday evening, at a large shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, a contiguous suburb on the south side of Indianapolis, a shooter armed with a rifle and many rounds of ammunition fired into the food court, killing three and wounding several others. He was then shot by a young man who was carrying a concealed handgun, which is perfectly legal under Indiana law. The awkward element in this scenario is that the mall has a clearly stated no-weapons policy. But what was mall management supposed to say in response to what transpired? The obvious had to bee acknowledged:

A spokesperson with the mall issued a statement Monday morning. In part of the statement, they said they were grateful for the “heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”

We grieve for the victims of yesterday’s horrific tragedy in Greenwood. Violence has no place in this or any other community. We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.

In Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter got an earful from a woman who, along with her kids, had come under fire from a shooter who was taken down by police snipers:

Did police abuse their power? Black Lives Matter organizers think so and organized a demonstration outside of the apartment building yesterday. They got a counter-demonstration in response — from the woman whose children came under Sundberg’s fire:

What started as a rally for a man shot and killed by Minneapolis Police quickly took a turn after the mother of two nearly hit by bullets while inside her apartment showed up to share her story on Saturday afternoon.

Arabella Yarbrough was cooking food for her children Wednesday night when she says Tekle Sundberg fired bullets into their home, nearly hitting them. Police responded and helped Yarbrough escape when according to police, Sundberg also fired at officers. That led to a six-hour standoff outside the building that lasted until MPD snipers killed the 20-year-old early the next morning.

“I literally had five minutes to live while he had six hours to choose life or death. The police stated they did not want to kill him,” Yarbrough told Fox 9.

She confronted activists at a protest for Sundberg and against police violence on Saturday. A Fox 9 news crew was at the scene.

Yarborough took offense at the protest, and made sure everyone knew it. “This is not a George Floyd situation” she declared, telling protesters to go home. “This is not OK!”

Good question. Does BLM routinely protest intracommunity violence, or only law enforcement-related violence? I think we know the answer to that — and Yarbrough certainly knows it herself. That was an entirely rhetorical question.

And we know this by some of the responses Yarborough got that are clearly heard in this videos. Instead of acknowledging that Sundberg was a real and active threat to her and the other residents in the building, they scoffed at her protest. “You’re alive!” shouted one, while another shouted, “Shut up!” Yet another one scolded Yarbrough that “this is not the time or the place,” which is rather ironic considering the circumstances.

That last response - "this is not the time of place" - is particularly rich.

An investigators' report on the Uvalde, Texas school shooting reveals that 400 law enforcement officers, representing local, state and federal levels, were present at the scene:

Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to mass shooting that left 21 people dead at a Uvalde elementary school but "systemic failures" created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday.

The nearly 80-page report, obtained by multiple media outlets, was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom .

The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre at at Robb Elementary School — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives and released to family members Sunday.

According to the Texas Tribune, which reviewed the report ahead of its scheduled release to the public later in the day, the overwhelming majority of responders at the school were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, according to the Tribune.

Does the glaring point that a massive failure to establish security need to be elaborated on? It's screamingly obvious, is it not?

In Chicago, police morale has eroded to this point: 

The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.

The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.

The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops — in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.

And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.

The slowdown amounts to a pullback by police officers as the city has experienced its most violent years in decades, a rise also seen in other major U.S. cities during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

Rank-and-file police who patrol the streets and even top brass say officers are doing less.

Even just the suggestion that this was the case was once controversial. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel caused a minor scandal in 2014 when he told a gathering of big city police chiefs and Justice Department officials that cops had “gone fetal” in response to growing public scrutiny.

John Catanzara, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, even says officers aren’t as active as they once were.

Contributing factors include:

• The pandemic.
• Dramatic shifts in strategy from the top.
• Increased scrutiny of the police.
• Cops saying they increasingly feel that making an arrest isn’t worth risking their lives, their jobs or becoming a viral news villain.

There also was a plunge in the number of arrests are for so-called index crimes, which include homicide, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated battery.

Officers made arrests in fewer than 6% of those crime categories that were reported last year, the lowest level since at least 2001, the Sun-Times analysis of Chicago police data found. The trend has continued this year, according to figures through early June.

For the early years covered by the data, arrest rates are higher for killings, shootings and sexual assaults because detectives have had more time to solve those cases.

Still, arrests typically are made in the month or year that a crime was committed, law enforcement officials say. The data analyzed by the Sun-Times doesn’t show when an arrest took place — whether it was in the year a crime was committed or later on.

