The protesting is valid and worthy. Changes in police tactics are long overdue. Attitudes and sensibilities must be penetrated and awakened. That most likely can be forced only by intense outside pressure.
Far too many black males have been abused and worse. There is, in fact, clear evidence of a racist pattern in law enforcement throughout the United States, a country grounded in slavery and discrimination that struggles for its moral footing still.
That’s not to accuse every policeman of being a racist. It’s to say there is a pattern, even if the pattern is made by a relative few.
Yet legitimate complaints run headlong into simple practicality. Young blacks in Little Rock want to know why police officers patrolling their neighborhoods don’t even live in the city, and why they can’t be made to live in the city or replaced by people who do. The answer is crime. It’s that we’ve struggled to fill vacancies in the police force and our best chance of getting officers to live here is not to require it, but to encourage it. And if you’re young and black and rightfully angry, then that practicality sounds like more of the same.
So, you protest. More than that, you rage.
To be effective, to begin to get the institutions of embedded prejudice to take notice and accept the need to change, these protests must cause inconvenience and nonviolent disruption.
People need to be force-fed the discomfort of others’ righteous anger.
Motorists need to be delayed and redirected. Public officials need to hear the plaintive or angry chants and see the signs as they walk those rare few steps from their taxpayer-provided and chauffeured SUVs to their closed-door offices. Business leaders need to walk past those they don’t hire and those they don’t serve. The comfortable need to be afflicted, subjected to eyefuls and earfuls.
But setting fires, over-running barricades, breaking windows, looting, vandalizing private and public property, protesting long enough into the night to invite a purely destructive element … that renders pointless all the vital nonviolent inconvenience and disruption painstakingly inflicted before.
In case this doesn’t go without saying: Righteous causes must separate themselves clearly from criminal behavior.
Protest long. Protest hard. Protest loudly. Protest angrily. And when somebody starts breaking windows and defacing property and stealing and inflicting bodily harm, go home. Your productive work for the day is out of your hands and finished.
Maybe even protest earlier.
Leave the pointless criminal behavior to the pointless criminals, whether they be common thugs or angry young blacks seeing no other form or expression or left-wing anarchists or white supremacists trying to hurt your cause for change by cloaking themselves in it for their cause of chaos.
When the headline is about criminal destructiveness rather than criminal police abuse, the cause of legitimate protest is lost.
Aggrieved people must protest disruptively enough to be taken seriously but not to the point of criminal disruption. And they must try to achieve that balance among a thousand people on the Capitol lawn who are not uniform in their motivations and modulations.
For two nights running, protesters and media observers at the state Capitol were saying that a nonviolent protest escalated late and suddenly. One minute the protest organizers were urging nonviolence, and the next minute the state Capitol was being spray-painted and windows in irrelevant office buildings within two or three blocks were being knocked out.
On the third night, Little Rock joined other cities in imposing a curfew to try to sort out the protesters from the criminals. And peaceful protest almost prevailed.
Almost.
Most people began to disperse from the Capitol as the curfew hour arrived—or, more precisely, passed by several minutes. Mayor Frank Scott, walking all evening among the protesters and working hard to honor the cause but keep the peace, urged people to leave. Then he fell in with some of the obliging organizers carrying a Black Lives Matter sign on an eastward walk from the Capitol toward downtown. A crowd began to follow. Then, in the State Street area, the march ended, and Scott said it was time for everyone to go home.
Alas, some didn’t, or hadn’t.
Tweets from brave local reporters for print and broadcast reported that a few individuals had broken off to begin breaking windows in a bank and other buildings, even to strike one reporter and menace another.
The curfew thus worked less than perfectly. When staying out late is outlawed, outlaws will stay out late.
But that was kind of the point. At least the criminal conduct was clearly separated from the general peaceful protest.
But that left windows no less smashed and order no less lost.
Tear gas is the best of bad solutions. It really is. It’s better than gunfire and clubbing.
Meantime, many were asking why police sent tear gas into peaceful kneelers at the Capitol late Sunday evening.
It might have been that the police didn’t discriminate among persons who were declining or refusing to oblige an order to disperse.
But realize this: Police work in these circumstances is hard, and even a non-racist policeman can panic from fear.
Inconvenience that officer for sure. Disrupt his world. Protest that he lives in another county. Educate him. Sympathize with his stress. And try to understand him.
If he still keeps his knee on a dying man’s throat, that’s different. It’s why the protest is right and worthy, even if elements … well, ruin it.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.