‘Denver Police Dept. shows why good, well-funded policing is necessary
Shmuel Silverberg, the murdered student at a venerable Jewish institution in Denver, is not coming back, and the tears do not cease. Justice cannot bring him back; the horror, sadness and incomprehension remain.
Justice, however, is necessary, both intrinsically and instrumentally. Justice is necessary for the victim and the victim’s family and community, and in order to stop the criminals from inflicting on others the ultimate crime they inflicted on an 18-year-old student and the attempted murder they inflicted on another person, who remains in critical condition.
Necessary for justice is police.
Necessary for police are morale, trust, funding and competence. All were on display as the Denver Police Dept. apprehended four out of the five murderers of Shmuel Silverberg within, it seems, roughly 36 hours of the crime.
But this was not only an instance of cops chasing bad guys. This was cops who are experts at locating and installing or reading security cameras; this was cops who train other cops in criminal forensics; this was cops who maintain excellent working relationships with other police agencies, such as the FBI; this was cops who know how to communicate with the public; this was cops who train other cops in the law so that they know what charges to press based on the evidence they gather. The “police” are a lot more than the cop in a squad car driving down the street.
We could not have asked for more from the Denver Police Dept. than all the different competencies they brought to bear in quickly apprehending four of the five suspects in the August 17 crime spree, including the cold-blooded murder of a student at Denver’s Yeshiva Toras Chaim.
The Denver Police Dept. thanked other agencies, saying that without their collaboration the arrests would not have been made. But the leadership was provided by the Denver Police Dept.
Defund the police? Yes, of course — if one wants murderers to proceed with impunity. Yes, by all means, if justice is never to be done and civil society is to break down.
Sadly, post-George Floyd, civil society has broken down in parts of the country. Mayhem rules in Chicago, for example. Over the August 7-6 weekend, 78 people were shot, 11 of them fatally, including a police officer who took a bullet to the head allegedly shot by a 21-year-old on probation for robbery. All of the murderers of Shmuel Silverberg in Denver met in a youth correctional facility, and at least one was an escapee. This, too, is part of the post-George Floyd breakdown of civil society: treating crimes less serious than murder, crimes such as robbery, as not requiring serious sentencing.
It is oh so unfortunate that the line between juvenile crime and adult crime is being erased in a social atmosphere and an anti-police atmosphere that has criminals acting more brazenly than at any time in recent memory. Shmuel Silverberg was 18. Other recent murder victims in, for example, George Floyd’s Minneapolis were ages 6 and 9. They were not killed by police. According to a statistical analysis by Heather Mac Donald in the Wall Street Journal, unarmed blacks constituted only 0.2% of the total number of black homicide victims in 2020.
Police are not perfect. Police need to be held accountable for mistakes. Laws that protect police from being held accountable should be rewritten. Punishment of police who break the law should be consistent and commensurate to the crime. Payouts to police who broke the law should cease. All this is by way of the obvious.
All this, however, in the post-George Floyd era, has clouded what should be far more obvious: Most police follow the law, are dedicated to public safety — and display the competence demonstrated in the quick apprehension of four murderers of an innocent Denver student. Most police are indispensable to civil society, an all too obvious point undermined in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere, where assaults on police — the same kind of lawless assault that killed George Floyd — are on the rise.
We in Denver do not want to become another Chicago.
We do not want the routinization of murder.
We do not want to demean the police.
George Floyd is not the face of the policing that took four alleged murderers off the streets some 36 hours after their crimes.
Crime is not the face of the city that we want, as if it’s OK to expect that, oh yes, of course, there will be murders in certain neighborhoods. The August 17 crime spree covered Southwest Denver, East Denver, Capitol Hill, West Denver and Lakewood — all of these neighborhoods, and all metro Denver neighborhoods, deserve to be safe.
None will be safe if we defund the police.
Nor, of course, will any neighborhood be safe if the deeper causes of crime are not identified and addressed. But to focus on them as a rationale for weakening good, well funded-police work is to underwrite the breakdown of civil society.
Thank you for your service.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
