What If You Called 911 and No One Came to Help?

You actually have to be able to hire and retain police officers if you expect them to respond to 911 calls. Carrying a Bible and a gun, a pastor tends to an unsettled New Orleans

This is the story of a minister in New Orleans who has lost count of the number of funerals he has led in 20 years of living in NOLA. It is also the story of the decay of civilization as seen through the lens of one city.

In recent years, Stewart’s ministry had gone far beyond consoling victims of gun violence — into teaching churchgoers and other New Orleanians how to use a gun to protect themselves in a city where police don’t always come when you dial 911.

Like a lot of cities in America, New Orleans is experiencing a bit a crime wave.

New Orleans’ homicide rate is far from the record-setting heights of the mid-1990s, when a proliferation of killings earned it a reputation as the murder capital of the country. But the 265 murders reported across the city last year were the highest recorded since the murky floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina devastated the city nearly 20 years ago.

And of course police are leaving the city. There are 900 officers on the force, down from 1300 in 2018. And the city is supposed to have 1600 officers. So of course that is impacting 911 call response time. There just are not enough officers to cover the city.

Though the mayor has statistics to "prove" that things are getting better, most people don't believe her. At least not according to the article.

“Fifteen minutes to never, that’s their response time. And most of the time, it feels like never,” Stewart said, reflecting the frustrations of residents who complain that their 911 calls often go unanswered.

Click thru; it is worth a look. Murder. Robbery. Carjacking. A lot of it perpetrated by kids.

As these stories often do, it reminded me of the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The entire text of the poem, it isn't long, can be found below (after the break). The part I always think of is...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Civilization was nice while it lasted.

The Second Coming
  — W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.