Cities Will Collapse Even Sooner Than We Fear

Many major western cities are dangerously unstable and the slightest spark can set off rioting; it is only our present massive police resources that keeps these tendencies in check.Code Green Prep – by David Spero

We have written several times about how major population groupings (ie cities) will collapse ‘shortly’ after the essential elements of life cease to smoothly flow in to them as needed.  When there’s no water, no sewage, no food, no gas and no electricity, things will unavoidably get very nasty.

In an earlier post we suggested that cities will decay into violent anarchistic morasses within a week or two.  In that article we were deliberately trying to look at a ‘best case scenario’ (don’t laugh – the collapse of cities taking a week or two is, alas, a best case scenario!).  Our projection was based on the ‘best case’ hope that people would remain passive for a few days and it would only be when people realized no help was coming and they were starting to starve that things would turn truly nasty.  

One of our readers, ‘Lt. Dan’, wrote in to share his perspective of what might go down, and alas, it is not nearly as sunny and optimistic as our earlier best case hope.  His point is that violence will break outimmediately.  There will not be days of ambiguity before things start to fail.

He says that in known ‘hot spots’ in larger cities, the violence will start at once, and as soon as the violent offenders realize that the police response is inadequate (or totally missing) it will skyrocket in scope and extent.

This is a key issue for us, because it impacts on our decision about when to ‘Get Out Of Dodge’ (GOOD) and hightail it to our remote retreat.  How much time do we have to decide what to do between when a massive problem occurs and when the city becomes lawless?

Lt. Dan writes :

As a retired LEO with over 30 yrs dealing with “society” I have a number of thoughts on this topic. I grew up on a working farm not close to any major metro center but in adulthood joined a sizable metro PD.  So I have perspective from various angles.

The speed and spread of lawlessness with be much faster than most will think.  Even now in “quiet” times LE staffing is usually based on the lowest number of officers to reasonably handle a “normal” day.  Any event(s) beyond “normal” immediately overwhelm on-duty forces.  Planned events like anarchists protesting the latest capitalist conference allow time to plan for enough ON-DUTY personnel (plus resources from other agencies) to be available when violence breaks out.

In most major metro areas there are areas the police routinely avoid because they’re too hazardous.  The violent elements in these areas are constantly looking to explode their violence at a moment’s notice when the opportunity happens.  And when it happens it will spread like a ruptured gasoline storage tank afire.  LE forces will be quickly overwhelmed and retreat to a safe place/bunker for self-preservation.

Most LEO’s have families and a desire for self-preservation.  If the collapse involves monetary problems (like no paychecks) the officers will not be reporting to duty, they’ll be protecting their own.  When this happens the initial violent outbreaks will mushroom like a nuclear reaction.  If the officers are being paid yet, they’ll set up a “containment perimeter” IF they have enough manpower…. which is highly unlikely in a regional or national SHTF scenario.

On other really scary thought I never see mentioned is…. what happens to the tens of thousands of violent criminals in prisons??

In a farming community where religion/moral values are generally much higher than urban dwellers, the problems of violence will be much reduced.  Plus everyone usually knows each other so its harder to want to take advantage of them.  One tip for urbanites…..farmers are not working their butts off to feed the city slickers (who’ve been ridiculing them for years as hicks, etc) and they certainly will not welcome the urbanites showing up during a crisis.

We asked Dan about his comments and background, and he told us a bit more about how he has formed the views he has – and, let’s face it, thirty years in a major metro police department and retiring as a lieutenant gives him a lot of credibility, particularly on police related operational issues and on matters to do with how people will (mis)behave when given half a chance to do so.

Now that he can ‘tell it like it is’ we asked him in particular about something that opinions widely vary on – will the police bravely ‘man the battlements’ and fight to the last man in a failing and doomed effort to save civilization, or will they adopt – as he suggests above – a ‘my family first, everyone else second’ approach when they see the inevitability of a city’s collapse.

Dan replied :

When I first started on the PD in the 70′s I was stuck in the Comm room and on boring nights I’d actually read the Civil Defense binders (HUGE things) full of detail, much theoretical.  For example, upon receiving alert of a nuke attack we were supposed to call a long list of elected officials and city unit directors etc.  We all knew it’d be a total waste of time to call these clueless government people because all they’d do is panic and babble on the phone asking US what to do!

