Last night in Adelaide yet another police car was rammed in yet another car chase, after being pelted with objects from the car by four occupants fleeing from a liquor store raid.

No matter how cutting-edge innovative and humanistic justice officials may think they are being in giving these individuals chance after chance, they present themselves to the general public as imbeciles and expose public protection as a non-event.

Whether or not they consider that to be an unfair assessment of their efforts and their worth is irrelevant. It remains the right of the public to judge according to their own perception. Efforts by justice officials to change that perception have largely failed. The public mind is not quite so easily programmed. It perceives far more than some professionals give it credit for.

When street crime explodes justice officials blame it on a barrage of social factors without ever considering that failings on their own part may be resulting in unnecessary injury, death and property damage. Social control is a psychological thing. The public must believe in or it is lost. People cannot believe in the pile of rubbish we are currently witnessing.

Neither do we believe the arguments that are being flung in our faces. They are spurious and they amount sophistical reasoning.

They say "crime is a community problem and it has to be solved within the community". That statement is ultimately true, but what should it translate into? Should it mean the public have no right to protection? If so, it amounts to a reasonable argument being used as a clever dodge.

There is a disgusting accusation implicit in that statement. It is this. "You, as a victim of a heinous crime, are a part of a community that tolerates social injustices and inequalities and therefore you have no right to demand the incarceration or severe punishment of the offender who is themself a victim. The sin rests upon your own head".

Therefore, the death of a granny knocked down heavily onto the footpath during a savage bag snatch is her own fault. The government, courts and penal system were under no obligation to protect her against that. Therefore the knifing death of someone's son while he was being robbed of the expensive sneakers he worked for was his own fault. Therefore the brutal abduction and rape of someone's teenage daughter was her own fault etc. We are essentially being told that if inquality is tolerable then so is crime so don't complain, just look in the mirror.

It's not that we can't see the point, but we can also see where they are bending the argument to their own ends.

Each of us as an individual can do only the best we can towards being a decent citizen. None of us can wipe out inequality even if we find it abhorrent. It never escapes us that there are great failings common to people who live on society's bottom level but when we point that out and suggest that they themselves need to change we are rubbished for unfair criticism and told to shut up.

Jails are expensive. It is far cheaper for governments to let offenders out. If they are kept locked away governments can be held directly accountable for that. On the other hand, if a released offender kills or maims someone governments cannot be held directly accountable. It is therefore politically safer for governments to have offenders released even if they pose a danger to innocent and defenceless members of the community.

The public mind isn't stupid. It can gather these things. And it can also gather momentum to hold accountable governments, justice officials and lawyers who hide behind shabby arguments in order to protect and advance their own interests while the public are left at the mercy of dangerous offenders who roam free to threaten lives and property.