Rich writes that our law enforcement needs a little more Wyatt Earp in it. I think it could use a good deal less.
Wyatt Earp the literary character is a Stoic hero to be emulated in many ways. Wyatt Earp the historical figure was a pimp, a cheat, a claim-jumper, probably a horse thief, and a cold-blooded murderer. He was also a low-rent con artist who tried to sell people painted rocks he claimed were gold nuggets. He had an arrest record as long as your arm and continued as a career criminal into his old age, from fixing boxing matches to fixing card games. No sane or self-respecting society would give a career criminal such as Wyatt Earp a badge and a gun.
What happened at (or, rather, near) the O.K. Corral wasn’t cops-and-robbers — it was Hatfields-and-McCoys, an old-fashioned feud in which Earp abused his badge to carry out extrajudicial executions when the legal system didn’t give him the outcome he wanted. If you want an example of what the Wyatt Earp model of “justice” would look like in our time, imagine if Joseph Rosenbaum had a brother who was a U.S. marshal who hunted down and lynched Kyle Rittenhouse after his acquittal.
Rich writes:
By the end of his career, few people so thoroughly exemplified the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Earp was indeed very deft at shaping his own legend. Which is to say, he had a talent for lying about his crimes and errors while exaggerating his accomplishments — very much a familiar figure for our time. There’s a reason that Wyatt Earp went around doing business under a fake name.
I like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but romantic fantasies are a pretty poor basis for good governance. I’d prefer an effective civil service.
The problems in Wyatt Earp’s times were not entirely unlike our own: lack of effective civil administration, judges and prosecutors who could be bought or pressured, politicians with a vested interest in crime and in lax law enforcement, police officers of greatly varying degrees of competence and professionalism, rogue elements within law enforcement, and a general sense of near-anarchy that made many criminal acts more attractive to calculating criminals while also giving wicked encouragement to the non-calculating sort of criminal.
I live not far from the place where Wyatt Earp’s most famous criminal associate, Doc Holliday, practiced dentistry in Dallas. It is a better place than it was in his day, though not without its troubles, including criminal troubles: a few more murders per capita than Minneapolis, a few less than Des Moines. Wyatt Earp is said to have favored the ’73 Winchester, and I like that rifle, too — but I don’t see how that rifle and one thoroughly corrupt man’s personal vendetta would greatly improve things around here.
Wyatt Earp was part of the problem, not the solution.
I’m not 100 percent convinced that police-department statistics are much more reliable than Old West tales of heroism, but, ceteris paribus, I’ll take Eddie Garcia.