Cop-cam videos are one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Seeing the badly behaved and the thuggish get what’s coming to them is a rare treat in an America that has abandoned personal responsibility and consequences for bad behavior.

But the pleasure turns to frustration too often. In most of these videos, the police waste minutes to an hour repeating their orders to a struggling suspect who has no intention of obeying.

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Take the latest viral example: a blue-haired college kid of indeterminate gender demanding that the cop “use my pronouns” before “consenting” to being arrested (yes, they do think they have a choice).

What should have been a simple arrest turns into an eight-minute installment of absurdist theater. It is truly something to behold.

Missed manners

Before we get to that, consider the general cultural context of such videos. Anyone in their 40s or older knows that standards of public behavior in America ain’t what they used to be. Manners are a thing of the past. People walk their carts up the middle of aisles, oblivious to anyone needing to get by. They sail through doors you hold without acknowledgment.

And that's just on foot. Rules of the road? Forget it. Everyone at a four-way stop is either trying to jump the right-of-way line or they’ve forgotten the rule altogether. Or they don’t care.

The other day I ran across an honest-to-God telephone booth preserved as part of a nostalgia display at an amusement park. These were built for a world with manners. People were motivated to build booths for phones because they assumed the caller wanted privacy and that the caller didn’t want to inflict his conversation on passersby. Quaint, no?

Broken windows

We're living through a nationwide experiment in abandoning broken-windows policing. It's just plain old common sense: When authorities let the "little" things slide — graffiti, vandalism, public disorder, petty lawbreaking — they teach people that the rules don't matter. Bigger offenses inevitably follow. New York City learned that lesson the hard way before Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton restored order in the 1990s by cracking down on so-called "quality of life" crimes.

It’s obviously true. But Democrats, leftists, and communists don’t like law and order. What they like is pretending that having rules for civil society is oppression. What they like even more is getting cities to defund their police departments so that criminals have a rules-free playground at everyone else’s expense. They do this by whining that mean, bad, Republican “fascists” like Giuliani were hurting “people of color” and “unhoused people” with these awful rules and laws.

You can see it in this essay on the blog Common Justice. Author “Cade T.,” who styles himself a “community organizer,” says cracking down on law and order is targeting those oppressed brown people again.

“Ultimately, the fear is that crime will become contagious and endemic in the urban environment,” he writes. “Under Giuliani, the NYPD identified neighborhoods in which to crack down on minor crimes. Not only did broken windows policing fail to reduce crime, but it also provided cover for a deliberate targeting of Black and brown communities.”

No respect

This is simply not true. Giuliani's policy resulted in a dramatic decrease in violent crime. It stands to reason. When people see police take a hands-off approach — especially toward groups the political class considers "protected" — they naturally become bolder. We see it every time hundreds of black teens riot through city streets while news anchors timidly describe the violence as nothing more than a “teen takeover.”

A large number of Americans — especially younger ones — neither fear nor respect the police. Why would they? As Forbes reported in 2020, at least 13 major American cities cut police funding or staffing in response to the BLM movement, while many smaller jurisdictions created such a hostile political climate that officers no longer felt confident their own departments would support them for simply doing their jobs. Small cities like Montpelier, Vermont, now struggle to recruit and retain enough officers.

The video below shows what hands-off policing looks like in the 2020s. Even when cops are willing to try to do their job, they’re strangely timid about effecting an arrest in a way I don’t remember police acting when I was a young man.

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Paul Harris/Getty Images

Gender special

Our protagonist is a young man I’ll call a “gender special.” He’s obese, his hair is dyed blue, and he simpers as he gesticulates, using a falsely high voice. It’s eight minutes long. If you’re pressed for time, just watch the first two minutes, and then the last two minutes. The whole thing is worth watching, though: The young man screams “JUST SAY SHE” repeatedly at the cops, jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin when his true name was spoken.

The encounter takes place on a Florida college campus. The cops were there to deal with a car theft. The blue-haired person begins screaming at the cops; it’s not clear why. The cops tell the shrieking man to lower his voice and stop freaking out or he’s going to be cuffed and taken for a psychiatric hold. So far, so good.

And then all hell breaks loose, and the cops waste almost seven minutes shouting repeated orders at the increasingly aggressive blue-hair. The trouble is, they don’t make good on those threats immediately. The tantrum-thrower escalates; he claims to be “scared”; he screams at the cops to stop harassing him (they’re not); and he pitches a fit at being referred to as “sir.”

He even threatens the cop with “f**king try it” when the cop warns him he’ll be handcuffed.

Tantrum terrorist

Any parent of a toddler knows that you don’t negotiate with terrorists. You give them one warning, and if they keep fussing, you bodily control them and remove them from the scene. Otherwise, the tantrum gets worse.

That’s the mistake the cops made. I watched the video and counted the number of verbal warnings and commands the cops gave before finally making good on the threat to take him down in cuffs: 14.

The blue-hair’s resistance didn’t stop there. Even after he was in custody, cops had to tase him twice before he finally stopped kicking and fighting.

Back the blue

Policing needs to go back to the way it used to be. Before recent years, we never saw cops who were afraid to arrest a disorderly suspect. Why do they keep giving orders repeatedly while their subject escalates? Don’t they see that failing to follow through on promised consequences teaches the suspect and onlookers that people can, in fact, break the law and the cops won’t do anything about it?

Yes. It does teach that lesson. And that’s part of why we now see behavior every day on the street that only used to happen in mental hospitals.

But the police are not the problem. The governments, municipalities, and mayors' offices are the problem. Cops are working in hostile territory. They know their civilian superiors not only do not support them, but are often working to target their own police force for false complaints of racism and brutality that can cost a cop his career.

If we want the boys in blue to have our backs, we have to make sure someone has theirs.