Demonstrating for the safety of criminals?

John Podhoretz:

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This has happened several times in our history. As the late sociologist Eric Monkkonen wrote in his seminal 2001 study, “Murder in New York City,” Americans have often responded to an era of relative calm by deciding that the authorities have been too restrictive and cruel — resulting in a subsequent period in which greater laxity led to higher rates of crime.

Americans today have either never known or have forgotten that that for decades, it was the working theory of police departments that their job was to respond to crimes after they occurred rather than to prevent crime from happening in the first place.

Police departments racked with corruption scandals (like the ones in New York investigated by the Knapp Commission in the 1970s) actually thought it best to keep cops at a bit of a distance from the citizenry, because their interactions were bound to be controversial.

By the early 1990s, Americans (especially those in cities, and especially the poorest among us) were living in a state of near-siege.
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Those demonstrating in the street need to know why they are wrong to react emotionally to events in Ferguson Missouri.  They are going to do great harm to the victims of crime in the black community if police withdraw from protecting them.