Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:
(1) Why are the players protesting? Police brutality? To bring attention to Black Lives Matter? Trump? Institutional racism? Capitalism? Ask 10 different NFL players and you’ll probably get 5 different answers.
More confusing still: When should the protests be over? Once you start protesting open-ended societal problems there’s no obvious endpoint. The criminal justice system isn’t going to be perfected tomorrow, or next week, or by the time today’s NFL rookies retire. And even if we did fix the justice system, there would be other large-scale societal woes. Why not protest income inequality? Or the disparate racial impacts of abortion?
Protests ought to be organized with bright-line goals and natural endpoints. Otherwise kneeling for the national anthem becomes like wearing pink to “raise awareness” about breast cancer: It goes on for forever (and loses meaning over time).
(2) That said, there are non-crazy reasons why NFL players might protest on the broader subject of police misconduct, which is where this story kind-of, sort-of began.
The current unrest began with the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, but that case was always an imperfect cause celebre: Brown wasn’t an innocent bystander, and it wasn’t clear that the police acted poorly. But even as the Ferguson story was unfolding there plenty of other examples of police behaving badly. The Eric Garner story sure as hell should have freaked out anyone in the country who worries about having a police force that is (a) empowered to kill for almost no reason; and (b) is not held to a reasonable degree of accountability by the other pillar of the criminal justice system.
(3) Anyone who looks around the country and believes that black folks don’t have a totally different experience with the police than white folks is simply kidding himself.
There are probably a hundred reasons for this, including: the proliferation of handguns (I say this as a factual matter, not a moral judgment), usage of illegal drugs, and actuarial facts about violence. Racism may have a little to do with it (as Freddie Gray’s death suggests) or a lot (as the Colin Kaepernicks of the world would suggest).
But the fraught nature of interactions between police and black people is a basic fact of life and you can’t even begin to engage with the questions at hand if you don’t understand that it is a real thing.
(4) Conservatives have a blind spot for the police for reasons that are mystifying. Conservatives, after all, are hugely distrustful of government authority. Someone from the IRS or the EPA bosses citizens around and deprives them of their property and conservatives freak out.
But call that agent of the government a cop, give him a gun, the authority to kill, and a public sector union devoted to ensuring he faces zero accountability? Suddenly only racial agitators and liberal namby-pambies question his actions.
(5) Here are, in no particular order, three cases that ought to greatly disturb anyone who worries about the abuse of government power:
In Fairfax, Virginia, police conduct a late-night breach into an Iraq veteran’s apartment. They point guns at him, roust him from his bed, and handcuff him. It turns out to be a preventable case of mistaken identity: They failed to check the identity of the apartment resident with the building supervisor. The cops leave without so much as an apology.
In Philadelphia a man with a license to carry firearms is confronted by police who clearly do not understand their own local open-carry laws. The police scream at him, curse at him, threaten to kill him, and then handcuff him. The citizen remains calm and respectful throughout the encounter. We know this because there’s audiotape. Eventually, after the police figure out that they’re on the wrong side of the law they grudgingly let the citizen go. But after the guy publishes the audio of the encounter, he is charged with disorderly conduct.
In Canton, Ohio, police pull over a couple for a routine traffic stop. The man tries to inform the officer that he has a concealed-carry permit, and thus a firearm. The cop keeps cutting him off and won’t let him speak. When the cop discovers the weapon on his own, this is what transpires:
These are not the imaginings of Al Sharpton. These are things which happen, in the real world.
(6) Now, you might ask if this sample is a handful of isolated incidents or the tip of an iceberg. That’s an important question and one about which every American ought to be curious, because the answer is not obvious.
What is obvious is that if this sort of thing happens to middle-class white people, then there’s every reason to believe that it happens to poor black people, too. Probably more often. And possibly much, much more often.
(7) Yet in an important sense, none of this argument is really about police misconduct, per se. It’s about the institutional response to police misconduct.
Think about the Catholic Church’s priest-abuse scandal. The scandal wasn’t that there was a small number of priests who abused their charges. This sort of evil behavior has happened for centuries and will continue to happen for centuries more because people are fallible, all people, even priests.
No, the “scandal” was that the bishops observed this evil behavior and then tried to cover it up.
The same is true for police misconduct.
If police officers who acted badly faced criminal consequences for their behavior most of the time, then I suspect that society would not get so upset about incidents of misconduct. It would be much easier to accept the few-bad-apples explanation and move on about our lives accepting that the benefits of police outweigh the costs.
