Here we are again in America, trying to make sense of the senseless in the wake of more gun violence. Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and five Dallas police officers are dead, all for no good reason. And in many quarters the usual lines are being drawn, with conservatives rushing to decry the murders in Dallas, while advising everyone to proceed with caution before criticizing the policemen who shot Castile and Sterling. But readers of at least one conservative blog, RedState, were presented with a bit of uncomfortable truth thanks to a writer named Leon H. Wolf.
Wolf, who became RedState’s managing editor last year on the departure of Erick Erickson, breaks with conservative orthodoxy on the topic of police shootings in a piece published on July 8, called “The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came to This In Dallas Yesterday.” And based on what he has written, unlike many on his side of the political spectrum, when it comes to this topic Leon Wolf gets it. He writes,
As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.
Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of - let’s call it what it was - white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?
That’s an uncomfortable truth for many conservatives — the fact that in this society which they have proclaimed to be “color blind,” people of color have a very different perspective on the police than whites do.
Wolf goes on to observe something most of us know; that the vast majority of those who wear a badge do their job properly and professionally. But, he says, recognizing that doesn’t address what he calls the “reality of lingering mistrust” between minority communities and police. He says the numerous cell phone videos that have been recorded in the past few years confirm what many have long believed — that police interact with minorities in a very different way than they do with whites. And, he says, when they interact with minorities in an improper manner, “they never or almost never face punishment.”
After throwing a bone to his conservative readers by saying that he doesn’t want to rush to judgement in the cases of Sterling and Castile, Wolf says “…based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad.” He adds, “They look, most importantly, like many other scenarios in which officers have skated either scot free or with a slap on their wrist.”
Then Wolf explains why he believes those shootings led directly to 12 officers being shot in Dallas.
The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.
Wolf indicates his frustration with people who use any excuse they can find to justify police misconduct.
Every time I post these stories, I get a flood of comments from people who look for even the smallest hook on which to hang an excuse for the cops. ‘Well, he was rude and confrontational to the cop.’ ‘Well, when the officer was trying to arrest him, he ran.’ ‘He was ‘resisting arrest.” (My personal favorite, which was used by several dozen people I talked to regarding Eric Garner, whose ‘resisting arrest’ consisted entirely of turning his back to a cop and putting his hands in the air.)
He continues,
Look, this is not how a free society works. Being rude/disrespectful to a cop, running from a cop, demanding in a hostile tone to know why a cop has pulled you over might well be contraindicated to the peaceful continuation of your day, but they are not an excuse for someone getting shot. I’m for the death penalty, but the kind that is carried out after, you know, a trial and some appeals - not the kind that is carried out on the spot by a cop who’s had his authority challenged in some non life-threatening way.
After citing the fact that New York City police have shot and killed some 180 people since 2000, Wolf observes that only three officers involved in any of those shootings were indicted, only one was convicted of anything, and that officer received a punishment that didn’t include jail time.
Wolf concludes:
But people’s willingness to act rationally and within the confines of the law and the political system is generally speaking directly proportional to their belief that the law and political system will ever punish wrongdoing. And right now, that belief is largely broken, especially in many minority communities.
And it’s the blind, uncritical belief that the police never (or only in freak circumstances) do anything wrong that is a major contributing factor to that.
It’s at least as much of a factor, if not more so, than the blind, uncritical belief that the police always do things wrong - which many conservatives today are blaming in entirety for what happened in Dallas.
It’s time we stopped choosing up sides after one of these tragedies and come together to see what can be done to fix the problem. It is a bold move for someone in a position like Leon Wolf to break with many fellow conservatives on the issue and admit that the police are not always right, and that yes, law enforcement doesn’t always treat minorities fairly. But will other conservatives listen?
You can read Leon Wolf’s complete commentary here.
Featured image via Ron Jenkins/Getty Images
