MAY 30, 2020 – The charge, trial, sentencing, and execution of a black man—where a single police officer, given free rein by his three fellow officers, served as police, judge, jury, executioner—took mere minutes, end to end. It will now take a collective, herculean effort to tame the beast of chaos.
That people outraged by the injustice should protest en masse is understandable—public protest is also our most fundamental freedom. And for each person to have the freedom, everyone must have it. To ensure meaningful change, it’s necessary. But a crowd draws individuals who, as such, might be wholly harmless, but when infused with the negative elements of a mob, become destructive. Also, a crowd driven by angry rants often makes amplified demands laden with unintended consequences. Worse, a crowd of peaceful protesters provides cover for people driven not by “outrage” but by the chance to throw rocks, start fires, and grab stuff for free. Before long, what began as a needed “call for justice” opens the floodgates to gross injustice.
Arsonists—who and from where, we don’t know—light fires; opportunists dive into a Target store and steal whatever they can. Action begets reaction until the social order descends into a Dantean inferno. Lost in the flames is George Floyd’s murder. Also lost in the smoke and flames: reform regarding age-old matters of affordable housing, access to quality education and health care, economic opportunity, and . . . a stacked system of justice. No, those matters must be deferred (and forgotten)—yet again—while the “peace” is restored, broken glass is swept up, and charred remains removed.
Then there’s the supreme paradox of preserving due process in prosecuting a police officer for the most egregious disregard for . . . due process. This isn’t a case wherein the defendant is simply a citizen who committed a horrific crime. It was an act at the hands and knee of the law itself.
The paradox will bring another huge, potential flashpoint. Because we must hold to the notion that we’re still governed by the rule of law, we can’t make an exception in the case of the cop, even though he, as an officer of the law, made exactly such an exception in killing George Floyd. We’ll be in even swifter descent if we say, “Sorry, former cop. You’re so bad we’re going to convict you here and now for ‘murder one’ and put you away for life—good luck defending yourself against all the violent, black inmates who await your arrival!”
But try to explain to the family and friends of the victim, to all black citizens who know firsthand the institutionalized discrimination of “the system,” that to preserve the rule of law for all of us, the cop must be afforded due process. “Where was the ‘rule of law,’ they’d fairly ask, “when the law bore down on a black man?
To avoid irretrievable descent, all of us need to grapple with that question–before the sun goes down.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
