On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 2

This is the second installment of El Inglés’ three-part essay “On the Failure of Law Enforcement”.


On the Failure of Law Enforcement — Part 2
by El Inglés

In the first installment of this essay, I laid down a rudimentary conceptual framework for understanding the nature and scale of the law enforcement challenges posed to us by certain alien groups within European societies, be they ethnically defined, religiously defined, or both. The focus of the essay was, naturally, Muslims, though the analysis could be equally well applied to any group. Here I would like to expand on my initial analysis by explaining the problems posed by what I have termed the dynamic of escalation.

The Dynamic of Escalation

In the first installment of this essay, I outlined the most important reasons why Muslim incarceration points in European societies would have a tendency to drift up relative to the baseline incarceration point, and similarly prove extremely difficult to force back down again. They were as follows:

1.		the prevalence of the narrative of oppression,
2.		the dynamic of escalation,
3.		the magnitude of the extra financial commitments required,
4.		electoral disadvantage, and
5.		demographic issues.

Apart from the dynamic of escalation, these barriers to bringing the incarceration points back together are all things that can, in principle, be overcome and presumably will be in time. Public opinion across Europe is slowly but surely waking up to what Islam is. Anti-Islamic political parties are making gains every day. Prisons can be built if budgets are cut in other areas.


However, the dynamic of escalation (hereafter referred to as the DoE) is different in this regard. It is not something that can be gradually overcome by an ever-more robust attitude towards Islam, but only by concerted action of a certain type. To understand why this us so, we need to first consider exactly what the DoE is, how it operates, and what problems it will present those who attempt to out-escalate it. How does it come to be the case that even fairly small clusters of Muslims, disproportionately dysfunctional and impoverished as they are, can force onto the back foot the law enforcement apparatus of wealthy, technologically advanced European countries, effectively creating a two-tier legal system to the Muslims’ own advantage?

If, in the small English village that I live in, I throw a rock at a police car as it passes by, the officers inside will get out, arrest me and charge me with the appropriate crime. If, however, on trying to arrest me the two police officers are attacked by five friends of mine who think the police are acting unfairly and who do not intend to let them carry out their duties, they will be forced to call for backup. How many officers will be dispatched? Let us say that another six are sent in two cars, in response to which some thirty other neighbourhood youths come to my aid by congregating in the area and flinging rocks and various choice epithets at the police.

What happens now? Do the police send out another sixteen officers in two vans? And if they do, what if my friends and I notify, via text and mobile phone call, other friends in the area, who notify others in turn, so that before too very long we have a hundred or so youths swarming around the area hurling debris at the police? In a situation such as this, it is clearly not going to be the priority of the police to effect my arrest, but instead to prevent a riot or contain it if it has already commenced. This is not an unworthy goal in its own right, but it does mean:

a)		that I have attacked the police with impunity unless they are prepared to come back for me another day and risk the same thing, and
b)		that a hundred youths have rioted with almost complete impunity, as only a small fraction of rioters at most riots are ever charged with any crime.

Next time I or someone else in my street throws a rock at the police, how will they respond? Are they going to try and arrest me? They might, but the harsh reality of the situation is that, if a violent, tribal reaction on the part of the people of my neighbourhood is guaranteed, they may well think better of it. Do the police really want to have to dispatch large numbers of officers to control riots that they themselves have, in a certain sense, helped whip up, all because someone threw a rock at them and missed?

This is not a theoretical concern. The first time the DoE impressed itself upon me was when I read a translation of an article from the German magazine Die Welt on the evolution of no-go zones in Essen, Germany. I urge readers who have not read the article (entitled In Enemy Territory) to do so to understand the sheer scale and severity of the problems that hostile, unassimilable foreigners are creating there. Here I will quote it at length, as it makes the point far more eloquently than I could (all emphasis added by me):
- - - - - - - - -

Every other week some dozen policemen in olive-green coveralls enter the area in company with employees from the city’s civil services. The exact number is secret, “so that the foe can’t adjust“, say the police.

The “danger zone” encompasses three dozen streets. The civil servants enter gloomy tea-houses and oriental cafés, normally disguised as “cultural societies”, kiosks, telephone shops, internet cafés. It is a twilight infrastructure of the Lebanese “community”, holding around 5,000 persons in Essen. The civil service demands lists of employees and licenses. They are met with little courtesy and sour expressions as if they were entering alien territory. The city of Essen tries to counter a phenomenon well known to other German cities. Policemen talk of “parallel worlds” and “rooms of fear”. When confronted with such terms, the immigration-politicians cringe. But the experienced civil servants can’t come up with better terms. They don’t dare to enter such areas without protection, otherwise they risk riots and physical assault.