We (cops) talked openly in the Comm Room about what we’d do and we decided we’d immediately leave our posts and spend our remaining time with family.  The point being alerting totally clueless and incompetent “leaders” would do nothing except add to the panic and confusion over which we (cops) would have ZERO control over.

It is important to understand how much we can learn from past ‘lessons’ with breakdowns in cities (in the case of the US, the L.A. riots being a prime example) and how much we have to adjust for a future breakdown of society.

We suggest that the big difference is that in past events, the problem has been successfully contained to a restricted region, and the police have had, in effect, virtually unlimited reinforcements and resupply, and there has never been any question of what the ultimate outcome would be – of course law and order would triumph.

But in a future society-destroying event, none of this applies.  The police will have no resupply or reinforcement, and problems will break out in multiple locations.

We agree with Lt. Dan that very quickly, the police will see the unwinnable nature of the contest and will switch from attempting to defend a disintegrating society from itself, and will focus instead on attempting to ensure the safe survival of themselves and their immediate family and friends.

Summary

Lt. Dan puts it very vividly when he writes

[Violence] will spread like a ruptured gasoline storage tank afire

This means that if you have a GOOD plan and a retreat to go to, you need to be ready to activate this sooner than you might have otherwise hoped for.  As soon as you hear the first word of lawlessness, rioting, looting, and general disorder breaking out, you should accept that this will spread like wildfire across the entire city, and leave as quickly as you can.

Oh – one more unsettling thought.  How will you learn that violence has broken out in another part of the city if the internet is down, and radio and television stations are also down?  Even if some broadcasters remain in service, they’ll probably have limited sources of information and it might take a while for them to become appraised of events and to then broadcast them.

It is also reasonable to guess that broadcasters will be asked ‘not to spread panic’ and so initial reports of violence breaking out might be downplayed or omitted entirely.

Choosing when to bug-out is a difficult but essential issue.  You need to be willing to leave before it becomes too late, and with inertia and resistance to change and desperate hope all encouraging you to delay your decision, you need to fight these tendencies.  Better to leave ‘too soon’ and return back again some time later, safely; than to leave it too late and suffer the consequences.

We talk about the issues to do with making your bug-out decision here.

http://codegreenprep.com/2013/05/cities-will-collapse-even-sooner-than-we-fear/

15 thoughts on “Cities Will Collapse Even Sooner Than We Fear

  1. On April 29th in Virginia Beach, 40,000 blacks descended on the area all
    at once with shots being fired, stabbings, physical attacks, robberies.
    The numerous frantic calls to 911 were unanswered. The police were
    over-whelmed. Business’ closed their doors. Local reporting but no
    reports by MSM.. This can happen just about anywhere.

    1. Also live in virginia beach. Funny thing is even though it was only about four miles away from our home we had no idea what was going on, it didn’t effect us at all. Morale is i guess if you stay at home or in your immediate neighborhood you should be ok. If the trouble comes to you then you have a choice flee quickly or hunker on down. There could be trouble close to you but if you lay low (as in on the floor if gunshots ring out just being low and flat could save you) you should be ok. There are a multitude of scenarios. Go with your instincts!

      1. Agree. Things are heating up but not being reported.
        Even where I live, basically secluded area by mtns.,
        incidents are occurring. A friend of mine who was
        retuning from Savannah via I-16, was stopped by a
        State Trooper, she had a .32 in her glove compartment; the Trooper told her “you need a bigger gun”. I am surprised you heard no commotion in the background
        but I guess four miles and concrete disguises well.

  2. “This can happen just about anywhere”. Yeah, that’s why they want to disarm all of us. It’s back to the stone age.

  3. Of all the concerns for SHTF times my largest is fire.

    Living ina typical housing track once a home starts to burn others will follow. There will be no Fire Dept to show up and stop the initial fire. Violence is not the only thing that spreads like ‘wild fire’.

    Living right on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada (jsut west of Lake Tahoe) there is a bunch of land had I wanted to ‘bug out’ but getting there and then doing what are large concerns for an entry level survialist type outdoorsman with a family. Simply put, it’s not an option.

