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As I’m writing this, there is a hue and cry (a term I chose carefully) all across America for us to defund the police.

Some school districts and some colleges no longer want law enforcement on their campuses.

And the Minneapolis, Minnesota, city council says it will defund them, and it has enough votes to do it.

Let’s do something that isn’t popular and certainly isn’t done much right now–let’s take a minute and think about that. What would the world look like if that happened?

So, we defund them. That means that we take away their money, that we stop paying them. If we stop paying them, they stop coming to work.

I expect a few would show up and try, but when they got to work they would show up to patrol cars that had no gasoline. They couldn’t patrol, and they couldn’t respond to calls for help.

And even if the cop found a way to respond, what could he do? If he went to a crime scene and something really bad had just happened, he couldn’t take the bad guy to jail because jails are run by…. wait on it…. the police.

I’m not so sure that he could even get to a jail. You see, without police, the need to obey traffic laws ends, so drivers, some of whom are marginal to begin with, would no longer have to stop at stop signs, pause at red lights, and they could drive down highway 29 at 100 miles an hour. Wrecked vehicles would clog our streets.

Have you enjoyed the news stories about the people who are burning businesses and looting them? Without police, there is no need to think that would end. Why would it?

Without police, there would be nothing to stop people from going to Givorns, Kroger, and loading up on food, or from going to Wal-Mart and just walking out the front door with that brand-new big screen T.V. that they don’t want to pay for. The stores would close.

You would have to walk to the grocery store anyway, because if no one has to pay for anything, the gas stations would also close.

Those school districts that don’t want police on their campuses? They would become special places.

Nationally, school violence is a growing trend—blessedly, not in the Chambers County school system—and without police to help our teachers, our school systems would quickly fall.

Truancy officers—those policemen whose full-time job it is to make sure that children get to school so they have a shot at an education—would be gone, so no one would have to go anyway.

Who are these people they want us to fire? According to the FBI, in 2019, 89 of them were killed in the line of duty, 48 by criminals. The murdered cops had an average age of 40 and had been cops for 13 years.

While they aren’t all perfect—let’s be honest, are you? —they seem to do a pretty well in a tough job. The world is a better place because we have them.

Get rid of the cops? Wouldn’t that just put the looters and the rioters in charge? Rather than order, we would live in a world of perpetual anarchy. Does anyone think that is better?

But if we are not happy with our cops, maybe there is something we can do.

Why not select them more carefully, train them better, and, to make sure that we get the best, raise their pay considerably.

Defund the police? Fire the cops?

That’s just not a world I want to live in.