I always used to laugh at the whole “defund the police” idea. Not a cruel laugh. Just the quiet kind you get when somebody announces they’re going to solve world hunger by yelling at the sky. These folks simply cannot think past the first move on the chessboard. They see a fence and decide the fence is the problem.

So let’s walk it through, nice and slow. Suppose some big American city actually does it. They defund the police all the way. Cops go home. Radios go silent. For a little while the criminals have a field day. Shoplifting, robbery, home invasion, the works. Why not? Who’s going to arrest them?

Then the second act starts. The victims arm themselves. Shopkeepers, homeowners, the guy who just wants to buy milk without getting his skull cracked. They start carrying guns out in the open. And when an armed citizen meets an unarmed criminal, the math tends to favor the one with the gun. And who’s going to arrest him? The same empty station house that used to send the squad car?

So far, so ordinary. Now comes the part that makes polite company get real quiet real fast.

A solid majority of the serious index crimes in this country – homicide, robbery, aggravated assault – are committed by Black people. They’re about thirteen percent of the population and they account for roughly half to sixty percent of those particular crimes, year after year, through every social program and every sensitivity seminar. Hispanics make up about nineteen percent of the population and their rates sit noticeably higher than those of non-Hispanic Whites or Asians, though still well below the Black rates. Northeast Asians, for whatever stubborn reason, keep posting the lowest numbers of all.

Once the shooting starts in earnest, the Black criminals do what any rational group does when the old restraints disappear: they organize into packs. They start hitting targets in numbers one armed shopkeeper can’t handle alone. At that point the rest of the population – Whites, Hispanics, Asians – looks at the situation and does the only rational thing left. They stop treating every individual as an individual. They start treating groups the way groups get treated when the state has left the building. They shoot first and consult the crime tables later.

Innocents get caught in it. That’s how these things always go. But the overall result is the sort of outcome that used to live only in the wilder corners of the internet: Black people either dead, or living very quietly inside tightly controlled ethnic pockets, or simply deciding that leaving those pockets is a poor career choice. Hispanics, having intermediate rates, end up in a similar but somewhat less extreme position. The streets outside become, for practical purposes, someone else’s problem.

I’m reasonably sure this is not what the defund crowd had in mind when they were painting slogans on plywood. Then again, these are the same bright minds who spent years demanding body cameras on every officer, certain the footage would expose systemic racism. What the cameras mostly showed was a lot of people doing exactly what the crime statistics had been saying they were doing all along. Funny how that works.

Anyway. I’m not saying any of this ought to happen. I’m just saying that if you remove the only institution that stands between civilization and the raw numbers, the numbers don’t politely disappear. They just stop wearing badges. And once that happens, everybody else starts solving the problem the old-fashioned way.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty strong argument for keeping the police funded. Not because cops are perfect. Just because the alternative is a lot more honest about human nature than most people are ready to be.