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What are some good ideas, as an individual, for decreasing street crime in highly Democratic-leaning cities, other than just moving away? Recently I have been getting more and more fed up with the failure of my local government to provide basic safety - which is, after all, reasonably speaking the most important purpose of government. I want to apologize to @2rafa for having yelled at her about this kind of stuff a year or two back. Perhaps she was simply more aware of the problem than I was at the time. At this point I am reaching near Bukele levels of willingness to crack down hard on the problem.
I am a techie, I do software. I've recently thought that well, given my concerns, maybe I should go work in law enforcement. I think that at this point I am probably too old to become a cop, but I could probably provide useful services in other ways. What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws. On the other hand, if one has to choose the lesser of two evils, then I do, despite all my disagreements with the justice system, see the cops as being a lesser evil than street criminals, even despite the fact that they enforce the anti-drug laws that I view as fundamentally wrong. This is not something that should be seen as me praising cops, it is just that street criminals are such scum that even cops are vastly better.
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
Other than complaining on social media, which raises awareness but does not necessarily accomplish that much, what can one do in cities which are failing to provide basic safety? What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections? I am open to suggestions. I know that statistics say that street crime is down a lot from the 1980s and early 90s, but that is small comfort for me because I have little memory of those years. What I know is that I subjectively feel that the level of street crime now is too high compared to what I would wish it to be, and I would like to do something about it. If moving away from the failed cities is the only reasonable course of action, fair enough. But is it, or can something actually be done to fight back against the problem?
By the way, given that this is The Motte, I know that people will likely read a racial angle into the issue. Which is fair, given the crime statistics that most of us are aware of. But anecdotally speaking, out of the five or so times that I have been attacked by street criminals of various sorts over the course of my life, four of the five times were a case of white men doing the attacking. So while I totally understand that statistically speaking, there is a racial discrepancy in this sort of thing, at the same time it is clear to me that we do not just have a problem with non-white people. We also have a pretty significant issue with street scum whites who act in these kinds of ways. There is a general problem with territorial idiots, drug dealer gangsters, violent insane homeless, etc...
All you can do is leave and stop voting that way. Most of the areas that have been captured by criminals are hopeless corrupt and run by political machines. You can't vote your way out of it, and if you use non-political means like actually defend yourself from those animals, the state will come down on you like a brick of shit. "The punishment for armed robbery isn't getting shot!" or "What about due process?!" will ring from every pundit's mouth as they discuss your actions on every cable news show for 48 hours. The powers that be have decided you have a moral obligation to allow yourself to be victimized by these people, and they have no obligation to protect you.
At some point, if we are lucky, those areas will collapse. Businesses will leave, their governments will go bankrupt, anyone with the means to will have left for better managed areas, and if we are really lucky people will have actually learned and changed what they tolerate from their governments in aggregate.
If we are unlucky, the people from the areas that are fucked will just fuck the places they flee to, because they've left their own choices completely unexamined.
Sadly I think this is the more likely case, because very few people deprogram from all the demoralization propaganda they've been fed the last 20 years.
Probably safest to move somewhere remote and buy guns and ammo. All my neighbors are strapped with an acre or more between us and I've never felt safer.
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