“What do we want?”
“Dead cops.”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
To the protestors of the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee NYC, who were videotaped doing this chant in Manhattan earlier this month, congratulations. You got exactly what you wanted. A crazed man who had attended such rallies, already on the run for an attempted murder, felt inspired to (as he put it on social media) “give pigs wings” by shooting two police officers in the name of social justice — two random officers, sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn, eating lunch.
Officer Rafael Ramos’ son will spend this Christmas mourning his dead father. Officer Wenjian Liu’s new bride will ring in the new year alone, a widow after just three months of marriage.
A third victim, of course, is the worthy cause of police accountability. Most who support it, Left and Right, would never dream of killing a policeman, and most would never be caught dead uttering a chant like the one above. But police reform now rests in peace because someone took just a bit too far the far-left-wing protest philosophy that the system is inherently unjust and must be torn down in order to fix structural societal problems.
Do not blame President Obama for what happened. He was right to point out that blacks are not making up the problems they face in interactions with the police. And he also got it exactly right the night a grand jury failed to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “[T]here’s never an excuse for violence,” Obama said that night, “particularly when there are a lot of people in goodwill out there who are willing to work on these issues.”
Obama was pointing out something many Americans take for granted — the rule of law, one of this nation’s hard-won blessings and in large measure the reason for American prosperity. The United States has a political system capable of addressing legitimate grievances and fixing them through a completely non-violent process.
To give one related example, the rule of law is what made black civil rights possible in the 20th century. It was restored after civil rights leaders, with their non-violent resistance, tugged at America’s conscience over the violence being visited on blacks in the Jim Crow South. Thanks in large part to their efforts, federal government finally stopped ignoring the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the nation changed for the better.
In contrast, those who would tear down the rule of law, even for the worthiest cause, only discredit themselves and jeopardize established rights. As Sir Thomas More famously said in A Man for All Seasons, the cutting down of the law in order to catch the devil is a fool’s pursuit. Once the laws are flattened and the devil turns around, “where would you hide, the laws all being flat?”
Despite the arsons in Ferguson and the irresponsible rhetoric of a few people there and in New York, most of those upset by police killings and hoping to increase police accountability understand this implicitly. Even if the established laws and legal processes do not always produce the results one wants or even the correct results in every instance, the rule of law is the only force capable in the long run of protecting citizens from bad cops.
Those who would tear down the rule of law — the professional protest crowd of the revolutionary socialists and anarchists, whose philosophy reached its logical conclusion in Brooklyn last weekend — cannot be allowed to derail the just cause of making the system hold bad cops accountable.
