“He’s got the sheriff and the whole police department in his pocket!” This brief statement by Red Webster, the day after Brad Wesley blew up his place of business, is pretty much the only word we hear regarding law enforcement in the town of Jasper, Missouri. No big news here: cops love rich authoritarians, film at eleven. But this isn’t even the Frank Wilhoit statement regarding conservatism, that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,” in action. In Jasper, there is no one whom the law either protects or binds. It’s fucking Mad Max out there. This is how a jumped-up bouncer and a mall developer can go at each other in roving gangs for weeks without anyone lifting a finger to stop them.

But apparently word has reached the sheriff and his deputies that their patron is in trouble—big trouble this time, the kind of trouble that goons can’t be relied upon to stop. Again, how news of a five-minute fracas in a mansion can spread across town so quickly that half a dozen outsiders can get there in time for the climax is beyond me. But there they are, and they want to know where “Brad” is (when I said Elizabeth is the only person in the film to call him “Brad,” I neglected his pet cop) and what the hell happened here.

What follows either exposes a gaping hole in American jurisprudence or explains why the cops have been so superfluous in this movie. One after another, the people who just murdered Brad Wesley—and who’ve given their guns to Red Webster to hide, which takes him all of about ten seconds if you’re wondering how hard he worked to do so—simply say that they didn’t see anything.

With no eyewitnesses, how could the sheriff possibly hope to bring charges against the five men standing around a bullet-ridden corpse in said corpse’s own basement? Need I remind you? No one saw anything! And if they say they didn’t see anything, well, stop the investigation right there and file this one under “unsolved mysteries.” Forget it, Sheriff. It’s Jaspertown.