I'm going to assume, for a moment, that the Right is honest in its protestations that recent police killings are not about race. Let me propose a couple of theories as to what could be going on...
#1.
Republicans as a general rule hold three literary sources to be holy and sacrosanct: the Bible, the Constitution, and the collected works of Ayn Rand. Randian ideology holds up the individual as exemplary. Truth is knowable, and deeply internal. A person who seeks Truth will find it, and can use it to become mighty. Truth can be recognized in the individual by those individuals who shuck off the bonds of society and grab for themselves everything they want, because not only is Truth the divine right of the individual, but so is everything else. The mightiest person is the one who climbs on top of the heap of others, becoming the most politically and economically powerful, too. Many people can achieve success and be Randian, but certainly not most, and only the king of them all is the true winner of the philosophy.
One problem occurs when we realize that the heroes of Rand's books are not beholden to the law, and in fact actively work to subvert the law when the law seems to prevent them from attaining all the power they believe is their right. The law cannot stand up to the Truth of a Randian hero.
And once again, this is what I was actually taught in my own religious upbringing - that when Truth and law disagree, it is the responsibility of people to stand up to the law in favor of Truth.
We all believe this, of course. We praise Rosa Parks for fighting for Truth. We praise Martin Luther King Jr. for fighting for Truth. We praise Nelson Mandela for fighting for Truth. Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. etc.
But we tend to forget that those they fought against also thought THEY were on the side of Truth. The slave owners had convinced themselves that slaves were actually better off under their control. In the American Revolution, many people born and raised on this continent gave their lives in service to King George.
Truth, as with other things, may be decided by the victors.
But while we're in the midst of a fight, Truth is still decided by the individual - each individual fights for his/her own unique definition of Truth.
And, as I've noted before, on the Republican side of the aisle, we have a supposed arbiter of Truth that cannot be argued against. That is, that when someone believes his/her Truth comes directly from God, there can be no discussion about it, no bending, no giving in to the demands of the other side...
no diplomacy.
The other side always already belongs to Satan, because if God is Truth, and Truth is absolute, then those who agree with Truth are with God, and those who disagree are with Satan. It's exceedingly and necessarily dichotomous.
And it is this Truth that narrowly limits the Randian heroes from everybody else. For, when a person walks into a store and takes everything at gun point, they are not living within the Truth. When a person uses legal means to take everything from someone else, however, they are right in doing so, for they are the ideal Randian hero. When a social group, like the government, uses legal means to take a portion of things from someone else, they are right if those things are to be distributed to other Randian heroes, and wrong if those things are to be distributed to others.
Sadly, the inner Randian is often at odds with the Truth. For a true Randian would not give one whit about someone ELSE's definition of Truth, even if that someone else is a religious figure of global impact. Ayn Rand herself was, after all, an atheist. If a Randian wants to take someone else's property, at gunpoint or no, then he will take it - or will long to, and believe it is his/her divine right to do so, but may stay his/her hand to avoid going to jail.
And this sensation lies under the surface of the subconscious, always waiting for a chance to act. The greatest Randians I've known haven't held themselves back very far.
Now consider what someone might do who holds that philosophy and encounters someone who does not pay attention to the law, someone who takes what s/he wants or does what s/he wants. The existing feeling of entitlement would find itself jealous, and would seek to eliminate the competition.
It could do so through passing laws for longer prison time, through allowing Randians to commit murder of those they deem a threat to their order, and through economic and social manipulation to ensure that those on the other side who have not yet gone to prison or been murdered by the Randians would have to stay as far away as possible, in their own worlds.
Now, thus far I've been theorycrafting, but we see this every day.
In the case of Michael Brown, those on the Right claim he is a thief, as if it's OK to gun down a thief in the street. Well, in the model I just described above, it is! A thief takes what s/he wants, and a Randian who follows the law cannot abide that, so the Randian will accept the thief's murder as a just punishment for the crime.
I'm making no claim here whether Brown did or did not steal anything - rather, I'm making only a claim about the justification for the use of lethal force.
Based on all of that, we could, perhaps, make a claim that it isn't about race, but rather purely about the extremes to which Randian beliefs have taken over the Right.
Then we got another case similar to Michael Brown's. Like Brown's, Eric Garner was a black man killed by police for suspected illegal activity. Unlike Brown's, his criminal action wasn't quite on the same scale. He was suspected of selling individual cigarettes, which would help people avoid paying tax on them. As Ben Shapiro notes on Right-wing blog site Breitbart.com, "Garner had been arrested some eight times for selling 'loosies.' That said, even Shapiro says, "by virtually any logic, it is the height of irresponsibility and depravity for a man to end up dead for selling loose cigarettes" (link).
I would, of course, claim the same is true for simple theft of cigars, but there may be a link to my Randian argument yet - remember that in Brown's case, he was supposedly stealing directly from a store, pitting a non-Truth Randian (Brown) against a Truth Randian (a store owner); however, in Garner's case, he was supposedly a non-Truth Randian stealing from the government of New York, a government that is, itself, inherently non-Randian. Ergo, no crime was committed against Randianism.
And yet, Garner still died. And not only did he die, but police were cleared of charges, even though by all accounts they used an inappropriate subdual method.
#2
Grand Juries almost always indict. Ben Casselman, on ESPN's news site "fivethirtyeight.com" (I know... ESPN and news in the same phrase...), reveals the numbers:
... U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.That's 0.006%. That's 1 out of ever 14,727 cases. You have a better chance of winning an Academy Award than avoiding an indictment. You have a better chance of injuring yourself with a chainsaw. Or with a toilet. You have a better chance of dying in a horrible bicycle accident.
Casselman goes on to explain,
Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment.Yikes. In Dallas, at least, you have only a 1 in 81 chance of being indicted if you're a cop. For comparison, you have a 14545 times greater chance of not being indicted if you're a cop, at least in Dallas, than of not being indicted if you're *anybody else*.
The obvious answer to that, of course, is that the prosecutor likely intentionally threw the case. That's easy to imagine, given that the prosecutors in Grand Jury cases are the same prosecutors as in every other criminal case, and thus they have to rely on and work with the police department every day. At the least, there's reason to suspect they would throw the cases just to stay on the good sides of law enforcement, a kind of "I've got your back, you've got mine" mentality. At worst, it's a reflection of outright fraternity between prosecutors and police.
This, of course, presents a problem from the standpoint that both police and prosecutors are supposed to be working not for each other, but for the people of their districts. If the people need to be protected, even from the police, then it is the job of the prosecutors to go after the police and keep the people safe.
What's weird, though, is that even with this knowledge, we see the Right saying that a lack of indictment in the Brown case was the right thing to do. For reference, an indictment is not a conviction - rather, it's saying that there's reason to further try the case, much like impeachment is not removal from office. It would have given people a more thorough and more open trial, to see all the evidence and make a decision for themselves, rather than allowing police to hide behind the protections of a Grand Jury to prevent that evidence from becoming a matter of public record.
It's weird, I say, only if this case was purely about attorneys protecting police - because anyone can acknowledge that it's wrong for them to use their position to protect an officer from being further tried in a court of law.
But it's not about that... it's about power. And I'll get there in my next post on this topic.
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