When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Everyone leaves out of responsibility the peaceful demonstrators even if they continue to provide cover for arson when, for example, they break a curfew by continuing their demonstrations late into the night and so require the police to break them up even though their demonstration is peaceful because it provides cover for the arson down the street. The demonstrators are well meaning; they want justice, whatever that might be, for George Floyd and all the others who have been victims of police brutality, although it might also be held against them that they do not police their own parades with demonstrators assigned the task of keeping their own people in line, which is what MLK did when he made sure that his own parades were non-violent. Nor do communities do what was done even in Furgason not so long ago when clergy and organizers went out to talk to the hoodlums who came into the town to make mischief, trying to convince them that this did not help the cause of justice for Michael Brown in that the worst rather than the best elements of the community were being brought to the attention of the American public and that would not endear their cause to the American people, it obvious that only righteous anger that was presented by sympathetic people would change the hearts and minds of the American people and lead to reform. Being righteous was not in itself enough.
I have changed my mind as to the cause of the rioting during the past few days as a result of looking at the makeup of the crowds at demonstrations across the country, provided to me by cable television as if I were in the situation room of an urban police force. The demonstrators are well dressed, middle class in their demeanor, and in many places largely white. Two people in NYC who were arrested for firebombing an empty police van were lawyers, one of whom had been an undergraduate at Princeton. One of the young women arrested in New York City was the Mayor’s daughter. (It is not just the Governor of New York State who says that he cannot tell his grown daughters what to do.) The demonstrators are also young and have been locked down too long because of the coronavirus and the weather has been just great and so demonstrating in a righteous cause seems just the right thing to do.
The police in numerous jurisdictions seem to have adopted highly flexible and sophisticated tactics so as not to commit the atrocities that agent provocateurs are looking to foment. They have been using this new kind of weapon that causes noises and smoke but releases no projectiles so as to scatter crowds. Live ammunition has been used in very few places. They do not go after looters because that will lead to incidents, even if Mayors, back to David Dinkins were and are criticized for not acting more aggressively against them. Some senior police officials have even gone down into the crowds and joined arms with them to protest injustice, that, by the way, also a tactic to validate the cause of the crowd and so disarm their anger. Police departments these days are often well led even if their line officers can get themselves and the nation into a lot of trouble by being zealous rather than circumspect.
I am surprised, however, at how little attention the demonstrators have paid to creating an organization that might publish a manifesto of legislative demands to counter police brutality. An educator I know reminds me that if an elementary school principal has three hundred kids in his school and that only one of them does not get home safely, then it is still a bad day. Similarly, an incident a year of clear injustice is too much, and there should be ways to forestall such incidents. The demonstrators just asking for justice is not enough. How do they want the criminal justice system to be reformed so that atrocities do not happen with this degree of regularity? Sure, the victims of these incidents are not heroes but largely figures marginal to the upstanding members of the community. Michael Brown was a shoplifter and Eric Garner sold single cigarettes so as to avoid the tax laws. But the thirteen year old in Cleveland with the air rifle was shot within eleven seconds of the police car arriving on the scene. No time to check what the kid actually was packing? The policemen and women largely get away with their crimes because, as in Baltimore, when Freddy Gray was allowed to be bounced around in a paddy wagon taking him to the station on a deliberately “rough ride” and turned up dead, no one could be found responsible by the law. Supervisors put on the scene on Staten Island when Eric Garner was sat on and also complained as did George Floyd that I can’t breathe did nothing to interfere, nor did the policemen on the scene with the now charged officer who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
So what are the remedies? There might be more accountability of supervisors and not just the active policemen for what their underlings do. There might be regulations that prohibit rough rides or how to approach children. There might be better screening of candidates for police positions so that people not suited to this kind of work are not hired in the first place and that clear racists like Mark Fuhrman are severed from the force before they become part of the OJ Simpson murder investigation. (I doubt many people would take a pension as being sufficient reward for being labelled a racist.) Most important, I think, is not to treat non violent criminals in the same way as violent ones. There was no need for white collar criminals to be perp walked in handcuffs out of their offices by Guiliani’s U. S. Attorney’s office. Similarly, there was no need to arrest Garner for his petty commercial crimes even though he had disregarded many bench warrants. Just have a sheriff lock up his premises. And remember that stealing from a convenience store does not deserve the death penalty. What we are seeing is the use of force to control petty crime which does indeed make the occupants of low income neighborhoods feel like they are an oppressed community, however much it is also the case that not prosecuting minor crime in an impoverished community could be seen as neglecting their interests but dismissing such crime as the kind of things those people do. The police can’t win until we have effective programs to reduce poverty.
The most important thing to say is that we are not in a revolutionary or near revolutionary moment, however much the Russians might like to think so. That there is no manifesto nor any planning for how to perpetuate a movement is sufficient evidence of that point. Remember that Occupy Wall Street had no manifesto in 2011 because they were all free souls who had their own opinions but that meant that the erstwhile movement would sputter. It had shared anger but no organizational mind. It didn’t even have plans for where it might camp out when winter came-- somewhere other than a piece of land controlled by a major corporation. MLK had been wise enough to line up private property owned by sympathizers to serve as camp grounds on which his marchers could settle for the night on his march from Selma to Montgomery.
The main reason this is not a revolutionary moment is because the lower classes, whatever their grievances, do not rebel. Rebellions are formulated by the middle class and even the aristocrats of a society in pursuit of their own grievances. That was the case in the English Civil War where it was the minor gentry, like Cromwell, who made the revolution, and it was the rich people and landholders in the colonies that made the American Revolution and it was the bourgeois lawyers like Ropespierre who took over from the liberal aristocrats and influential merchants who had dominated the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The students in the current demonstrations will return to school in the fall, convinced by that time that they miss its structure and there is no reason to think that the economy will be so inflexible that it will not find jobs for them when it reopens. This has been a spring break for students and ex students that did not require any plane travel to congested beaches. Meanwhile, the serious political people in minority communities will abandon these demonstrations because they have bigger fish to fry. They are out to elect a President. Joe Biden can freely go around to houses of worship in minority communities because he has friends and supporters there, while Trump hunkers down in his bunker because he cannot go out among the people except when tear gas clears the way for him to go one block from the White House. Catholic and Episcopalian clergy announce that Trump is not welcome in their houses of worship.
Whatever Trump says is increasingly irrelevant. He chides the governors and then just says, in a public statement, that he wants governors to put down demonstrators and that he will supply Washington D. C. with troops to enforce its curfew. He talks big and does nothing, which has been his history since he took office. So people, I think, pay less and less attention to what he says and are more willing to call him a liar, ever decreasing the majesty of that office. That is the most hopeful sign that the people will turn against him in November.