Time has an opinion piece titled, "Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting." Its closing paragraph reads:
Instead of tearing down other human beings who are acting upon decades of pent-up anger at a system decidedly against them, a system that has told them they are less than human for years, we ought to be reaching out to help them regain the humanity they lost, not when a few set fire to the buildings in Ferguson, but when they were born the wrong color in the post-racial America.
I won't go into the obvious difficulties with riots. I want to make only one point -- that the Ferguson riot had next to nothing to do with the expression of dissent, about racial issues or any other.
You don't smash the store windows of private businesses and rush in to gobble up bunches of sweatshirts and sneakers and video games because you've got a political grievance. You do it because it's neat, it's exhilarating, and most of all, because you can -- because a weak, self-flagellating culture has handed you an excuse; because the cops are too intimidated by "militarization" talk to do anything; and because, just to be clear, stealing stuff is easier than buying it.
So, Bill, what changed between the forceful police response in Watts in 1965 and the weak-kneed protection (of property) by the government in Ferguson in 2014? Is it simply that "the cops are too intimidated by 'militarization' talk to do anything," or is there something else at play?
paul --
I think the first thing we should understand is how weak-kneed the police response in Ferguson actually was. Mike Rushford just put up a post about that. The response was pathetic, and it had considerable costs to law-abiding small business owners.
As to the causes of the weak-kneedness, I suspect there are several. The one that came most quickly to my mind was the rise of the libertarian chant that the police are "over militarized" and too eager to use their now-massive force. This was all over libertarian websites in response to the first Ferguson riot when Michael Brown was killed. There was, to my knowledge, no similar libertarian movement in the time, now almost 50 years ago, of the Watts riots.
I suspect a second cause was the intervention of Eric Holder. I am not privy to the communications between Holder and Gov. Jay Nixon (D-MO), but I'd be surprised, if, in light of the widely spread liberal criticisms of the police response the first time, Holder did not urge Nixon to stand down now. Predictably, this proved to be a bad idea. As the rioting and looting spread, Nixon was compelled to show more force. By then, of course, it was too late for many store owners.
Third on my list is the rise of political correctness. It's now considered A Really Big No-No to say that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime, even though everyone in the field knows it's true. Thus the idea that force should be visibly displayed as a deterrent to an almost exclusively black riot was considered Something Not To Be Mentioned, much less something to be undertaken.
Below this, and more toxic and dangerous, is the idea -- still fringe but growing from what I've seen -- that the rioting is not unambiguously wrong. (I put up an entry about this today). Amerika has it coming -- coming for its years of racist oppression.
The fact that those who did the oppressing are now mostly in cemeteries counts for nothing. Ditto with the idea that civilized life requires settling grievances without violence. Also walked past is the central fact my entry notes, to wit, that the riots are not a political act at all, not in the normal sense. They're party time for a bunch of criminals.
In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged the probable difficulty of obtaining a conviction but voiced the following criticism:
"[T]he goal of criminal law is to be fair—to treat similarly situated people similarly—as well as to reach just results. McCulloch gave Wilson’s case special treatment. He turned it over to the grand jury, a rarity itself, and then used the investigation as a document dump, an approach that is virtually without precedent in the law of Missouri or anywhere else. Buried underneath every scrap of evidence McCulloch could find, the grand jury threw up its hands and said that a crime could not be proved. This is the opposite of the customary ham-sandwich approach, in which the jurors are explicitly steered to the prosecutor’s preferred conclusion. Some might suggest that all cases should be treated the way McCulloch handled Wilson before the grand jury, with a full-fledged mini-trial of all the incriminating and exculpatory evidence presented at this preliminary stage. Of course, the cost of such an approach, in both time and money, would be prohibitive, and there is no guarantee that the ultimate resolutions of most cases would be any more just. In any event, reserving this kind of special treatment for white police officers charged with killing black suspects cannot be an appropriate resolution."
That does sound right to me.
It's hilarious that Toobin thinks the problem with the grand jury is that it had TOO MUCH evidence.
For years, the defense bar has been yelping that the prosecutor subverts justice by presenting just a sliver of the available evidence. But once that self same defense bar smells cop blood in the water, all that gets thrown overboard, and they condemn exactly what they've spent years demanding.
Can anyone spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y???