[…]

This is an unusual strategy in Germany, but no longer a breach of taboo, due to the resistance the almost 270,000 civil servants from state and local police have to confront on a daily basis in many regions. “The problem with violence against the police has escalated in recent years. The police have to concentrate increasingly on self-protection” says national chief of police Konrad Freiberg to Die Welt. “When a fellow policeman goes on duty, he never knows what might happen to him“.

[…]

Kircher says that unauthorized persons interfere when papers are checked or arrest are made, and oppose the police. For some time now, the police have been trained how to behave in crowds of people. When a patrol enters a bar in order to arrest a criminal, another patrol of equal strength is needed to control the crowd.

[…]

Chief Inspector Andreas de Fries is all too familiar with the hunch that makes the little hairs on his neck start to rise when in the middle of the night he wants to see the papers of a suspect and suddenly, as from nowhere, he is surrounded by two dozen people who push and yell. “The voices come from all over, and suddenly you feel a stab in the back. So fast you can’t even see it,” says de Fries.

[…]

“With the Turks and the Albanians the parents are helpful,” says Schwerdtfeger; usually, if a youngster makes trouble, a talk with the parent can solve the problem. But the youngsters who call themselves “Arabs” don’t acknowledge any borders or respect. There may be some hundreds in Marxloh and their behavior tends to engender a disgust for all foreigners. Eight-year-old boys kick old ladies, sexually harass women, throw water balloons at business windows, ignore traffic lights, and create havoc at road intersections. “They constantly provoke incidents, even in proximity to patrol cars,” says de Fries. As soon as you try to calm down the younger ones, the older, aggressive brothers show up. “This is our street,” they yell. Then it becomes dangerous. The Police President of Duisburg, Rolf Cebin, calls the problem by its name: “The gathering of various communities when the police show up is an increasing problem. One can’t avoid a sense of hostility towards the police.”

If this seems quite similar to the hypothetical scenario I laid out above, that is because it was the basis for it. What exactly has happened to the Muslim incarceration point in this part of Essen I cannot say, but it would be very hard to believe that it has not edged substantially upwards as a consequence of the DoE as it operates there. Of course there are other reasons that the Muslim incarceration point will creep up in such contexts, the most obvious being the unwillingness of victims and witnesses to cooperate with the police that is generally observed in situations of this sort. But this does not affect the key point here: that the DoE is active and that it is hard to see how the German authorities, having let it develop in the first place, will be able to overcome it by operating within their current paradigms. I will elaborate on this last claim in the next section.

Why the Dynamic of Escalation is Special

I suspect that many readers will intuitively agree with the claim that the DoE is unlike other mechanisms forcing apart Muslim and baseline incarceration points in that it cannot be dealt with in a gradual, organic fashion. In the interests of completeness, however, I would like to make the reasoning underlying this conclusion completely clear here. If the law enforcement apparatus of a given country wishes to crack down on gun crime, or drug crime, or any other type of crime, it is, on the whole, free to do so by intensifying extant operations. Why is this not the case vis-à-vis the DoE in general?

The key to understanding this point lies in the name of the problem — the dynamic of escalation. Let me try to express this in terms of the model I presented in the first installment of this essay. What happens if the attempts of law enforcement to enforce the law vis-à-vis Muslims results in the criminality profile of Muslims shifting to the right in some fashion for the duration of the attempt, as the brute tribal response of Muslims runs its course? This will result in substantially more crime, the precise opposite of the original intent of the police.

What this means is that Muslims are re-writing the short-term cost-benefit analysis of police action against their criminal actions. In any short-term cost benefit analysis, it is a simple matter for a community of Arabs dominating a German neighbourhood to render the costs of trying to apprehend an Arab thug throwing a rock at a police car greater than the benefits of doing so. When this comes to be the case, an irresistible pressure will be brought to bear on the police in these areas, either at a personal psychological level, or at an institutional chain-of-command level, or both. That the former pressure exists is fairly clear from the article quoted above, and that the latter exists is made fairly obvious by the Belgian example I referred to in the first installment of this essay.

Even without these concrete examples, though, we would be able to deduce with a high degree of confidence that these pressures existed. How could they not?

