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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 8, 1985
"People have to fight back. You have to, you know. As I see it, if you
don't you're just living, you're living like a dog," he said on the tape.
"If you corner a rat and you're about to butcher it--OK?--the way I re
sponded was viciously and savagely, just like a rat. In the past three
years I have been attacked--if you count this one--! have been attacked
three times and threatened twice seriously. The people have to have guns
and yet the city tells you, 'don't you dare have a gun.' The legal system
is a farce. It's a self-serving bureaucracy."
In his column in the January 7 issue of NEWSWEEK, George F. Will revealed
the consequences of the breakdown of law and order in America's largest
city:
One of the tangled topics is the moral status of what the man did.
The other is how to characterize the city's rejoicing. Let us
get the easy part over by saying, straightaway, that it is wrong
"to take the law into your own hands," and the state should have a
monopoly on the use of violence. But such moral near absolutes
wobble when the law seems increasingly unable to cope with crude
violence or the community comes to feel that the state chooses
not to act vigorously against such violence as the 12,000 felo
nies reported in New York's subways in the first 10 months of
this [past] year•• -.-
.-
-- -- -
Social theories and their consequences--government policies-
have been teaching irresponsibility: the poor are not at all re
sponsible for their condition, men are not responsible for the
children they father, women are not responsible for becoming
pregnant, criminals are not responsible for their actions. Vigi
lantism is an individual saying: "I've got to be responsible for
my own safety." Vigilantism is private enterprise in the justice
business. It is apt to occur when public-sector institutions of
justice fail on a wide scale. Public officials are right to in
sist that what the man did to the youths--at least three had
criminal records--cannot be condoned. But officials should be
shaken by the vehemence of the public's reproach, expressed in
visceral approval of the man's deed. New York City is a welfare
state. Its comprehensive solicitousness is expressed in hundreds
of ways, from rent control through subsidized arts. But it has
failed to provide an essential prerequisite of civilization-
safety in public places••••
Many New Yorkers are angry because they believe justice is a rare
accident. They believe that few violent criminals are caught,
that many fewer are convicted, that most of those convicted plea
bargain their way to leniency. That is true. In 1983 in the city
there� 84,043 reported robberies • . There were just 7,351 �
victions, all but 663 §y plea-bargaining. There were 26,808 re
ported felonious assaults, just 727 convictions, all but 61 by
plea-bargaining. Persons dependent on the subway--a nightmare of
spray-painted graffiti that underscores the menacing environment
of lawlessness--can become desperate•••.
When a society becomes, like ours, uneasy about calling prisons
penitentiaries or penal institutions, and instead calls them