Letter 2 America for April 28, 2015

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Dear America,

Lest you labor under a false impression, I believe that police violence is not a racial problem per se, but rather is a problem with law enforcement in general.  I do not believe that because we hear nothing about cases with Caucasian, Asian or Latino victims, all victims of police brutality are African-American.  But over the past year we have been exposed to abuse of black arrestees on at least four occasions because those stories have become nation-wide news in each case, thus evoking in many the impression that racial prejudice is always the raison d'ĂȘtre in such cases; I know from experience that cops take liberties with white people too.  But that isn't the issue with which I am concerned today.  Rather, in two of these recent cases of apparent excessive force by police, the issues that should be addressed--police training, personnel processes that allow brutal people to carry badges and guns, the pervasive culture that favors abuse in some police departments and the psychology of the average cop relative to not just his professional duty, but his moral duty as well--have been obscured by this trend toward attribution to race as the primary cause of the police misconduct involved.  And the consequence in each of these two cases--Ferguson and now Baltimore--was not demonstrations, but race riots.

Unfortunately, such devolution of events from legitimate protest to not just lawless, but criminal behavior has two effects.  First is that it reinforces the syllogistic idea that all policemen and all police brutality are functions of racism, that only racism can cause such brutality and that all police are therefore racist. But the fact is that in at least two of the cases that have become fodder for the popular furor we are seeing, the victims were at least low-level criminals in the process of committing low level criminal acts.  Whether it was walking down the middle of the street and then resisting reasonable commands to stop doing so or selling "loosies" on the street, each victim passed through a threshold of cause for police to confront him in those two cases.  As to the most recent case in Baltimore, that of Freddy Gray, the victim was characterized even by some of his friends as a low level drug dealer, and he happened to be carrying a switchblade at the time of his arrest.  None of that is to say that there was cause for the police involved to execute the victims on the street...or in the transport vehicle as in Freddy Gray's case.  It is to say that the victims were not heroes or saints; they were not innocent victims, though victims they might have been.  It is not the case that every police officer is a criminal at heart, nor is it the fact that every time someone gets beaten by a cop, it is the cop's fault and not his own.  When you act outside the law, you should expect to be confronted by law enforcement, and when that occurs, resistance to the lawful application of legal authority in the form of arrest should be  expected to result in violence.  While brutality is unacceptable in our society, physical restraint, and yes, necessary and appropriate violence, is sometimes a part of law enforcement, but it may be that obscuring that fact with racial motifs serves a disproportionately deleterious purpose in American social discourse.

When the movement represented by protest beatifies people of dubious character, and the result is demonstrations that lead to violence and criminality like looting and arson, the movement itself is discredited because it looks to the world as though that movement is the criminal mob within it, and that the condemnation of racism is just a gambit for lawlessness.  All that being said, it is impossible for the legitimate movement against police misconduct and racism to prevent mobs of malfeasant miscreants from infiltrating them, but it is not impossible for them to audibly condemn the misconduct of some among them, and to support the police in their efforts to apprehend them and separate them from a legitimate social movement.  The only way for the righteous movement against racism and police misconduct to validate itself is for its leadership to point out the flawed characters who have become emblematic of what they are trying to do--and by that I mean not just the criminal mob within the protest that appears on the nightly news, but the criminal element that becomes the victims inspiring the cause as well--so that neither can  taint its legitimate and noble purpose.  In the case of Michael Brown of Ferguson for example, the victim may not have deserved to be shot to death, though the resolution of that issue in favor of the police officer who did the shooting seems more than credible to almost everyone who examines the evidence with an open mind, but he was a bully and a thug as demonstrated by contemporaneous video of him robbing an old man in a convenience store.  Now, his parents are suing on his behalf, but that suit, even if it yields a recovery for the family, does no service to the movement for racial justice in this country, and that case, along with the rioting in both Ferguson and Baltimore connected with it and the death of Freddie Gray, serve no purpose but to discredit the quest for vindication of principles that are American to the core and have no race or creed.

We live in a period of great social injustice both economically and socially.  There is no way to separate that injustice from these events in that economics and the social Darwinism that plague us are at the root of much of what passes for nothing but human decadence, but when we try to move in the right direction, we do not need distractions and misdirection in the form of opportunism and venality.  In both Ferguson and Baltimore, some people...black people...have vocally protested the hijacking of their protests and their neighborhoods by outsiders who are seizing an opportunity to rob and burn, and they are the real heroes here.  Not Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.

Your friend,

Mike 

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 28, 2015 4:39 PM.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on April 28, 2015 4:39 PM.

Letter 2 America for April 24, 2015 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for May 19, 2015 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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