Let’s start with the fact that the murderer had been arrested at least nineteen times (some reports say as many as thirty-one times), which means this is another in a sad list of crimes committed by felons “with a record as long as their arm” – who thus should probably never been on the street in the first place but should have been incarcerated or institutionalized for the safety of the public. Often, because judges and juries and lawyers and opinion-makers feel that it is unfair to hold them responsible for their crimes, career criminals or habitual violent offenders are spared lengthy sentences or have their charges “plea-bargained down.” Had this fellow been in prison, two families would be celebrating Christmas instead of mourning. But – sadly so – this type of thing happens way too frequently. We could avert many crimes if our legal system would put away habitual violent offenders for the length of their sentences.
Elected officials normally accept the decisions of juries and grand juries; even if they do not agree with them, they do not undercut them. Oh, sure – the federal government may start a civil rights suit if a decision is questionable – but they should not infer that a local court decision or judicial proceeding should be ignored. Yet, that is just what happened in both the Michael Brown case and the Eric Garner case. Two people – both of them African-American – died at the hands of Caucasian police officers. And what happened? It is not so surprising that the families rejected the adjudications that determined neither death warranted charges against the officers; or that activists did, or people in the news media did. It is shocking that the Mayor of New York City, the Attorney General of the United States and to a significant degree, the President of the United States all denounced the verdicts and made public statements justifying protests. Now – don’t misunderstand – we are not editorializing against protests; and we are not saying that the three officials mentioned in the previous sentence espoused violence; but they did not emphatically condemn it – and what condemnations they did make were conditional or qualified (which explains why the President “unconditionally condemned” the murder of the two officers. That adjective was used, we think, because his remarks on the riots and protests were more of the “we understand why you are doing it” than the “we strongly urge you to stop the violence” type of comment.)The confrontational tone taken by the “understanding” officials is worse than harmful – it may be dangerous as well. According to the FBI, in 2013, there were 6,261 black victims of murder in America. Did the President and Attorney General and Mayor of NYC mount public campaigns to end that horrible waste of life? No – yet the Mayor used the word “scourge” to describe the two deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and blamed them on “centuries” of racism; the Attorney General announced that, even if the grand jury in Ferguson was done, his investigation is not; and the President, while decrying violence and rioting, “understands” the motivation of the rioters. After weeks of riots and protests and vandalism and threats of violence, with the authorities either afraid to clamp down or so sympathetic to the protests that they did not want to take measures to bring them under control - the situation finally boiled over, and a deranged criminal, motivated by the circumstances, chose to murder police officers. Marches, some of them organized by Al Sharpton, were punctuated with chants of “What do we want? Dead cops!” Prominent athletes and celebrities exercised their legal right to protest in other ways – such as wearing t-shirts with slogans or making gestures before the game – but they perhaps did not grasp their full meaning. That is, a rejection of legal proceedings, and not merely a rejection, but one that escalated into a campaign of rioting (in cities far away from where the original incidents occurred) and general disrespect for the law.
Wise leadership at the time of the Ferguson decision and the Eric Garner decision could have allowed protests without turning a blind eye to the violence and hot rhetoric and vandalism and disruption. When top officials issue statements that convey the interpretation that “cops are racists,” the “justice system is unfair” and any form of protest is acceptable, we should not be surprised that a lot of people come to share those views, and by the time a few of them decide to take the law into their own hands, it may be too late to stop them.
The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were tragic. They chose a path of confrontation instead of cooperation, and they died because of it. How different things might be if the activists advised people to obey the police, rather than to challenge them.