St. Louis....... There is no good news from Ferguson, Mo. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown is dead – shot “more than a couple of times” by a police officer who may or may not have been pushed into his patrol car and may or may not have been involved in a struggle over a pistol. Incensed residents have taken to rioting, to sacking private businesses that had nothing whatsoever to do with the incident, and, in some cases, to burning them to the ground. Like clockwork, the professional grievance industry has announced its intention to descend vaingloriously upon the scene. And, in some quarters of the media, pundits have begun to pretend that America’s cops are routinely gunning down unarmed young black men for their own pleasure. The sensible responses to these developments strike me as these: (1) To acknowledge that justice is a process — and a slow one at that — and that we should all wait for the facts of the case before reacting too vehemently. Police officers are no less fallible than any other human beings, and, as we should all sadly know by now, there are many among them who are unconscionably trigger-happy. Nevertheless, presumption of innocence applies to men in uniform, too, and to pretend otherwise is to abandon those virtuous institutions that keep us civilized. Easy as it might sound to recommend, patience and restraint are necessary here; (2) To insist that rioting is in almost all cases unacceptable, and that this is especially so when the targets of violence are wholly unrelated to the matter at hand. As the deceased’s own family has established — with palpable exasperation — nobody’s interests here can possibly be served by third parties taking goods from private stores and then burning them down; (3) To groan at the news that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are gearing up to involve themselves in the mess, and to note that no good can come of their particular brand of self-aggrandizing rabble-rousing; (4) to push back gently against the notion that the United States is currently afflicted by an epidemic of white-on-black butchery.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 20:15:25 +0000
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