Cops admit pulling back

In 2019, as the overall arrest rate continued to fall, City Hall agreed to a federal consent decree aimed at overhauling the police department following the killing by a police officer of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 on the Southwest Side.

The department has since made reforms aimed at changing how officers do their jobs, including a stricter vehicle pursuit policy and a new foot pursuit policy.

Also, cops have been told to stop enforcing some low-level offenses, including the possession of small amounts of marijuana, which was legalized in Illinois as of the start of 2020.

But the number of arrests for possessing harder drugs, like heroin, also has fallen significantly. Those arrests peaked at 7,753 in 2001 but dropped last year to 929.

Current and former police officers — who agreed to speak on the condition they not be identified — say cops have been pulling back for other reasons.

A former commander says officers who regularly have had days off canceled are avoiding making some arrests because they don’t want to wind up in court during their time off.

A beat cop who patrols downtown says prosecutors’ high threshold for approving felony charges has made officers second-guess whether to engage “criminals with guns” — a sentiment the former commander echoes.

The beat cop says high-profile attacks on officers such as last August’s shooting in West Englewood that left Ella French dead and her partner Carlos Yanez critically wounded — “make us take a step back and think: Who really cares about us at that point?

“We can only support each other at the lowest ranks,” the officer says. “And if that means going out there and not doing anything, then that means going out there and not doing anything.”

Rank-and-file officers, sergeants and detectives also say they feel they have a target on their backs. They point to the consent decree, which requires the city to reform its policing policies after the Justice Department found officers engaged in civil rights violations.

Veteran cops say they used to go out of their way to make arrests when they saw suspicious activity but that they’re less likely to now for fear of getting into trouble and being fired or even arrested.

“In the past, I might see a guy with a gun in his waistband, and I’d jump out and chase him,” one decorated officer says. “No way I’d do that now.”

As I said at the outset, the obvious conclusion is that if we had more Elisjsha Dickens (the civilian at the Greenwood mall who took down the shooter there), we'd be safer, given the reality of the demoralized scaredy-cats we pay to protect us failing to do so. 

But is that really a tidy package in which we can wrap this all up and move on to other topics?

I suggest that we need to look at the acceleration of the whole cycle of phenomenon-and-backlash that characterizes pretty much everything in our society anymore. 

It's certainly been the case regarding gun rights, the defense of which in some quarters has turned into an ostentatious fetish.

And there's also the sociological reality that pretty much every case of either mass shootings in public spaces or gang warfare, with its all-too-frequent collateral casualties, has as a common element the rootlessness - often meaning fatherlessness - in which those inflicting death and injury have come of age.

A lot of people are dismissive of a causal connection between the products of popular culture - video games, music, movies - and the formation of rootless young men's characters and worldviews. Come on. Is it really possible that output so raw, so vulgar, so devoid of anything that seventy years ago was recognized as art, has no effect on those who steadily consume it?

Then there is also the growing achievement gap between females and males. As a society, we've emphasize the empowerment of women at the cost of considering how it affects the prospects of boys and men. Part of this process has involved focusing on what are customarily regarded as female priorities - feelings, seeing that everyone can feel good about himself or herself - as Christina Hoff Summers noted in her book that really got that conversation rolling, The War Against Boys.

And in recent years, yet another layer has been added to the situation, one which has the imprimatur of the US government: We have obliterated the inherent and divinely designed basic architecture of the universe.

To tie all this together, a lot of young males in our society have not signed onto that. Of course, neither have they become men, if we're going define that as a male person who understands what responsible stewardship of this powerful face that is his masculinity entails. We used to call those who did understand it gentlemen. 

Rather, these young males, in their starvation for basic appreciation, decide that they're gonna go out and gets guns and make a statement, by God. The the-world-won't-soon-forget-me mindset does not motivate them to contributions to society's betterment, but rather desperado last stands that serve as nothing but testaments to their nihilism.

I have no ready answers here. Of course, as a man of faith, however wobbly, I feel confident in recommending that path as the basis for a solution, but it's more challenging than it's ever been in America to point young men, or indeed anybody, to a church that will provide real guidance and support. 

I guess the way to conclude is to say that we ought to be very careful about coming to hard-and-fast conclusions about what to do. 

And we'd all better value our sanity and cultivate our maturity with vigilance.