If the police respond to such a situation by further increasing the degree of law enforcement attention, only to be out-escalated again in the same fashion, then what are they supposed to do? Re-escalate? There are limits to how far this can be taken by law enforcement actors concerned with the short term and unaware of the long-term implications of their actions, as we saw in the hypothetical example above. All re-escalations against concentrations of tribal actors who hate the police and their host societies have the potential to turn into exercises in riot control, in which the original law enforcement objectives are forgotten, rendered impossible, or both, and at great expense, too. It is therefore entirely rational for the authorities to give in to the DoE if their time horizons are short. And they clearly have a tendency to be very short indeed, in Germany and elsewhere.

That said, ignoring Muslim crime on these grounds is a recipe for societal suicide in the long term. Are actors concerned about the long term therefore obliged to devise a way of out-escalating their opponents? The answer to this question must be ‘yes’ for those who believe that waiting for ‘moderation’ and ‘integration’ is not a realistic option. But the solution will be exceptionally difficult to implement, both politically and operationally. If it were not, the DoE would already have been defeated across Europe and I would not have felt compelled to write this essay.

Defeating the DoE

The DoE, by its nature, involves bringing the hostility and violence of more and more Muslims to bear on the police as they try to do their job, with the intention of rendering that job impossible. This means that whenever the DoE is operative, the police will be on the verge of facing a riot of some size, big or small. Our objective then, is to move from riot control to riot punishment. This cannot be stressed too strongly: the DoE is, at its heart, nothing more than an escalation of conflict by Muslims, at the point of contact between Muslims and law enforcement, with said conflict eventually turning into a riot. To break this dynamic by hurting (figuratively or literally) the rioters until they decide that rioting is not in their interests is, by definition, to have defeated the DoE.

Accordingly, all factors involved specifically in defeating the DoE rather than ‘just’ applying the law pertain to riot punishment, which I define as a set of responses to riots, big or small, that result in their costs significantly outweighing their benefits for their participants. It is therefore quite different to riot control, which — concerned with reducing the short-term human and economic costs of the rioting in question — has no such objective.

Let us consider, then, what defeating the DoE might look like, and then what it certainly will not look like, by examining certain recent events in Europe.

The Bradford Riots of 2001

In Bradford, England in July 2001, an estimated one thousand South Asian Muslims rioted for successive nights after a period of gradually increasing racial tension boiled over. Clashes and street violence between whites and Asians (as they tend to be called in Britain) had escalated to the point where substantial numbers of police were called in, whereupon the conflict turned into a battle largely between them and the Asians.

The build-up to the riots is complex and need not concern us here, where we are interested only in the operational characteristics of the law enforcement response. To give an account spliced together from different sources, 297 people were arrested, and 200 jail sentences for a total of 604 years were handed out, for riot and related offences. Over a year later, on September 5, 2002, David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, was quoted in The Independent as having said ‘The police have done a really good job in following this through and at last the courts are handing out sentences that are a genuine reprisal but also a message to the community.’ The time scale of the investigation gives, I feel, some indication of how assiduously the British police pursued the rioters, especially given the fact that the last conviction was gained six and a half years after the riots.

It is clear from all accounts of the riots and their aftermath that those convicted of riot and related offences were overwhelmingly Asian. Indeed, so many Asians were convicted and for such long sentences relative to the crimes they had committed, that the Bradford Fair Justice Campaign was founded to seek redress (unsuccessfully, it seems). CCTV footage was used extensively to identify rioters, which presumably accounts in part for the large numbers who came forward of their own account and surrendered themselves to the police. However, sentence reductions for this cooperation were apparently much less than is normal in the UK, which turned into another source of bitterness on the part of the Asian community.

It is worth pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, the greatest number of convictions ever handed out subsequent to any other riot in our history was only five. Five against two hundred! This makes it absolutely clear that despite my repeated and, I still feel, legitimate criticisms of the police in the UK, they and the Crown Prosecution Service at least had the sense to ‘go for’ the Bradford rioters fairly ruthlessly. Pursuing rioters for years if necessary; draconian sentencing; incarcerating a completely unprecedented fraction of them: this is what I mean by punishing riots rather than just controlling them. An intriguing question is whether or not this response has been at least partly responsible for the odd lack of endemic rioting and violent disorder from the Muslim population of the UK relative to its coreligionists in other European countries.

Either way, the British response to Bradford is the type of response that will be required to deal with the DoE, though it would need to be enhanced in certain regards to be all it could be even in the UK. But we must bear in mind that, as I pointed out above, the UK does not have the chronic problems with large-scale Muslim violence that other countries in Europe do, and provides only relatively poor and scattered examples of the DoE in action in the first place. This being the case, let us take some of the responses we saw implemented after the Bradford riots and ask ourselves how others might build on them in countries with more serious problems in this regard.

