By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, August 11, 2014
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.
Alas, far too many conservatives have today taken a
different road, responding to the news instead by insistently and smugly
repeating a non sequitur. “Well,” these types have inquired on Twitter and
beyond, “what about black on black violence, huh?” Distilled into its purest
form, this request boils down to a scoff: “Why, pray, are the people of
Ferguson so worried about this unlovely
episode, when almost 500 black Americans die at the hands of other black
Americans every month?”
This is a peculiar and inappropriate response. Whatever
its cause, it is indisputably true that the United States has a problem with
blacks killing blacks. And yet this has absolutely nothing to do with the
question at hand, which is: “Did a police officer unjustifiably kill an unarmed
black man in Missouri?” It is feasible, is it not, to be worried about the
internecine violence in America’s inner cities and to want to get to the bottom
of an allegedly unwarranted shooting? So why the conflation? After all, whether
or not it is intentional, reacting to a community’s grief by raising an
entirely separate topic smacks largely of distraction — of reflexively throwing
up a roadblock to what is a legitimate line of inquiry in the hope that the
subject might swiftly be changed.
If the Right hopes to counter the Al Sharptons of this
world and pull their narratives apart, this is not the way to go about it.
Whatever historical and contemporary injustices black Americans face, they are
not in fact being habitually gunned down in cold blood by white-supremacist
cops, and nor are they faced any longer with routine “lynching” or quotidian
“vigilantism” or any of the other loaded and terrible words to which we are
subjected whenever something awful happens. Still, the way to fight such hyperbole
is to engage honestly with the topic and to acknowledge that — even when our
understanding of the facts is limited — incidents such as this open old and
real wounds. It is not to change or to dismiss the subject. Can it be any
surprise that many black voters believe conservatives are deaf to their
concerns when “this cop shot my unarmed son!” is met by so many with “but there
are lots of citizen murders in this city; let’s talk about that instead”?
Such conflations do violence to time-honored American
conceptions of law and liberty. The problems of black-on-black crime and the
alleged miscarriage of justice in Ferguson are discrete issues per se. But they
are philosophically separate, too. It remains the case that a life is a life,
and a murder is a murder — after a point, one doesn’t grieve more acutely if
one’s family is taken on purpose. Nevertheless, police shootings will always
play a trickier role in society because, by definition, they are carried out
under the imprimatur of the state. Even if the United States did not boast a
history in which blacks were routinely disfavored, beaten, and even murdered by
the governments that were ostensibly established to protect them, there would
still be something distinct about being killed or hurt by a man in uniform. No,
you are no less dead if your neighbor murders you. But you do enjoy a different
relationship with him — and it matters. As a rule, your neighbor does not exist
to protect you; he is not paid by the whole of the citizenry; he does not claim
to act in your name, or to treat everybody equally. And, if he commits an
illegal act, he will be charged by authorities and he will face a jury of his
peers that will first pronounce upon his guilt and then decide upon his
punishment. He, in other words, is subject to rules that are designed to help
you if he steps out of line; the state, by contrast, has very little above it.
Traditionally, conservatives like to ask “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” — who
guards the guardians? — and, too, to maintain a clear line of separation
between the public and the private spheres. One has to wonder what purpose can
be served by blurring that line, as so many have done in reaction to the news
from Missouri.
“Justice,” Benjamin Franklin suggested, “will not be
served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” There
is no virtue to playing judge, jury, and executioner before the facts are
known. Nor is there anything to be achieved by turning a dispassionate process
into a partisan game. No doubt, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Jordan
Davis, we will witness sects forming where they do not belong. Conservatives
should resist indulging in this at all costs. But they should also resist
appearing uninterested. By asking those who wish to talk about authority what
they think about civil society instead, many among us are giving off the
impression that there is no circumstance in which Franklin’s outrage is going
to be forthcoming — however clear-cut the guilt might be. The question of who
guards the guardians pertains now as keenly as it ever has. The Right’s answer
should be “we do” — and we’re happy to hang them high if we know that they have
transgressed.
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