I have to admit that I am weary of and even becoming a tiny bit bored by this sort of thing, but . . . here we go. Again. A white police officer shoots and kills a black suspect in the line of duty, is duly acquitted in a court of law, and . . . riots erupt in protest of the ruling. Again.
That this violent and unhinged reaction is related only to the races of the officer and the suspect rather than points of law seems a given. Again.
Demonstrators clashed with police officers Friday night in St. Louis after the acquittal of a white former police officer who was charged with murder last year for fatally shooting a black driver after a car chase.In a video tweeted after midnight Saturday, St. Louis police Chief Lawrence O’Toole said at least 23 people had been arrested as of 6 p.m., and 10 police officers had suffered injuries, including a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder.”Many of the demonstrators were peaceful. However, after dark, many agitators began to destroy property and assault police officers,” O’Toole said in a joint video statement with Mayor Lyda Krewson (D).O’Toole said the protesters assaulted police with bricks and bottles, and officers responded by using tear gas and firing pepper-spray balls as a “less lethal option.”Roughly 1,000 protesters descended on the mayor’s home, throwing rocks and breaking windows, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were met by about 200 police in riot gear who tried to disperse them with tear gas. The mayor did not appear to be home.
Burning an American flag does not signal disapproval of a single acquittal of a single police officer; it has a much broader context that cannot and should not be ignored. These rioting mobs intend to undermine, even overturn, the rule of law on which our country was, at least in part, founded.
One reporter tweets that the St. Louis mob of thugs came close to attacking him and that this was “the scariest moment in [his] career.”
Screech loudly enough, break enough windows, set fire to enough things, intimidate and assault enough reporters and innocent bystanders, and eventually, these violent mobs insist, “justice” will be done.
That “justice,” however, directly contradicts and undermines the rule of law, and as such, is the very definition of injustice. When race, not the alleged offense and evidence, is expected (demanded?) to be the key element in legal proceedings, we all lose.
Worse, when these perfectly normal legal proceedings are manipulated into condemnations of America herself and when enough people believe it, we are lost.
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