By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, June 01, 2020
Protesters hit a defaced NYPD vehicle during a rally
against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd in Times Square
in New York City, May 30, 2020. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
I keep seeing public officials offer up this slogan:
And I keep wondering: Why? That “life is more valuable
than property” is, of course, absolutely true. But it’s also entirely
irrelevant in this context, because we are not discussing a killing that pitted
property against life. George Floyd was not murdered by a property developer or
killed to save a cathedral. He was killed by a bad cop. And no amount of
property damage is going to bring him back. So, yes, we should indeed be more
upset that George Floyd lost his life than that a local business was destroyed.
But we should nevertheless be upset by both. That arson is a lesser
crime than murder does not make rioting useful or virtuous — especially
given that rioting itself tends to lead to deaths at worst and to poverty and
heartbreak at best.
The mantra is particularly ill-fitting in this case,
because there is scant disagreement about the injustice of the proximate cause.
Almost everyone in America — Democrat, Republican, libertarian, socialist —
agrees that what happened to Floyd was appalling. Hell, most police
departments agree, and many are going out of their way to say so. As far as
I can see, almost nobody has said, “well, the killing was bad, but what
happened to Target was worse.” At whom, exactly, is the insistence aimed?
I have come across some people who are openly defending
the riots because they believe that they will lead to change. This is a
separate argument to Demings’s, although I suppose one could squint her words
into that meaning. Either way, those people are wrong. The most likely
consequence of these riots will be a diminishment in the number of
minority-owned businesses; a reduction in long-term investment in America’s
poorer areas; and, if history is any guide, an uptick in support for the sort
of politicians who are the least likely to support reform. As a matter
of amoral realpolitik — and the “riots work!” argument is an argument
from amoral realpolitik — the best way to ensure that life is deemed
valuable is to avoid property damage, not to engage in it.
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