And in that regard my response to Mayor Bloomberg is simple: DO IT.
Here's why. See, it wasn't all that long ago that citizens lacked the one thing that police officers and other civil authorities had -- a decent communications network that would "go anywhere."
This is no longer true. We almost all have cellphones with Twitter and other similar media -- even teens have these items nowdays.
And that's the great equalizer, because for every crook there are hundreds of law-abiding citizens and today it's trivially-easy for us to organize and defend ourselves and our communities.
So go ahead, Mr. Mayor, call your strike. Let all the cops walk off the job.
I dare you.
Because the day you do it, there will be nobody to enforce the law in NY that says you can't have -- or carry -- a gun. So guess what? All the law-abiding citizens will do exactly that. And those citizens can easily organize using a simple hashtag to call attention to anything bad going on. See, our phones all have GPSes in them, so when we tweet "Robbery at the jewelry store on 26th!" the position pops up on a map for anyone who sees it. And shortly thereafter two or three dozen armed citizens will appear out of nowhere and Mr. Robber has a problem, as he doesn't have enough guns and bullets, not to mention being cornered.
Then we just deliver the crooks we catch (and we would catch a lot of them) to the prosecutors. If they want to go on strike, we'll appoint some new ones. I bet the judges will still sit behind benches and book people into jail. Oh, if the cops that man the jail quit? What did you say the unemployment rate was in NY City again? I suspect there will be plenty of applicants to fill those vacated positions.
There's one exception to the citizens organizing and coming together to protect their community, of course. Those cops who walked out? And the Mayor himself? **** you all.