The French Riots of 2005

There are several countries in Europe in which extreme polarization between at least some Muslim groups and the state, accompanied by endemic anti-police violence and rioting, is already visible. France is the most obvious example. Though I cannot pretend to be any sort of expert on affairs in France, and find it frustratingly difficult to get satisfactory information on matters of interest there, I would like to concentrate a bit of educated guesswork on the country, for the following reasons:

a)		its Muslim population is by the largest as a fraction of population of any country in the West;
b)		relations between Muslims and natives are as polarized and bitter as anywhere else, as far as an outsider can discern; and
c)		large-scale rioting and violence appear to be endemic and conducted largely with impunity.

Let us consider the French riots of late 2005 in a slightly freewheeling and speculative fashion. Given that these disturbances continued for over three weeks, it is hard to know how many rioters there were in total. However, it would be instructive to try and compare these riots to those in Bradford in 2001, so let us try and determine how many rioters there were per night, on average. There is no figure for this anywhere that I can determine, so let us note that, approximately halfway through the riots, 18,000 police were deployed, with a reserve of 1,500 men. It seems to me that the ratios of police to rioters that seem to be deployed in response to riots in European countries is somewhere between 1 to 2 and 1 to 1. If we take the full figure of 19,500 to represent the number of police deployed to contain the riots specifically, then the number of rioters on any given night during the height of the riots was between 19,500 and 39,000. I will take 30,000 as a compromise figure for the purposes of the discussion, though I reiterate that I have no way of knowing how accurate this figure is. Note that the scale of the riots was approximately 30 times greater than that of the Bradford riots, in a country with a population size (though it should be pointed out that other areas in the northwest of England also had riots at about the same time).

If we take the maximum number of rioters per night, 30,000, divide it by 2 to get a figure for average rioters per night of 15,000 for the entire period, and multiply by the 23 nights that Wikipedia says the riots lasted for, then we obtain a figure of 345,000 man-nights of rioting. There is no way of knowing how much churn there was amongst rioters, how many of them rioted consistently, and how many rioted less frequently. However, it is inconceivable that only 30,000 rioted in total if that was the maximum number of rioters on any night, as it would imply that everyone who rioted at all rioted on that night. It is also inconceivable that no one rioted more than once, which, if it were true, would mean that we had 345,000 different rioters who rioted once and only once each. The total number of rioters would therefore seem to lie somewhere between 30,000 and 345,000. Making the not entirely unreasonable estimate that the rioting would have been concentrated amongst a hard-core of rioters and that the lower end of the estimate is therefore more likely to contain the true number of rioters, I will take a figure of 60,000 as the total number of rioters, i.e. the number who rioted at least once. This is twice the maximum number who rioted on any given night, indicating a significant degree of churn while still being compatible with the claim that there was a substantial hard core of regular rioters.

This is 60 times the number of people who rioted in Bradford. If the 1-in-5 conviction rate of Bradford had been obtained in France, this would have added, mainly over the couple of years subsequent to the riots, some 12,000 people to the French prison population if other factors were held the same. The French prison system currently holds about 64,000 people, which would mean a nearly 20% rise in that population to accommodate these people and a similar expansion in the size of the French prison system. In the UK, it costs about £30,000 per year to incarcerate someone (estimates differ), and the average sentence after the Bradford riots was apparently 3 years. Adding in the costs of arrest, investigation and trial, and assuming a mean sentence of three years for the French rioters (without early release), we can expect marginal costs in excess of £100,000 per rioter, i.e. in excess of £1.2 billion, even before the costs of building several large new prisons have been taken into account. Of course, the political capital that would have to be expended to implement such a response and the further poisoning of relations between France and its cultural enrichers are virtually impossible to imagine, as are the operational challenges that would be faced by a police force required to arrest thousands of rioters after the rioting had ceased, without re-inflaming it.

Now, the riots were indeed an escalation, starting as they did with the deaths of two immigrant youths who, fleeing the police (which is to say, law enforcement doing its job) for reasons that are still not clear, managed to electrocute themselves in the process. This, not the relatively minor example of the Bradford Riots I gave above, is the type of thing that the French need to be prepared to deal with if they are to defeat the DoE. But how could they ‘deal’ with it? The bloodless and number-heavy analysis of the previous paragraph notwithstanding, it is hard to see that the French state could possibly have punished the rioters without using the army and killing some substantial number of people.

