No justifying Charlotte protestors’ crimes

Let me be clear: Rioters deserve to be arrested. They are illegitimate. They are criminals. They deserve no understanding or sympathy. They are evil. What happened this week in Charlotte was not “violent protests.” That gives them too much gravitas and dignity. What happened in the streets of Charlotte, and what happened in my hometown of Baltimore, is urban crime. The legal term is “mayhem.” Period.

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Unclear in new video whether man had a gun

Police shootings don’t merit disrespect, our streets set ablaze

Clinton, Trump decry latest police shootings of black men

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Treating criminal activity as legitimate political protest is absolute idiocy. You might think that’s obvious, and because I assume you have few or no mental defects, you would be absolutely justified in assuming that’s the case. But as I watched television, followed some online discussions and read some newspapers in the wake of the destruction, it occurred to me that people with a political agenda and race-colored blinders will make excuses for even the most violent, aberrant behavior if it advances their goals.

I’ve been a fairly consistent critic of the protests against “The Star-Spangled Banner,” conceding that protestors like Colin Kaepernick have the right to send a message of anger and opposition to the killing of black men by police officers while at the same time abhorring their form of protest. The feedback has been as expected, with some agreeing with me that this disrespect is repellant and others thinking the tattered state of race relations justifies this type of shock tactic.

That’s fine. Peaceful protest, even when it turns the stomach, is exactly what this country is about. But looting is neither peaceful nor a protest, and pretty much anyone with a brain has to accept that fact.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit the narrative of the evolved liberal.

To him, or to her, property rights (like gun rights) are expendable and can be sacrificed in the service of some larger “good,” which in this case is the forced recognition that police officers are inherently racist, even the ones who happen to be black. You know, like the ones who also die on the urban battlefields and who shed blood that is as red as that of their white brothers and sisters.

I’m not here to say that any of the killings that have happened over the past weeks are justified. I don’t know enough about these cases, and neither do you, to make an informed judgment about whether the police acted appropriately in those few seconds they had to make life-or-death decisions. In some of those cases, I would agree that there have been bad choices made by police officers who were poorly trained to deal with crisis situations. I would even go so far as to say that in some of those cases, preconceptions of how the suspect would act and bias born of generational racism has pulled the trigger instead of staying the hand.

If I denied that race was a factor in any of these killings, including the ones where both the shooter and the victim were the same color, I’d be guilty of the same thing I accuse those evolved liberals of harboring: a blind spot where race is concerned.

How could I argue that a black man is treated exactly the same as a white man when approached on a city street, in the dark? I can’t. How could I argue that more black men are killed by other black men than by police officers? I can’t, because even though that is statistically true, it doesn’t respond to the precise question of why the interaction between police officers and young African-American youth often ends in death.

I’m not insensitive to the anger and the frustration and the tears of the mothers who have to educate their teenagers how to act so they can avoid becoming another statistic. I will never have to have that “talk” with my nephew, who I love as much as any black woman loves her son, her grandson, her brother or her nephew.

But again, no amount of tears, anger, frustration or reverse bias against police officers justifies destroying a man’s livelihood, gives any legitimacy to screaming through the streets with expletives that those mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts would abhor, attacking the “system” by attacking its innocent members, or making lame excuses that this is what you get when frustration boils over into action.

This isn’t action. This isn’t what the patriots did in Boston’s harbor, as one of my Facebook friends suggested (I’m barely able to keep a straight face on that one). This isn’t even some highly paid athlete having a constitutionally protected hissy fit on the sidelines.

This is criminal. And trying to dress it up as righteous disobedience is as obscene as the words coming out of those angry, Southern mouths.