When Governments Fail, Private Initiative Is the Solution

In a disturbing number of incidents in recent years, local governments have withheld critical services, resulting in destruction and death. Consider, for example, the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022.

Law enforcement officers waited for 77 minutes inside Robb Elementary School before confronting and killing the active shooter who murdered 21 people—19 children and two teachers—and trapped 36 people in a room, many of whom were shot and dying. In the final incident review by the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland called the law enforcement response “a failure,” but “criminal” is likely more accurate. Two of the responding officers will go on trial in Texas in October 2025.

In October 2022, property and business owners located in “the Zone”—a vast dystopian homeless encampment of more than 1,000 people in downtown Phoenix, Arizona—filed a lawsuit contending that city officials maintained a public nuisance in the Zone by refusing to enforce their own laws and provide critical services. The plaintiffs argued that the lack of services destroyed businesses and devastated neighborhoods and livelihoods.

The trial court agreed with the plaintiffs and in March 2023 the judge ordered the city to clean up the Zone and to end its “decision to forego enforcement of criminal, health, and other quality of life statutes” in the Zone, including effectively making it “off-limits to [law] enforcement.” The city stopped enforcing laws against public sex and drug use, defecation and urination on public and private property, and even violent crimes (two dead bodies, including a burned baby, were found in the Zone). An Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the trial court in August 2024.

Note that instead of helping residents immediately, city officials fought the lawsuit and appealed the initial decision. The city fought its own residents in order to withhold police, fire, and sanitation services and maintain a lawless area within downtown Phoenix. Let that sink in. While pondering that disaster, consider the attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025.

U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, flying an Islamic State flag, drove a Ford F-150 Lightning truck into crowds on Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more. Jabbar was able to pull off this mass murder because the system of bollards, vertical posts, was not deployed in the French Quarter. The system was being replaced after years of malfunctions prior to the Super Bowl in February. Reuters reports that the new bollards are crash-rated to only 10 mph making them useless against “vehicle attacks at moderate-to-high speeds.” So the mayor wants yet another evaluation of the bollard system in the French Quarter.

A 2019 report, commissioned by the City of New Orleans, by security consulting company Interfor International, “strongly” recommended “bollard mobilization to be fixed/improved immediately” on Bourbon Street. At the time of the review the existing bollard system either did not work or was not used. The report also found that “internecine politics and bickering” among a “patchwork” of law enforcement agencies, security companies, and politicians within the state-created French Quarter Management District hindered the “good efforts of [business and resident] stakeholders” to fix security problems in the district. After releasing its report, Interfor never heard from city officials.

Over in Maui, Hawaii, county officials in Lahaina, failed to provide critical services in the run up to the deadly August 8, 2023, wildfire. As I explained in “The Lahaina Wildfire Holds Lessons for California and Other Western States” (San Diego Union-Tribune and Orange County Register, November 7, 2024), an important contributor to the fire was an area “overgrown with dry, combustible brush, grasses, and short trees” on land owned by the Kamehameha Schools, the state’s largest private landowner. That land was the source of the “rekindled” afternoon fire that destroyed most of Lahaina.

The blaze was the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century, with at least 102 people killed, 2,207 structures damaged or destroyed (86 percent residential), and property damage approaching $6 billion.

In 2019, the Maui County Fire Department ordered the school to cut and maintain a 30-foot-wide fire break where the wildfire erupted in 2023. That fire break was not maintained. Also, in 2020, the school failed a fire brush inspection at that location but there is no record that school officials ever cleared the brush.

When questioned by reporters in October 2024, Maui County Fire Chief Brad Ventura said, “When we give a notice of warning, followed by a notice of violation, we give direct orders on what to do to the land [regarding fuel mitigation] and to maintain it. Therefore, we shouldn’t have to go back to babysit lots over and over again.”

Enforcement of a notice, however, is as critical as issuing the notice. Ventura seems ignorant of the urgent need to consistently remove excess fuels, especially in the aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the California town of Paradise, and the 2021 Dixie Fire, which destroyed Greenville.

Maui County officials failed to thoroughly inspect private property for excessive fuel loads, failed to issue sufficient notices of warning and violation, and failed to ensure that the fuel reduction work was performed.

It is bad enough when local officials fail to do their jobs and withhold critical services that result in preventable tragedies. Those same officials, however, deploy their political power to block independent initiatives and private competition that would prevent or solve the problem. When local officials refuse to do the job they reserve for themselves, and jealously protect it against competition, that leaves little recourse for local residents and customers.

It is understandable if victims’ families think that a private security agency contracted by the children’s parents at Robb Elementary, or even a volunteer armed “grandfather security team” inside the school, would have prevented the massacre. An independent “business district sanitation and safety team” in Phoenix would have prevented the lawless hellscape of the Zone to emerge. And a “French Quarter security district” consisting of residents, businesses, and property owners—not bickering government factions that “all hate each other”—would have deployed an effective bollard system since 2019 in the French Quarter, an area less than one square mile. In each case, private alternatives would have provided better service.

Lahaina residents would be better served with a system that allows them to file an action directly with a local magistrate for an expedited, adversarial hearing to obtain legal authorization to clear fire-prone vegetation on private property. The treatment bill would be sent directly to the property owner, with liens attached to the property for those who refuse to pay. Long term, converting traditional neighborhoods into homeowners’ associations with property managers to enforce vegetation rules is an even better solution.

As these cases indicate, wrestling control from governments will not be easy nor fast. Every success, however, will bring residents and customers superior services, free from the ineffective and politicized status quo, while broadly fostering a Tocquevillian culture of private initiative.

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