As a follow up to the shooting in the Military Circle Mall by a black mob, I ran across an essay by Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish) "Our state of Police" which analyzes the situation from an interesting perspective.

I'm disturbed about the increasing militarization of the police. It's a poor police force indeed that does hot have a SWAT Team and one or more mini-tanks and heavy weapons.  But, as Greenfield points out, we're not living in a police state.  Not yet.

But when the story about what's actually happening in places like the Military Circle Mall - which gets out via the grapevine or via news reports like WND despite the Virginian Pilot's attempts to keep the public in the dark - you want the police to intervene; to stop rampant thuggery by gangs of thugs.

And why is the lone cop not enough to prevent this?  Here's the brutal truth:

In the United States, it's not the populations that drift in and out of jail who find the police terrifying, but those who don't. There is no police state for the former. The middle class citizen looks warily through the window of his home like the bars of a cage but when the cop car drives through a bad neighborhood, it's the police officers inside who feel like they are in a cage. The police state is about control and our state of police exists to control the areas that are becoming uncontrollable.

These gangs are  not afraid of the police, the police are afraid of the gangs.  And it's more than the fact that they are out numbered.  The people who make up these gangs, and their parents, grandparents and friends represent a powerful political constituency and they have their own representative on city council who will quickly accuse the police of racism if they try to establish some rules.    

What we have is a problem of failed societies, both at home and abroad. Some of these societies encompass entire countries while others are limited to a city or a neighborhood. In these places the social contract has broken down. The only thing that keeps the people living in them from killing each other is the threat of naked force, the vendetta and the lynch mob and honor and shame.

The welfare state created the gangs and the rest of the community responded by enabling the welfare state while also increasing the power of the police.   Its a self-reinforcing cycle that will end, but we don't know where.