Hands Up, Don't Loot

That is what this conflict is about. The police exist so that Ferguson Market and a hundred other stores can do business without being robbed or murdered. Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, was holding down the thin line that makes it possible for stores to stay open and children to go to school.

When the police pulled back, the rioting and looting began in earnest. A mob forced its way into Ferguson Market and other stores. Governor Nixon, a critic of the police was forced to turn to the National Guard.

After all the lectures about militarization, there was no better solution to the violence than the military. The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were.

The photos of protesters with their hands in the air confronting police in riot gear told a very misleading story. But the real story was sitting in a video held by the Ferguson police and the Justice Department. It was the video of Michael Brown assaulting a clerk at Ferguson Market.

The Justice Department and Governor Nixon did not want the video released because it put the emphasis back where it should have been all along. This was not a conflict between Michael Brown and the police. It was a conflict between Michael Brown and a Ferguson Market worker.

Any one of us can be targeted by a Michael Brown at any time. Every week delivers up fresh new victims of the knockout game. A pregnant woman. An elderly man. A child.

The police are the common defense we use to protect ourselves against the kind of society where store workers have to fear being killed. They are not perfect, but they are far better than the rule of the Michael Browns who take what they want and attack anyone who tries to stop them.

In Ferguson there was a choice between looters wandering around shouting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" and ordinary citizens crying out "Hands Up, Don't Loot". Shouting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" at a police officer might work. Shouting "Hands Up, Don't Loot” at a looter won’t.

And that is why we have police forces. As flawed as they are, they follow some rules. The looters follow no rules at all.

Despite all the talk about the militarization of the police, there is very little discussion of why. The police and the prisons are a societal immune response to an infection.

Talking about the immune response as if it exists entirely apart from the infection is how we ended up with hysterical coverage of the unarmed teen shot in the back by a crazed racist officer. Not only was the media take on the story a lie, but it removed the context of the crime from the response to the crime. That was what made Brown's shooting seem senseless and insane.

Stripping away the rioting and looting from the police in riot gear made the law enforcement response seem deranged and insane. It's only when we see the rioting, the looting and the arson, the shots fired and Molotov cocktails thrown that the heavy gear suddenly has a context.

This is a trick that the left has been playing for a very long time. In Ferguson or Gaza, in Afghanistan or New York, it focuses on what soldiers and police do without the context of what they are responding to. Watch a few hours of media coverage from Gaza and you’ll conclude that Israel is fighting a war against crying children. Without footage of Hamas terrorists or Israeli children under fire, the Israelis seem like murderous lunatics.

If the United States continues bombing ISIS for another month, the media will stop showing photos of crying Yazidi refugees and instead show us the crying Sunni Arab children of the families in Mosul who support ISIS. And then the United States will start looking like maniacs who are out to murder crying children for no reason at all. Most people will forget that we got into it to save the Yazidis from genocide at the hands of Sunni Muslim supremacists and they will shake their heads.

All systems and people are flawed, but our law enforcement and military are reactive. When we don't talk about what they are reacting to, then there is nothing meaningful to say. 

We don't have SWAT teams because law enforcement has gone completely insane. We have them because of race riots and urban guerrilla warfare. Without Watts, the Black Panthers and the SLA, the police militarization would probably never have existed. 

The militarization of the police was a response to left-wing violence and terror. And the left knows it. 

If the left hadn't spent much of the last century inciting race riots and setting up terrorist groups, there wouldn't be police officers armed for war. 

If not for the left's disastrous social experiments, the War on Drugs would never have been necessary. Instead the left trashes social values and criminal laws and then complains about the authoritarian rebound from the crime waves that follow. The wealthy liberal who snorts cocaine and dashes from sexual encounter to encounter can walk away with little damage done. The same behavior in the ghetto leaves behind shattered lives and destroyed communities because there is no safety net for it.

Finally, if the left hadn't shifted immigration over to the Third World while sympathizing with Islamic terrorists, September 11 and its law enforcement and military aftermath would never have been necessary.