If anger is appropriate, and I suggest it is that as well as being unavoidable, immediate, and strong, the question is how best to give it legitimate expression. The most attractive means is that which we thought we were effectuating when the citizenry as a whole ceded to the police the chore of preventing crime most of the time and seeing to its punishment when prevention occasionally failed. The trouble is that this pacific social pact has been breached by nonperformance too many times to pretend any longer that the citizen is getting what he paid for, as it were, when he took his gunbelt off. The cops blame the judges for this, and the judges have some sharp comments to make about the cops, each sector vying with the other to distribute somewhere else a quantum of blame so enormous that no amount of acrimony or contrition will ever deplete it. It will be interesting to hear what Elliott’s opponents recommend to replace his firearms. □
¡ Speak Spanish like a diplomat !
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