After a day of peaceful protests on the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri erupted in violence last night as shots were fired by rival protest groups and then at police. The attacks are being condemned as a distraction from the effort to use the anniversary as a way to provoke conversations about race, inequality and police violence. But the problem here is the same as it has been throughout the last year. While racism is a real problem, the effort to demonize law enforcement — something that was sadly encouraged by the rhetoric about the topic by President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder — created an war on law enforcement that hurts African-Americans and other minorities as much if not more than it does the cops.
Each successive incident in which an officer kills someone that is used as an excuse for more violence and rioting feeds a narrative of police violence even if, as the evidence ultimately proved in Ferguson, that the shooting was justified. But the false narrative of a war on young black men is not only distracting the country from the real chronic challenges facing America’s inner cities such as terrible public education and economic stagnation. But it is also making it impossible to cope with growth of crime, as the cops are rightly afraid of being targeted by both violent thugs and an alliance of radical activists, liberal media, and politicians eager to make them scapegoats. Rather than making “black lives matter” as the demonstrators’ slogan goes, all that has accomplished in the last year by those promoting this cause is to create a political movement whose sole goal is to further divide Americans and to justify a war on police.
The Ferguson anniversary is a classic example of how the facts about a case can be lost amid the general desire to seize upon an incident and exploit it for political purposes. While Brown’s death was regrettable, it has never seemed to matter much to those seeking to use it to prove that America is irredeemably racist that there was no reason to consider the case anything but one of a cop defending himself against a dangerous person who had already violated the law. That the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra adopted by so many public figures was based on a fiction was quickly forgotten, if, indeed, it was ever acknowledged. That isn’t true of every incident in which police have been criticized — often correctly — for excessive violence. But for those determined to interpret everything solely through the lens of racial tension the facts or the racial identity of many of the police involved (as was true in the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore) have never mattered as much as the need to indict the nation as a whole.
Though a conversation about the legacy of institutionalized racism that is part of our past would be helpful, that is not what the “black lives matter” movement is interested in conducting. What they want is a politicized crusade against police. But, as we have seen in both New York and Baltimore, the decisions by politicians to curry favor with left-wing cop critics has led to an increase in violence on the streets. While racial hucksters like Al Sharpton who promote the false narrative of police as the enemies of African-Americans are feted in the White House and on cable television, African-American communities need vigorous law enforcement action to protect them against a rising tide of crime.
At last week’s Republican presidential debate, candidate Ben Carson reminded us that as neurosurgeon he viewed the emphasis on race as an absurdity because it is our brains, not our skin or hair that determines who we are. While in the past, that false emphasis on race did produce a society where black lives didn’t matter, the sea change in America over the last half-century since the triumph of the Civil Rights movement has changed that. The United States in which we currently live is a nation where the president and the attorney general are both black. Jim Crow is something in the history books, not our present. African-Americans still face terrible problems, but they can’t be understood, let alone solved, by an obsessive focus on race or a false narrative about the police that is rooted in a political mindset of the past.
But that truth is not something that those determined to shout down even the most liberal politicians (as Bernie Sanders has recently learned to his sorrow) in the name of “black lives matter” worry about. This movement doesn’t seem to care that much about the lives of actual black people being victimized by crime or black police officers under siege in the communities they are trying to protect. Instead, it has given cover to violence such as the awful scenes we saw last night in Ferguson. The fact that the media is still choosing to treat Ferguson as an anniversary of an act of prejudice rather than a sad tale of a cop compelled to use force was already problematic. But much of the Ferguson anniversary coverage seems to be part of an effort to distract us from the reality of crime and of liberal economic and education policies that further inequality. Instead of supporting police and helping to improve their training, the left that kowtows to these thugs is enabling the targeting of law enforcement officers. The sad irony is that the left’s war on police is not only endangering cops, it’s hurting African Americans.
