{"id":10691,"date":"2025-10-22T00:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T00:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/10691\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T00:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T00:21:08","slug":"seth-higgins-people-will-demand-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/10691\/","title":{"rendered":"Seth Higgins: People will demand order"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a Saturday evening earlier this month, a homeless man caused a disturbance at a Center City IHOP in Philadelphia. As the man was being escorted from the restaurant, he spat on Yahaira Melendez, a security guard. She responded by pulling out her pistol and shooting him in the head. Thirty-eight-year-old Melendez is now facing murder charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A month before this incident, John Kelly, a homeless man known for harassing people outside the Center City 7-Eleven at 12th and Chestnut, got into an altercation with his girlfriend. Lauren Jardine, an armed bystander, intervened. In the ensuing struggle, Kelly wrestled Jardine\u2019s pistol from her, stood over her body, and fired two rounds into her, killing her<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In both incidents, armed bystanders confronted public disorder without the help of law enforcement. Now, two people are dead and two others are facing decades in prison.<\/p>\n

It is easy enough to tell Philadelphians not to intervene when confronted by criminals or the chronically homeless. That\u2019s the safe bet.<\/p>\n

But even that carries consequences.<\/p>\n

The most jarring example of nonintervention happened in the fall of 2021 on the Market\u2013Frankford SEPTA Line. A homeless man raped a woman<\/a> in front of several other passengers. People sat in silence, ignoring the hideous crime occurring just feet away.<\/p>\n

These events have something in common beyond individual tragedy. They reveal that residents no longer believe civil authorities will protect them. People have lost confidence that police will respond and that prosecutors will hold criminals accountable. In this vacuum, people turn to vigilantism, or turn away in defeat.<\/p>\n

This is, at its core, a failure of government.<\/p>\n

When you strip away the layers of bureaucracy, what lies beneath is government\u2019s true purpose: its monopoly on violence. In a democracy, the use of government force is ideally in service of the people and is accountable to elected officials.<\/p>\n

This democratic structure allows diverse political communities to determine where to draw the line between order and disorder. This is why there are different laws across cities and states. Yet fundamentally, laws are supposed to dictate behavior.<\/p>\n

All this points to a basic truth: people demand order. But law does not automatically give way to order. Government must act. If government fails to supply order, that demand must still be met, either at the barrel of the vigilante\u2019s gun or through the order of the ruthless and insane.<\/p>\n

To bring this back to the real world, Philadelphia\u2019s politicians are not just failing to supply order, they are doing so selectively. This unpredictability is why residents vacillate between action and inaction when confronting mayhem. Justice, when delivered, is also uneven. Melendez, the security guard, is facing murder charges. Kelly, the homeless man who initiated the deadly incident outside the 7-Eleven, had his charges downgraded to voluntary manslaughter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The most flagrant contributor to this selective enforcement of disorder is Philadelphia\u2019s District Attorney, Larry Krasner. While in office, prosecutions of individuals illegally carrying<\/a> firearms cratered. He also ignores quality-of-life crimes that contribute to the sense of lawlessness, such as his office\u2019s unwillingness to crack down on illegal dumping<\/a>. Meanwhile, he uses his goon squad to bar residents<\/a> like Frank Scales, a right-wing gadfly, from a public meeting while his office dishes out grants to politically connected organizations.<\/a><\/p>\n

For decades, conservative thinkers have called this dynamic \u201canarcho-tyranny<\/a>,\u201d which is \u201cthe combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that doesn\u2019t describe Philadelphia, I don\u2019t know what does.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be mistaken. This is not a call for vigilante justice. That isn\u2019t a way out of this mess. Neither is looking away. This is instead a wake-up call. Order will be obtained; the question is for whom and by whom. That is a question every Philadelphian has a role in answering.<\/p>\n

Seth Higgins is a native of Saint Marys, Pennsylvania. He currently resides in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a Saturday evening earlier this month, a homeless man caused a disturbance at a Center City IHOP…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[31,744,336,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-10691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-crime","tag-government","tag-larry-krasner","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}