(MENAFN- Caribbean News Now) 
Tiberiu Dianu has published several books and a host of articles in law, politics, and post-communist societies. He currently lives and works in Washington, DC, and can be followed on Medium. https://medium.com/@tdianu
By Tiberiu Dianu
Recently, three extremely disturbing events involving the police as targets show that American society is rapidly approaching a state of anomie (normlessness).
The events, allcaptured on video , took place in various New York neighborhood on Monday, July 22, 2019, inBrooklyn and Harlem , and on Wednesday, July 24, 2019, in the Bronx.
The incident in Brooklyn, captured in a 19-second video, shows bucketful of water hurled towards cops, and a cop hit with a bucket while making an arrest, as onlookers watch, laugh and prance in glee.
The incident in Harlem, captured in a 33-second video, shows two cops in sopping-wet uniforms walking away as water flies through the air toward their backs. At one point, a young man runs up behind one cop and dumps a bucket of water over his head.
The incident in Bronx, captured in a 92-minute video, shows a group of about a dozen young men and women, carrying buckets of water and plastic water guns, crossing the street and unloading at least four buckets of water on two female officers standing watch outside a public school, with cups of coffee in hand.
Three people have beenarrested for those incidents , including a gang member on probation.
A New York Police Department (NYPD) supervisor warned, 'Today it's a bucket of water. Tomorrow it could be a bucket of cement.' In 1993, a housing authority cop was struck and killed by a 30-pound bucket of spackling compound tossed from a rooftop amid arrest that started when NYPD began towing illegally parked cars.
'This looks like it's becoming a disgusting trend,' said one police source after the Bronx incident.
Back in those years, Republican Mayor (1994-2001) Rudolph Giuliani was successfully applying the broken windows theory, according to which targeting minor crimes prevent more serious crimes. Broken windows policing has become associated with the use of "stop-and-frisk" police practice, which caused significant drops in crime rate in New York City.
But those days are long gone. The current Democrat Mayor (since 2014), Bill de Blasio, has been consistently applying a hands-off approach to perpetrators. He ended the stop-and-frisk practice, while in public speeches he vilifies the police and victimizes the thugs for political expediency.
Anti-police rhetoric characterizes also many Democrat presidential contenders, like Kamala Harris and Julian Castro, who don't blame 'the few bad apples' but advocate instead for the whole system to be reformed.
Logically, these anti-police approach has immediate effects and tardier effects. Immediate effects include non-intervention of police in violent protests and drops in police recruitment rate.
On June 29, 2019, a clash with the left-leaning militant group of Antifa in Portland, Oregon, left conservative writer Andy Ngo with a brain haemorrhage. Police didn't intervene. Instead, officers told him they wouldn't approach the aggressors because it could incite the crowd.
Portland police and city Mayor(since 2017) Ted Wheeler (another Democrat) have received national criticism of how the demonstrations were handled after videos and photos of Ngo being attacked went viral.
Also, studies show a decrease in the number of police officers by 11 percent, and that, nationally, 66 percent of police departments report seeing a declining number of applications.
Long-term effects will show erosion of public authority in society and a spiral down toward anarchy.
Patrick Lynch, the NYPD Police Benevolent Association president, considers that 'we are approaching the point of no return. Disorder controls the streets, and our elected leaders refuse to allow us to take them back' and that the bucket attacks are 'the end result of the torrent of bad policies and anti-police rhetoric that has been streaming out of City Hall and Albany for years now.'
As for the onlookers watching and laughing at the humiliated police officers, I only wish them to have people with buckets of water at their door next time when they call the emergency service.
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