But that does not seem to be the case. Look at the Eric Garner incident, where the local prosecutor presented charges against the police officer who killed garner to a grand jury—but managed to do so in such a way that the officer was not indicted, but the bystander who videotaped the murder was.
It took more than two years for Cleveland to fire the cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice seconds after arriving at the park where Rice played with a pellet gun—and the firing was for lying on his application, not the fatal shooting. That officer never faced charges, but even when cops are forced to go through the criminal justice system, convictions are rare, as happened with the man who shot Philando Castile.
Look at the murder of Walter Scott. Scott was gunned down by a police officer while unarmed and running away. The officer then called in a false report, claiming that Scott had assaulted him, and then calmly planted evidence on Scott’s body. The officer got off on state charges and was convicted on federal charges—but only after a videotape of the incident surfaced. And having been caught lying about a citizen and planting evidence, the municipality seems to have done nothing to investigate the officer’s previous arrests. (Planting evidence may happen more frequently than we might hope.)
For Pete’s sake, in 1981 police arrested Mitt Romney—Mitt Romney!—for “disorderly conduct,” which is one of the ways that police level false charges against citizens when they’re in a bad mood. Go read the story of the arrest. The charges were dropped only because Romney threatened to sue the officer for false arrest. Which is fine. But in a rational world, the officer who committed the false arrest should have lost his job.
Paid agents of the state should not be allowed to knowingly make false charges against the citizenry. Full stop. If you can’t trust a police officer’s judgment in charging a crime, how can you possibly trust his judgment in the use of deadly force?
(8) So the problem isn’t just bad cops, or good cops making bad decisions. That has always happened and always will happen. You can’t make justice perfect. You could however, change the system so that police face more accountability for their actions.
But that’s a heavy lift, for lots of reasons. For starters, there are the police unions (which, for some reason, are the only public sector union conservatives love). Like all unions, the police unions exist for the sole purpose of insulating their members from professional consequences. Then there’s the human disinclination against whistleblowing and the fact that prosecutors rely on cooperation with cops for their livelihoods.
The point is: Changing this culture of institutional indifference to police misconduct is hard and kneeling down during the national anthem isn’t going to get the job done.
(9) All of that said, qua protest, the Star-Spangled kneel-down is probably the most respectful form of protest, ever. Football players aren’t turning their backs on the flag. They’re not raising the black-power fist. Kneeling is reverent. It’s what we do at the most solemn moments in church. As Gabriel Malor puts it, the tenor of the protest isn’t that America is bad or evil: “they’re kneeling to indicate that America is in distress.”
Which was, come to think of it, the entire raison d’être of the Trump campaign.
We should wish that every protest movement was so thoughtful and humble in its expression.
(10) The fact that people are freaking out about the NFL players’ protests says as much about our political climate as anything else. And the fact that Trump waded into this subject is yet another data point about his uncanny sense for weakness and conflict.
(11) In a way, Trump is the perfect avatar for everything that the police-brutality protest is about: He’s a guy who relishes the prospect of people getting beaten up. and recently gave cops the nudge-nudge, wink-wink “go get ’em” talk where he told the assembled lawmen “don’t be too nice” to arrestees in his patented kidding-not-kidding style.
And it’s instructive, too, that Trump seems so exercised about the NFL players kneeling. At the rally in Alabama, he called those players “sons of bitches.” Which is harsher invective than he’s ever been able to muster about, say, white supremacists or David Duke or the “very fine people” who marched in Charlottesville.
(12) Everything about the political dynamic suggests that we could be heading toward an escalation where the NFL protests now become more broadly about Trump. And, as I said up top, there’s no obvious off-ramp here. If you’re a player kneeling because the justice system is screwed up, when do you stop kneeling? Because it’s going to be screwed up for a long time. And if you’re kneeling because Trump is president, that’s got a ways to go, too.
(13) In a perfect world, a presidential response would be something like:
It isn’t rocket science.
Then again—perhaps you may have noticed this—we do not live in a perfect world.
(14) Regardless of your politics—whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, concerned by police misconduct or four-square on the side of the cops—we should all lament the current situation because it’s one more piece of shared cultural space which is going to disappear. Count on it.
The culture war has eaten America. Everyone is to blame and everyone will suffer for it.
