Atlas Is Shrugging

In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand pictured a society in which those who produce wealth and jobs and bear the burden of carrying society upon their shoulders, the creative geniuses who've made society prosperous, decide that a parasitic state has made their lives intolerable, and they all just quit.

Burdensome laws and regulations imposed on the wealth creators make it so difficult for them to continue that they give up, abandon their enterprises and abscond to a mysterious mountain retreat.

Something analogous is occurring today in our society, but it's not the corporate CEOs who are taking sudden and early retirement, it's those who provide a service at least as important as those who provide jobs - our police. Apparently, many officers have decided that they've had enough and are looking for other employment or are retiring.

Moreover, young people are deciding that police work in a society that seems intent on doing everything it can to make their job impossible isn't for them.

A piece at the Blaze.com tells the story:

The "defund the police" movement and the "abolish the police" movement, constant negative coverage of law enforcement by the media, anti-police sentiment becoming mainstream, and the threat of riots have contributed to a police shortage across the country.

The Philadelphia Police Department currently has 268 vacancies and is expecting even more shortages in the near future.

"From Jan. 1 through Thursday, 79 Philadelphia officers ... intend to retire within four years, according to Mayor Jim Kenney's office," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. "During the same time period last year, just 13 officers had [so indicated]."

"It's the perfect storm. We are anticipating that the department is going to be understaffed by several hundred members, because hundreds of guys are either retiring or taking other jobs and leaving the department," Mike Neilon, spokesperson for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, told the newspaper.

And it's not just Philadelphia:

Neighboring New Jersey is facing a "recruiting crisis," according to Pat Colligan, president of the New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association.

"Every action has a reaction. When you vilify every police officer for every bad police officer's decision, [people] don't want to take this job anymore," Colligan, head of New Jersey's largest police union, said. "It's been a very trying and difficult time to put on the badge every day."

Colligan also said the "quality has really diminished in the last few years," which could mean more tragic police confrontations in the future.

Col. Patrick Callahan, the acting superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said the state's largest police agency received a "historically low" number of applications this year. In some years, the New Jersey State Police would usually receive between 15,000 to 20,000 applications – this year they only received 2,023 qualified applicants as of Thursday, according to NJ.com.

In Baltimore they're talking about having to close police districts. If that happens they will almost certainly be closed in those parts of the city where stresses are highest and the need for police is the greatest.

According to a spokesperson for the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police, patrol numbers are now below 700 officers which is about 300-400 below what is needed, creating huge safety issues for our officers and for the citizens of Baltimore.

There's more at the link.

The Federalist's Katy Faust interviewed an African-American police officer about policing in the wake of the recent trial of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.

After talking for awhile about the Derek Chauvin trial Faust asked (Her questions are in boldface),

How would you characterize public opinion towards police today? There is a general narrative that demonizes law enforcement. In my opinion, the anti-cop narrative began with the Obama administration. He made negative law enforcement comments, and in controversial cases would show up to the deceased’s funerals (which were later justified as lawful shootings). The Dallas five were killed under Obama and he didn’t show any respect toward them.

Do you think that policing in America is systemically racist? Ha. Absolutely not. No.

In your experience has policing become more difficult since George Floyd’s death? Yes, but we’ve been on this slippery slope since the start of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement. That’s where things really started to take a serious turn. We were already nose diving, and Floyd’s death is just more fuel to the fire.

All these cases involve a false narrative of police racism, from Trayvon Martin to Rayshard Brooks to George Floyd, causing tension and a divide between law-enforcement and the community. People want us to solve their problems, but they don’t want us to defend ourselves or the community while doing it.

They want us to be able to talk it out with everybody, but the reality is we can’t always do that. If people shoot us, we’re going to shoot back. That’s what happened with the Breonna Taylor case. Somehow people are upset about that.

And facts don’t matter. Even though the false Michael Brown “hands up don’t shoot” narrative was proven false, I still can’t drive around the city without someone eyeballing me and putting their hands up and saying “don’t shoot” while I drive past.

There's more that's both interesting and important at the link. The interview concludes with this:

How’s morale? Each agency has its own subculture, but this region’s morale is generally crappy. A lot of officers are leaving. We don’t have anybody, anybody applying to be officers here, so we are lowering standards to get numbers up.

The academy has lowered their physical fitness standards and we have dropped ours completely. Now if you’ve got a pulse and some experience? We will take you. Because that’s how bad we are hurting for bodies. Of course, the lowering of standards does not increase the odds that things are going to be done right. So it will perpetuate the problems.

But even before we had to lower standards, we were still struggling. The public thinks that we are ninjas, that we are all MMA fighters. For a while that belief was helpful because it instilled a bit of healthy fear, of not wanting to mess with us.

But the reality is that most police officers have a YMCA degree (not to knock on the YMCA) but it’s like they went to one little seminar on self-defense and that’s kind of it. The level of training we get is so subpar compared to the demands.

Not only that, but there are important and serious limitations on our interactions with suspects. As an officer, I have a responsibility, we as a police force have a responsibility, to limit the amount of force to get someone into custody. But if they are overcoming my efforts, I can escalate my use of force, within reason, to effectuate that arrest.

In our precinct, we pitch and brainstorm ways that we can get better training. Unfortunately, “defund the police” is a movement, so our funding has already been slashed. There’s no money for classes or overtime for us to go.

So they’re basically saying, “We wish you guys were ninjas,” and we’re saying “OK, send us to ninja school.” And they’re like, “No we’re not going to pay for that. We’re just gonna put you in jail when you don’t meet our expectations even though we won’t give you the training you need.”

What would you tell America about this moment in time and your job? I think that it’s important for people to know that we still have a heart to have people’s backs. There isn’t a cop I know who isn’t willing to lay their life on their line for someone else in a life-or-death situation. But what we’re not willing to do is put ourselves or our careers or our families on the line for people’s inconveniences.

I’m happy to do that as a luxury as long as we have community support. But if we don’t have your support, and you call us about your neighbor’s loud music? No. Go talk to the neighbor yourself. Or buy some ear plugs.

The left appears about to get it's wish that police presence be abolished in many neighborhoods which, of course, will make those neighborhoods unlivable. And they'll stay that way as long as our cities, states and nation are governed by a party whose ideas about human nature are completely unmoored from reality.

Actually, the police aren't the only vital public servants looking for a less stressful line of work. Teachers have been taking early retirement for years for some of the same reasons as police, and as our cities become less and less governable, as police presence becomes increasingly thin, our schools, at least our urban schools, will become increasingly chaotic and it'll become even harder to find good people willing to teach in them.

It's hard to understand why anyone today would want to be either a police officer or a teacher, or to even live in a city that makes both of those jobs impossible.