Free Republic

Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before. The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Forty-three people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded. The reality was even more...

In the 1960s, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that if he had to endure the conditions of the ghetto, he "could lead a pretty good riot" himself, while Nixon ridiculed the Kerner Commission report that blamed the riots on "white racism."Nixon and George Wallace got 57 percent of the vote in 1968. And a strong stand for law and order helped to give the GOP a near quarter-century lock on the presidency.The law-and-order issue is lying there again, waiting to be picked up.