Steven Pinker describes how that went:
> "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]
"De Blasio, in this sense, is a remarkably unimaginative politician, like Andrew Cuomo. Police did stop doing their jobs, momentarily, after the murders of Liu and Ramos, in protest of de Blasio’s allegedly anti-police gestures. Arrests and summonses plummeted in early 2015. This, in labor and political parlance, is called a slowdown. The truth about the slowdown, as I’ve written before, is that crime remained quite low. Lack of police enforcement did not unleash the sort of disorder Lynch and his ilk always promise would come. It’s a small sample size, yes. But de Blasio has never used this data point to his advantage. Instead, he has grown only more defensive of his police department. Even in an age of COVID-19-induced catastrophe, with tax revenue evaporating by the month, de Blasio cannot bring himself to meaningfully cut funding to his police department."
Source: https://rossbarkan.substack.com/p/why-is-the-nypd-so-powerfu...