It turns out that "fixing broken windows" can be done by means other than trashing the
4th Amendment and declaring war on
law-abiding citizens who happen to live on the wrong street.
Boston has gotten similar results not by
treating poor neighborhoods like occupied territory, but rather by working
with people in
poor neighborhoods. It turns out that a lot of them don't like
crime either. Once the
police demonstrate that they're capable of distinguishing between
guilty poor people and
innocent poor people -- in other words, when the
police stop acting like just one more
gang of thugs with a
bad attitude -- everybody gets along okay. I understand that this is less
aesthetically satisfying because nobody gets a broom-handle up the ass, but we're willing to surrender the
aesthetic high ground to
Il Duce down there in
NYC if that's what it takes.
A curious side effect of
Giuliani's policies is that
violent crime in northeastern
Pennsylvania has gone through the roof.
Giuliani has not, in fact, done a damn thing to
stop crime. He just shifted some of it out of his
jurisdiction.
Do you really think the
homeless people just
vanish when you pass a law forbidding their existence? I
know they're not
human beings, that's obvious, even if some of them
are white. They
can't be
human beings, because they
smell funny. They have no more rights than a rock or a
stray dog. So
don't get me wrong, I'm not making a moral point here. It's more of a
logistical thing: Mass can neither be created
nor destroyed, not even by
Rudy Giuliani (he tried to get that one repealed but those goofy guys at the
Institute for Advanced Study are all a bunch of . . .
you know . . . and they wouldn't listen). Are the
homeless people still alive? If so, they've gone somewhere. It would have been more efficient to kill them. They're not productive, are they? Hardly. The vol^H^H^Hpeople of the
United States must not tolerate unproductive units.