The Keystone Kops Delta Force

This past week has been a slammed one for me, and so I had gotten behind on my current events. I was vaguely aware of the fact that trouble had erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, but that was about the extent of it. Having just now gotten somewhat abreast of affairs, I wanted to make just a few comments in descending order of importance.

First, few things are more obnoxious to me than militarized police. Competent police departments that have militarized are a far greater threat to us than the evils they purport to protect us from. And incompetent police departments that militarize . . . well, we don’t really gain much from a mashup of the Keystone Kops and the Delta Force, do we? We need to use this occasion, and any other like it, to demand a demilitarization of our police forces. We don’t need it. We don’t want it. Go away.

If I didn’t like it when the Bureau of Cows brought in their armored units to face down Cliven Bundy in Nevada, and I didn’t, I don’t like it any better when the same kind of thing is done to protesting blacks in Missouri. Further — if I may be a little provocative, why not? — I wish the protesters in this situation were as well-armed as Bundy’s friends were. I believe that if they had been as well-armed, we might have seen a lot less conflict here.

Second, pushing a different direction for a minute, indiscriminate rioting of this kind is simply an exercise in fouling your own nest. Protests against the police are of course fully in order — and from the initial reports of what went down, more than in order. Public pressure is entirely a good thing — it will help ensure that a full and complete investigation of the circumstances leading up to Michael Brown’s death.

But looting the 7-11 indicates that more than one motive might be involved in all this, and we should all know enough about the world to know that when we get to the looting part of this gaudy show, justice for Michael Brown has nothing to do with it. Ferguson is two/thirds black, which means that the odds are pretty good, when the rioting is all done, that blacks will have done ten times more harm to other blacks than the cops did. And speaking of that, it might be a good time to mention that shop owners with a robust understanding of the Second Amendment are in a position to keep themselves from being wronged in a time when the police are in no position to keep them from being wronged. This is true regardless of the race of the rioter and the race of the merchant. Meum and tuum know no color.

Here is the irony. It is the assigned task of the police department to protect and defend shopkeepers who had nothing whatever to do with the incident that resulted in Michael Brown’s death. But because of their handling of the whole thing, and looking instead like they are on the verge of liberating Kuwait, they are in no position to do so.

And last, we have courts for a reason.“For we really are in danger of being charged with rioting today, since there is no cause that we can give to justify this commotion” (Acts 19:40, ESV). The disorder in the streets is not only a bad substitute for justice right now, it is also something that will actively get in the way of justice down the road. The policeman involved, whose name has been withheld, either has additional information which will throw the whole thing in a completely different light (Prov. 18:17), or he does not. If he does not, then the investigation and trial should be pretty straightforward. But if he does, then both the rioting and the blundering reaction by the authorities will make it awfully difficult for him to make that case.

And that is a shame because no one should ever have to mount a defense with one nervous eye on a mob. And neither should he have to make his case after the authorities have done a series of things calculated to make him look like he was spending all this time in a back room, cooking up a story that might fly.

In short, this has been a bad business all around.