Beware vigilantism!

Mark Steyn http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/4359/:

Her Majesty’s cowed and craven politically correct constabulary stand around with their riot shields and Robocop gear as young rioters lob concrete through store windows to steal the electronic toys that provide their only non-narcotic or alcoholic amusement. I chanced to be in Piccadilly for the springtime riots when the police failed to stop the mob from smashing the windows of the Ritz and other upscale emporia, so it goes without saying that they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect less prestigious private property from thugs. Some of whom are as young as nine years old. And girls.

Yet a police force all but entirely useless when it comes to preventing crime or maintaining public order has time to police everything else. When Sam Brown observed en passant to a mounted policeman on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, “Do you know your horse is gay?”, he was surrounded within minutes by six officers and a fleet of patrol cars, handcuffed, tossed in the slammer overnight, and fined 80 pounds. Mr. Brown’s “homophobic comments,” explained a spokesmoron for Thames Valley Police, were “not only offensive to the policeman and his horse, but any members of the general public in the area.” The zealous crackdown on Sam Brown’s hippohomophobia has not been replicated in the present disturbances. Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the last two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid.

The problem as I see it is going to be when the general public can take it no longer and begin to enact vigilante justice. It happened in South Africa after the police had become so politicised they no longer represented the general public, only the political bosses. The macabre results of such 'justice' are forever memorialised in the horrible and unspeakably cruel spectacle of 'necklacing'. If we believe that such a thing could never happen here consider the end results of Nazism, which happened in one of the most 'civilized' countries in Europe. 

UPDATE  29.8.2011
Some words of wisdom on this dilemma from Toynbee and Miranda Devine:

British historian Arnold Toynbee once described this “schism” between the elites and the masses in his analysis of the rise and fall of civilisations, “A Study of History”.

He says when a civilisation starts to decay, a schism develops between a “Dominant Minority,” also called the “insiders” or “elites”, and the “Internal Proletariat” who become disenfranchised.

“First the Dominant Minority attempts to hold by force a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit; and then the Proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, and violence with violence.”

As the civilisation fails, it falls prey to an External Proletariat, an envious “bevy of barbarian war-bands”.

Toynbee argued that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

At a time when the masses are restive, the West’s self confidence is fading, American power is waning, European economies are failing, the Middle East is boiling, and China is increasingly arrogant, his words have new resonance