Vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s radicalism is evident in her support for a fund aimed at bailing out people arrested for criminal activity during protests in Minnesota.
Unfortunately, after George Floyd’s death in police custody, some of the protests gave way to criminal behavior. Property damage, looting, arson, and violence are not made morally justifiable by the supposedly moral cause of objecting to an injustice. Two wrongs, of course, do not make a right, and mobs are never right to victimize innocents (bystanders, shop owners, neighborhood residents, or honest police officers just doing their jobs) in the course of the protesters’ temper tantrums.
Yet, that’s what Harris effectively encouraged.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund is an organization that since 2016 has raised money to provide bail for arrestees awaiting trial. It boasts about making its bailout aid dependent only on the accused person’s ability to pay, without regard to how serious an offense was involved in the “pre-trial charge.” Thus, MFF makes it possible for even dangerous people to be released back onto the streets. Indeed, MFF money has been used to secure pretrial release even for those booked for sex crimes, violent felonies, and even murder.
MFF’s own website makes it clearly identifiable as an organization with a radical outlook, dedicated to radical action. It accuses the entire criminal justice system of being deliberately “designed to maintain and uphold white supremacy.” It wants to “dismantle” that system and work for “wide-scale decarceration,” which means releasing most criminals back onto our streets.
And with specific reference to the Floyd protests, MFF repeatedly refers to the street action as “an uprising” which will last for “weeks and months to come.” If someone is “detained while fighting for justice,” MFF prioritizes that person’s release — suggesting that the “end” of justice as defined by these radicals justifies almost any criminal means used to “fight” for it.
This is dangerous stuff, antithetical to the moral American tradition of justice under a system of representative law, rather than justice secured by deliberately undermining the duly enacted laws. Yet, this is the sort of organization for which Harris energetically raised money.
Worse, there’s something especially wrong with Harris’s impulse to want bail provided in blanket fashion for those arrested during protests that immediately devolved into riots, with rampant looting and arson. Mob rule destroys civil society. And while it is possible in the midst of chaos for police to make mistaken arrests, and while some harsh police responses can be quite obviously unwarranted, the simple reality is that most of those actually arrested during riots are surely among the most heinous of offenders.
Amid chaos, far more people get away with blatantly unlawful acts than the number that police can possibly detain. Police are not likely to waste time on any except those they witness committing the most serious offenses, nor are jail authorities likely to require bail for less serious violations. The odds are that most people for whom bail was required are accused of committing openly violent acts.
Yet, Harris advocated not some sort of targeted relief for people who were wrongly arrested or for people whose individual cases made bail requirements particularly unreasonable. Instead, she touted a blanket bail-relief program for “those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” as if simple, peaceful protesters, not rioters, were being arrested and held for exorbitant bail.
This sanctification of “protesters,” to the detriment of a community’s safety, is an egregiously warped attitude. Those who hold it should not be even within protesting distance of the Oval Office.
