They Shouldn’t Have Died; That Doesn’t Make Them Innocent

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  • Two weeks ago, Daunte Wright’s death sparked another round of protests and calls to defund/abolish the police. A week later, Derek Chauvin’s trial resulting in a guilty verdict has given the U.S. a reprieve from another round of violent riots.

  • Both of these outcomes could have been anticipated: every time a black civilian dies in an encounter with the police, the conversation immediately becomes about police brutality and police reform.

  • While excessive policing is a problem, there are two other aspects to the BLM conversation that are ignored by the mainstream: we will always need some policing and law enforcement to protect civilians from criminal behavior, and many of the recent victims who have been held up as martyrs of the BLM movement had been engaged in criminal behavior.

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Instead of Defunding the Police, Stop Regulating the Public

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  • On September 23, we learned that a grand jury had declined to indict the officers involved in the Breonna Taylor case for causing her death.

  • Further protests erupted that denounced the result as thwarted justice. Most of the anger has been directed at the police, but that fixation overlooks the larger problem.

  • There are far too many encounters between civilians and the police that have the potential to turn violent. Punishing the officers will not limit the number of encounters between police and civilians that have that potential.

  • The only way to do that would be to roll back the number of laws police are called upon to enforce. Instead, the trend is in the opposite direction.

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