Well, there is a hierarchy of responsibilities for the government.
I would say that, generally speaking, when people talk about a rule-of-law state, they're talking about a constitutional state in which the primary responsibility of the government is to observe the constitutional limits for anything that it might want to do. It would be very easy to address crime by rounding up suspects and executing them without trial, but we can't do that within our constitutional state because of the existing constitutional limitations. Observing those limitations is deemed to be of higher importance than addressing any problem, however pressing.