Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
- No city or state in the US has the authority to declare a purge. If, hypothetically, the police intentionally backed off for a night, and the people who were the victims of crimes pressed charges afterward, but the bored receptionist at the police station was like, “Sorry your grandma was murdered, but nothing was illegal that night. Next!” they could just take their complaints to the state or federal level. It would be easy to argue, even though there’s no law that explicitly bans a jurisdiction from decriminalizing things like theft and murder. You would just use the always handy Ninth Amendment, which says you have rights not explicitly outlined in the constitution. It wouldn’t be hard to get a judge to agree that you have the unalienable right not to be murdered or robbed with the tacit approval of the local authorities.
The whole idea of a purge, that people have to "work violence out of their system" is stupid in the first place. People who commit crime are going to do so no matter the laws that exist. They steal for their kids, for their wallets, for that next moment of getting high. They steal because they have to have that thing, and cannot buy it. People murder because of out of control emotions, or because the person is standing between them and the reason they steal.