That problem is the police. They and their supporters will tell you a very different story, but they are almost self-evidently over funded, far too heavily armed, and there are vastly too many of them. Worst, they are almost never held to account for anything they do.

I first became aware of this situation when I watched four police cars parked on a side street, the officers that they had contained interacting (I won't attempt to characterize it any further than that) with a single, solitary bicyclist whom they had pulled over. For what, speeding? I had been an auxiliary or reserve police officer, myself, in the early 70s, and I thought this was at least somewhat excessive. Short of hand grenades, there is very little that an individual can do on a bicycle that justifies the presence and attention of four police officers.

But little did I know, there was far worse to come. We all began to hear of unarmed individuals being firing-squadded to death, sometimes forty times, of victims being tasered to death—killed by the overuse of a "non-lethal" weapon—of elderly or crippled people yanked out of cars they were passengers in (sometimes their windows were smashed in with nightsticks) and variously brutalized. Of restrained and helpless people being raped with nightsticks. I am not particularly race-conscious, so I don't recall if there was that kind of pattern to the behavior in question, as is being claimed now by figures with the reliability and trustworthiness of Reverend Al Sharpton.