This morning, the highest ranking police officer of the six charged in the Freddie Gray case, Lt. Brian Rice, was acquitted on all charges.
That makes the record of the State's Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, perfect. She has tried four officers on several counts each, ranging from homicide to dereliction of duty, and has failed to secure a single conviction. In 18 years in a prosecutor's office, I do not recall even one time that we charged multiple defendants in one episode and could not convict any defendant on any count.
I was one of the few conservatives who was willing to give Ms. Mosby a chance, notwithstanding her inauspicious beginning, starting with a glitzy courthouse "news conference" that resembled a campaign rally more than anything else. The circumstances of Gray's death were too suspicious and too fraught for me to conclude ab initio that no charges were warranted.
I now confess error. I suppose it's still possible that there was criminal wrongdoing somewhere in the police handling of Freddie Gray, but Ms. Mosby is too ideological, too inbred in a culture of racial snarling, and, frankly, too much of an amateur to prove anything.
That is per se sufficient for her to wrap it up and drop the remaining cases (although I doubt her ego and pride can tolerate this now-obvious outcome). But I don't want to end this entry without adding one more note, something that needs to be said.
This fourth consecutive failure to convict a police officer in a politically-rigged prosecution comes less than 24 hours after three Baton Rouge officers were gunned down in the street. It comes a matter of days after five others were lured by following a supposedly "peaceful" BLM rally in Dallas, only -- once the rally reached its destination -- to be gunned down from ambush.
If the police do not view themselves as under attack across the country, they would have to be blind. The evidence is not merely statistical (although that too). Just pick up your morning paper.
A country that attacks and intimidates the people it hires to protect it will soon enough regret is foolishness. I don't think serious observers can any longer doubt that one of the main reasons murder is surging across the country -- with a shocking increase of 17% last year in our nation's 50 largest cities -- is that the police, under the weight of a toxic culture and an (at best) conflicted political leadership, are pulling back.
One thing that I had hoped would give pause to the ideologues who lead the anti-police bansheeism is the disproportionately black color of the corpses in the growing pile of murder victims. But I see it is not to be. The claim that disparate impact against minorities motivates police critics turns out to be a delusion. There is no disparate impact as dreadful as the growing mound of black bodies, and it still doesn't matter.
So once again, I am compelled to confess error. It was never primarily about racial grievance. It was about grievance for its own sake -- about pelting and mocking and yoking America with so much guilt and moral confusion that it would stand in shamed idleness while one of its strengths -- its black population -- is decimated by thugs it has lost the will to control.
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