    Medication is a personal concern as I must take them twice daily or my personal, internal version of SHTF begins. Not somehting I can stock up on – even then, for how long could I build a supply for…prescription meds are not readily available via leagal means. If they were narcotics the accessability would not be a problem lol

    Stay strong & stay smart – the foundation America was built upon.

  4. Stories like this always remind me of the blackout of 1977 in NYC, probably because that’s the only thing in my memory that I can relate to such an occurrence, but that was an eye-opening event, mainly for its sudden arrival out of nowhere.
    In less than a minute after the lights went out you could hear gunshots and glass breaking from several directions at once, and a minute before they went out, you would never have imagined that such a thing was possible.
    Tow-trucks were ripping the gates off the front of the stores, backing up through the storefront windows, and then loading up whatever they could grab before driving away.
    A cop car cruised along fifth avenue and announced over the P.A, speaker “anyone on the avenue is going to get shot”, but everyone ignored them and kept looting stuff. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it. People were running down my block with new TV’s, a married couple was carrying away a new sofa.
    By the next afternoon furniture was dragged out onto the sidewalk and people made themselves at home out there. They were having a good time even though all the beer was getting warm. It was like a party.

    That’s what I think will happen when this revolution gets started. People are going to pour out of their houses and unleash a lot of pent-up anger.

    1. I recall this on the news. Riots and looting every where.
      I think Ed Koch finally called in the National Guard.

  5. “He says that in known ‘hot spots’ in larger cities, the violence will start at once, and as soon as the violent offenders realize that the police response is inadequate (or totally missing) it will skyrocket in scope and extent.”

    If this is happening in multiple spots within the city, then yes, things will skyrocket. However if it is only in one area of the city and can be contained, things will not go haywire as the government will just send in unlimited paramilitary and DHS troops in to stop the unrest.

    From another perspective, you have to think about how many paramilitary/UN and DHS troops there are in the country VS how many areas are armed and causing civil unrest at the same time in order to understand whether the chaos will be contained or whether it will skyrocket, as well. Once again, as stated near the end of the article, that will also be hard to evaluate since any remaining broadcasters or reporters will be told to downplay the chaos in order to prevent further panic. Use your brains and decide for yourselves. Be a leader and take control of your situation based on the information and means that you have available or find yourself in the shitter.

  6. its already happening. the criminal element knows what’s coming. they’re already taking advantage of the economic downturn. walking down the street in broad daylight isn’t safe. people disappearing in our small city is escalating. to those with drug addictions don’t venture too far out of city limits, careful of the company you keep, and trust few. very little is being reported and much is being withheld from the public.

    1. here in Bullhead City, Arizona there were a couple dozen people gathered with signs to protest Monsanto today, and the police were watching them intently – looks like they were taking time off from illegally breaking into peoples’ residences. More on that later. Meanwhile in England, Muslims are marching with signs saying “British police go to hell”and the only people who have anything to fear from police there are the English Defence League trying to defend their homeland! In Stockholm while Muslims burn and loot, Swedes have to pay for the citations police leave on their burned-out cars!

  7. In a disaster most people say “what do I do?” Okay I’ll tell you what you can do right now. Go camping! Sounds so simple doesn’t it? But it’s true, think about it. When you go camping everything you need is with you, a tent for shelter, a sleeping bag, your water, Coleman stove and fuel, coffee, cup of noodles, Ramen noodles, tuna fish, cans of beans, your knife, toilet paper, shaving kit, good pair of hiking boots, extra underwear and socks, matches, and most important of all…your rifle and lots of ammo, because all this shit I just listed will be taken at gunpoint from you if you are not armed. Good luck.

  8. I was at the Los Angeles riots in April 1992, and everything this retired cop said is true, except that it will be worse than what he writes. You could feel it in the air. A power, a dark power which normally is latent or revealed in widely separated incidents, was unleashed. It lived in the air above us all. To have gone through that experience is to know we are one major incideent away from the pall of hell.

  9. Business’ whom have decided not to open during the “beach feast”
    in Miami were told that to not open will be considered discrimination.
    When one owns their own business they can open and close at will.
    Also, increased security measures are considered discrimination.

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