Cops’ Double Standard Today — Racism?
Jan 18, 2021 —
Cops treat pro-Trump protesters better than BLM protesters. Every mainstream news source has strongly implied this double standard is due to police racism. Not one of them gave any other explanation.
But look back 50 years and you’ll see the same double standard without racism. Couldn’t whatever caused that double standard also be causing today’s double standard? To check this possibility, let’s take a look at the Kent State shooting on May 4, 1970, and the Hard Hat Riot in New York four days later.
Jerry Casale, the future bassist/singer of the new wave band Devo, was part of an all-White, progressive protest:
I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause were my friends. … Live ammunition and gasmasks—none of us knew, none of us could have imagined.
Twenty-nine National Guard troops, with bayonets fixed, took aim, fired 67 rounds in half a minute, killing four White students who were, on average, 115 yards away. Nine others were wounded. Various charges were brought; none were convicted, but the State of Ohio paid $675,000 to the families of the dead and injured.
The hostility of the city, the police, and the National Guard toward the progressive demonstrators had nothing to do with racism. The students were protesting the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. In the previous three days, a few had burned down the military training (ROTC) building on campus, broken windows in town, and thrown rocks at the police.
Four days after the mass shooting, over a thousand anti-war protesters held a memorial near the New York Stock exchange for those killed at Kent State. By half-past noon, well over 500 construction workers had shown up to protest the protestors and were joined by hundreds of office workers. The police formed a thin line between the antagonistic groups of protestors.
But it wasn’t long before the overwhelmingly white construction workers broke through the police line and began chasing students through the streets. The workers attacked those who looked like hippies and beat them with their hard hats, tools, and steel-toe boots. Victims and onlookers reported that the police stood by and did little. The protest moved up Broadway to city hall, where construction workers demanded that the flag, at half staff in honor of the Kent State dead, be raised to full staff.
A worker inside raised the flag and a mayoral aide lowered it. The construction workers rioted again and the Deputy Mayor ordered the flag raised back to full staff. Workers continued beating up students. More than 100 were injured and most of those required hospital treatment, with a half dozen beaten unconscious. The police arrested five anti-war demonstrators but only one construction worker.
What caused the double standard in 1970?
The police sided with the violent White hard-hat protesters against the peaceful White long-haired hippies. Racism was not the issue. The issues were the war and patriotism. The construction workers — the precursors to Trump’s base — chanted, “USA, All the way,” “America, love it or leave it,” and “Heh, hey, what d’ya say? We support the USA.” The more privileged students were attacking the American policy that the working class supported. It didn’t help that by 1970, a few anti-war protesters had started waving Viet Cong flags and chanting “One side’s right, one side’s wrong. Victory to the Viet Cong.”
These incidents 50 years ago align almost perfectly with what we’ve seen in the last year. But the issue was not race. Bill Clinton described what was behind the same double standard when the Chicago police beat up the protesters at the Democratic National Convention in 1968:
“The kids [saw] the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft, upper-class kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam.” —Bill Clinton
But there is an even more powerful explanation for the double standard — the almost personal animosity between police and progressive demonstrators. Some demonstrators threw rocks at the police; police cars were burned, and by the 1968 Democratic convention, “Off the pigs” (Kill the police) had become a widespread and popular slogan. The demonstrators took being arrested (often falsely), and being beaten, tear-gassed, and shot just as personally. So there was real animosity on both sides.
Are the two sides as antagonistic today?
Now the political and the personal have merged. In 1970, the protests targeted the U.S. government, but the BLM protests since 2014 have focused squarely on the police. They are no longer seen as protecting the villains. Now they are the villains. The political problem is no longer U.S. policy, now it’s the police themselves. “All cops are bastards” has replaced “Victory to the Viet Cong.” They are seen as the epitome of White supremacy. They are constantly called racists. Defund the police. Abolish the police. These are the protestors’ demands.
As in the past, protestors still throw rocks, bottles, and explosive fireworks at the police to make their message painfully clear. In early June 2021, the NY Police Department reported that 292 officers had sustained injuries, and the Justice Department reported that, for the country, the total was over 700. The progressive Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reported BLM demonstrations with violence by protestors at 220 different locations out of a total of 2,400 protest locations. And some of those 220 featured multiple protests. Related, the 9000 or so protests at the 2,400 locations, police shot and killed one protestor. He was White.
In contrast, Trump and his base have loudly supported the police. So how can anyone be surprised that the police treat a BLM demonstration more violently than a pro-Trump demonstration? Of course, that shouldn’t happen. The police should be impartial angels who do not get upset by irrelevant factors like being pelted with rocks, called racist bastards, and being politically targetted.
But here is what I find hard to understand. How can anyone, especially the mainstream press that followed this story for months, forget that the BLM movement was an anti-police movement? What was BLM if not anti-police? And if they remembered that obvious fact, how could it not occur to them that the police (of all people) might not react to BLM protests for the simple reason that BLM was vehemently and often violently anti-police?
Yet I have been able to find no mainstream news from the NY Times to the geeky FiveThirtyEight.com to NPR, that has even mentioned that BLM was anti-police. I don’t think this is intentional. My supposition is that our trusted left-of-center media is absolutely blind to the way the police and Trump’s base perceive the world. This blindness, which afflicts both sides equally, is the main reason for the country’s dangerous, possibly fatal, polarization.
To see more clearly, we must question the left’s knee-jerk tendency to see racism as the cause of every problem.
Ripped Apart
