Why is nothing ever the police's fault?

How long are we going to blame “defund” for crime while giving police and politicians a pass?

Last week the New York Times published a story about rich liberals who espouse progressive pieties but are out-of-touch.

What? No way!

A woman was walking her dog in Prospect Park in Brooklyn when an unhoused man allegedly accosted her. He flung a liquid at her that she suspected was piss and her dog lunged at him to protect the owner. The man apparently hit the dog so hard he broke the Golden Retriever’s tooth. The vet fixed up the dog’s mouth but missed signs of a perforated intestine. The dog died from sepsis five days later.

The story could have been about a lot of things, including how the vet missed signs of a perforated intestine, but instead it treats some dumb shit people said on Nextdoor and a community meeting as a Symptom of a Bigger Problem That Raises Profound Questions about Justice™.

It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.

At first, the dog owners’ neighbors expressed sympathy. But then others argued against using the criminal system to bust the guy with a word salad of woke. “400 yrs of systematic racism which has prevented black people from building generational wealth through homeownership resulting in the extreme disparity we see today,” wrote one guy on Nextdoor.

When some guy responded by, omfg, forming the Park Slope Panthers, someone wrote, “Don’t be a cop” on his door.

And the ultimate K.O.:

To the delight of people who enjoy making fun of Park Slope liberals, one of the disrupters, a woman calling herself Sky, said, “Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” according to Common Sense.

Yes, Sky is a fucking idiot. But as far as I know, no one has deputized Sky to patrol the neighborhood in order prevent and solve crimes. That’s the job of the New York City Police department, which at $11 billion, has more resources to address stranger dog killings than Sky. One of them is NYPD surveillance cameras and private business cameras. New York City is one of the most surveilled cities in the world.

So, you would think detectives would be collecting footage from within a ten block radius of the Picnic House, the venue where the attack occurred. You’d think they’d do a massive sweep of the area with a sketch of the assailant, like they do in Law and Order. The owner has pressed charges. Sky has literally no bearing on the investigative process. What are the police actually doing to catch this public menace?