Rioters in Charlotte, N.C., and other cities across the country harm the cause of police reform more than they help it when they go on the rampage in the wake of police shootings.
The mob in Charlotte looted stores, assaulted journalists and possibly even shot each other. That is some response to what they claim is police violence against black people.
The proximate cause of this mayhem was the shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott, killed by Officer Brentley Vinson this week. Scott was black, and so is Vinson.
Scott’s family says he had been doing nothing other than reading a book in his car while waiting to pick up his son. Police say they found no book, but that Scott was holding a gun and refusing Vinson’s repeated demands that he put it down before he was finally shot. Witnesses at the scene have said he had a gun, and one witness’s photograph after the shooting shows a black handgun on the ground.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney, who is also black, said Thursday that video of the shooting, which has not been released, shows Scott holding a gun and refusing to put it down. It does not show him pointing the gun, he said, although that would not be necessary to justify the shooting. He added that he would not release the video.
This ugly incident highlights a weakness in either police procedure or North Carolina state law. Where the facts of a police confrontation are in dispute, police body cameras and dashboard cameras are supposed to settle the issue. Assuming the chief is telling the truth, shouldn’t the video footage have been released quickly and so, one hopes, have prevented people from being beaten up and shot?
But, for the sake of argument, let’s set aside debate over the unproven facts for a moment. Even if Scott was just holding a book and the shooting was unjustified, it does not make looting and criminal assault an acceptable form of protest. Violence does not “raise awareness” of anything except the criminality and extreme bad behavior of the rioters.
There’s especially no excuse for this kind of violence in a country where political speech is guaranteed to be free. The point about free speech is not just that it is free but also that it is speech. You can say what you want, but the corollary is that you have no reason perpetrate criminal violence. If you have the constitutional right to protest, as all Americans do, you are not denied legitimate avenues of political action, so you are not forced to take more extreme action.
It’s time for intellectually honest liberals to stop defending and attempting to justify or rationalize lawlessness as an acceptable response to police abuses. For news media — so often the handmaidens of leftist political fantasy — to refer to rioters as “protesters” or “demonstrators” when they are on camera committing violent crimes is disgraceful.
There are some bad policemen and there are also good ones who, faced with highly stressful situations, do bad things. But police all over America are reforming. And rioting has not made them change. Cameras have. Cameras recording police misconduct are what have pushed the public to demand reform.
Both black civilians’ demand for racial equality and police forces’ desire to keep order can cross the line into wrongdoing and criminality. We do not know yet whether Scott was wrongfully killed. But we already know that a man is dead from shooting during the protests, downtown Charlotte has been wrongfully smashed and other people have been wrongfully beaten by rioters.
Most of the nation will look at the state of emergency in North Carolina and will not think better of the cause of police reform. They will, rather, rightly think the rioters contemptible.