Of course, we cannot say with any confidence what would have happened if such action had been taken. Would it have subdued rioters across the country (defeating the DoE), or inflamed them (simply creating counter-escalation)? Evidently, the French government was not keen to find out. A Bradford-style crackdown writ large probably has the potential to break France, by which I mean it could result in a degree and type of violence that would shatter forever the illusion that the disparate peoples of that nation could ever peacefully alongside each other. And where would the country go from there?

I cannot find a figure for exactly how many convictions were handed out subsequent to the riots. Figures for the number of arrests seem to vary between 3,000 and 5,000. If we suppose that the higher estimate was correct and that all 5,000 were incarcerated, that would correspond to a rise in the French prison population of about 8% in a single year or so. This is almost certainly not physically possible, let alone politically or financially possible. It therefore seems probable that most of these people were given a slap on the wrist at most, after having been detained long enough to prevent them returning to the riots. This is not riot punishment, and barely even riot control. Rather, it is the flailing of an apparatus of state that is rapidly losing the ability to even pretend that it knows what it is doing.

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Needless to say, the desired approach to the DoE looks a lot more like the British response than the French one. This is not patriotic boasting; on the contrary, I was amazed to discover that a Labour government had acted in such a draconian fashion with respect to the criminality of cultural enrichers, out-escalating the rioters quite effectively.

That said, note the analytical difficulties involved when trying to judge the performance of opposing sides in real riots rather than moving lines around on graphs. How much did the state out-escalate the rioters by? Were the respective escalations simultaneous, or was the crucial escalation by the British government the long, gradual, punishment of an unprecedented fraction of rioters? Did this move discourage future riots, or are other factors responsible for the relative lack of such violence in the UK?

In the French case, who ‘won’ the riots? Who gave whom the biggest black eye? Am I correct in feeling that the French state will be far more concerned about future riots than the rioters themselves will be? Is defeating the DoE a meaningful option now for the French? How has the weakness they seem to have displayed affected the likelihood and nature of future riots? Will they meet future riots in a more or less draconian fashion? Do the Muslim immigrants smell blood in the water? Or is the state getting ready to deal with what will eventually turn into insurrection?

None of these questions is easy to answer. But one thing is clear. Concerted action, with the political class, the police, the state prosecution apparatus and public opinion all in accord with one another, will be required if the DoE is to be defeated. Think again of the sheer magnitude of the task the French would have faced in applying a Bradford-style response to their 2005 riots. A society not unified in the face of what it considers to be an existential threat will never muster the will to implement such a set of policies.

This brings us back to the earlier claim that the DoE is especially resistant to piecemeal, seat-of-the-pants type solutions. Muslims can escalate and are escalating their response to police action in a highly effective fashion based on:

a)		a tribal identity at odds with the host society,
b)		a desensitization to violence, and
c)		local numerical superiority.

All three factors are simply features of these communities, and require no thought, advance planning, or financial expenditure to obtain or maintain. In contrast, the state must train, pay, equip, organize, and command the personnel to implement a specially-formulated response backed up by a massive and massively expensive infrastructure to even hope to contain this escalation, with no guarantee of success. To acknowledge this asymmetry is bitter indeed. But this is the nature of the situation, and this observation reinforces the impossibility of dealing with it in an impromptu fashion.

Conclusion

There is probably little to be gained by this layman trying to lay down what he considers to be the ideal approach to riot punishment, and, through it, the defeat of the DoE. The options available to those who would oppose rioters on their streets, in whatever fashion, and for whatever purpose, are easily discovered by anyone with an Internet connection and a little bit of spare time.

To adopt some poker terminology for a moment, the crucial issue is whether or not the political will can be generated to raise and re-raise rioters until they fold. To the extent that it cannot, then the DoE cannot be defeated, which means that the Muslim incarceration point cannot be forced back to the baseline. This in turn will condemn Western countries to the horrors of rapidly growing Orange Muslim populations operating under a two-tier legal law enforcement system that greatly favours them, in effect if not in intent.


On the other hand, if the DoE can be defeated, this will play a huge part in allowing a state to reunite the Muslim incarceration point with the baseline incarceration point, which is all the law enforcement apparatus of a country can really hope to do with respect to the problematic human substrate that Muslims are.

Of course, this leaves unresolved the core dilemma, to wit, that a criminal human substrate will have to be some combination of over-incarcerated and over-criminal for reasons already explained. Can this problem be solved, or have we condemned ourselves to suffer the disproportionate criminality and economic costs of our recklessly imported third-world populations in perpetuity?

The answer to this most important question will have to wait for the third and final installment of this essay.