Protesters? Sorry, they look like thieves to me
No, please don’t.
“There’s no such thing as a bad protester,” organizer Ariel Atkins told reporters.
“Also, (we’re) demanding that police be defunded. Police should not be here. They should not exist, especially because we’re giving them all this money to beat and terrorize us. We’re giving them all this money when it’s like we’re in an actual pandemic and people need care right now, but you’re giving them police.
“We don’t need police,” she said. “We need care.”
OK, yes, we do have too many inequities in law and household income — bigger gaps between rich and poor than we had in King’s day. But, as King also would point out, there’s a right way and a wrong way to get there.
Today’s BLM movement sounded a lot like the Black Panthers of a half-century ago, when their 10-Point Program called in 1966 for the release of “all Black men” in American jails and prisons because they had not been tried by “juries of their peers.”
Yet, time is an educator. As Richard Pryor exclaimed on his “Live on the Sunset Strip” album after his first visit to a real penitentiary, “Thank God we got penitentiaries!”
“I asked a dude — I said, ‘Why did you kill everybody in the house?’ Pryor recalls. “The guy said, ‘They was home!’ ”
Yet, as I have written many times, we still over-incarcerate nonviolent offenders, particularly Black men, and suspects who are too poor to make bail.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was elected handily in the wake of a long history of police scandals that included torture, cover-ups and federal findings of racial bias.
Now she’s on the hot seat after a Chicago Tribune analysis finds she may have been too lenient in dropping charges against suspects at a higher rate than her predecessor, whom she defeated. Police Superintendent David Brown’s remarks that the looters were “emboldened by no consequences in the criminal system” sounded like a veiled jab at Foxx, who is up for reelection in November.
There are a lot of fingers being pointed in all directions after Monday’s mayhem. The buck inevitably stops with Lightfoot, , but there is plenty of blame to go around during this hot summer in which protesters sometimes look just like plain old looters.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
