Rich Lowry offers National Review Online readers an interesting assessment of recent anti-police protests across the United States.
Anti-police protesters have found their enemy, and it is commuters and shoppers.
The protest movement that has sprung up in the wake of grand-jury decisions not to indict police officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases is the anti-police version of Occupy Wall Street. It represents the same free-floating critique of “the system,” with the same strong whiff of lawlessness.
Even when protesters aren’t burning out buildings (as they did repeatedly in Ferguson), even when they haven’t broken windows (as they have in Oakland and Berkeley), they have closed down intersections and bridges. In other words, even when they have been “peaceful,” the protests have involved coercion and illegal acts.
Given the events of the past two weeks, you could be forgiven for thinking that the reason President Barack Obama says there is an infrastructure crisis in this country is that there aren’t enough bridges and tunnels for anti-police protesters to block.
The logic of these actions is, to say the least, not obvious. Eric Garner didn’t die in the custody of commuters trying to exit New York through one of its bridges or tunnels. He wasn’t taken down during his arrest by cabdrivers trying to make a living in an already gridlocked city. All of these ordinary people, who haven’t harmed anyone, are being inconvenienced for the sin of having somewhere to go.
The Left has long posited various means of achieving social justice, from the general strike to consciousness-raising worker collectives. To these methods must now be added traffic congestion, as well as the staging of obnoxious spectacles during the Christmas shopping season. If the road to police reform goes through the Disney Store in Times Square and other retail outlets around the country, the demonstrations have truly hit home.
