Police in Los Angeles don’t know who shot two officers sitting in a parked patrol car. It’s pretty safe to assume that the suspect was motivated by anti-police sentiment, even if it’s too early to ascribe any particular political motivation. Perhaps there was no political motivation at all.
It remains that the ambush occurred in a political and social environment that has turned the legitimacy of law enforcement into a central concern. That’s why it’s hard to make sense of the shooting without remembering that months of anti-police demonstrations have created an environment more open to justifying assaults and even attempts on officers’ lives as a method of “fighting back.”
A recent Washington Post report on 100 days of protest in Washington speaks to this, saving its most revealing nugget for the last paragraph. What a revelation it is.
“I was out here fighting for peace, asking people not to be aggressive, saying, ‘Don’t do anything,’ and then, I got shot at by rubber bullets,” activist Arianna Evans told reporter Marissa Lang. “Then, I got tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, and it showed me that crime is a social construct because [the police] can openly violate our rights and that’s not illegal, so now, I feel like it’s well within our rights to fight back as hard as we can.”
Evans continued, “People might say I’ve been radicalized, but you know what? I have absolutely been radicalized — and it’s the government’s fault.”
This onion has many layers, but the first thing to recognize is that Evans explicitly confirms the interpretation that many onlookers have developed: These demonstrations and riots have largely become self-perpetuating events with no fixed end in sight aside from vengeance and provocation. Apparently, it is not self-evident that arson, vandalism, assaults on police, and the like have no legal protection — despite what protesters may “feel.”
The whole strategy looks like one of Saul Alinsky’s rules in action. “‘If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive,” Alinsky posited. “Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.”
That has been the story in Portland all summer. Anti-police demonstrations have devolved into riots, assaults, attempted murders of police — early in the unrest, rogues barricaded the doors of a police precinct and tried to burn it down with officers inside — and other nightly crimes. Oregon’s governor sat by for months sympathizing with the underdog demonstrators before speaking out with force. Portland’s mayor spent months doing the same and, just last week, as commissioner of the police force, banned the use of tear gas to disperse rioters without giving the police force an alternative.
According to the Washington Post story, Evans “can’t wait to go to Portland.” Why is that? It’s not because her message will be better communicated there or because injustices in Portland abound more than in other cities. It’s because that’s where the action is and where demonstrators have gotten the most sympathy from local officials.
Score-settling with the police is not new, though it is seemingly gaining mainstream steam. If it is within your rights to fight back, going from shooting mortars at police to shooting them with actual guns becomes less of a jump.
