Justice - Denied or Served? Now What?

Many are upset about the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the AR-15-toting teenager who shot two people to death and injured a third during protests related to the police shooting of a young black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I didn’t watch the entire trial, but the jury apparently accepted Rittenhouse’s tearful testimony that he was just trying to defend himself.

To those who believe this was a failure of the justice system, I submit that there was nothing wrong with the system, it just didn’t come out with the result many wanted. It was true that the prosecution made mistakes, and there were allegations that the judge had his thumb on the scale, but the system worked, just not perfectly, because there are human beings involved

But it’s likely not over for Mr. Rittenhouse. He could be spending a lot more time in court, facing civil actions from the shooting victims’ families. The legal bar is lower in civil lawsuits, where unanimous jury verdicts are not required. Rittenhouse may not have been guilty of murder, but he could be judged responsible for shooting the three people.

His criminal acquittal, however, has given rise to concerns about the encouragement of vigilantism. Will others appoint themselves to protect property during protests and bring their guns?

Unfortunately, this whole story dovetails with another one: the attacks on jewelry and other high-end stores by large and apparently organized mobs of looters. If what has been going on in the San Francisco Bay Area begins to look like a successful business model to criminals, police departments across the country may find it a challenge to deal with, and their so-called helpers may start arriving to fill in the gaps. The merchants may arm themselves too. And sooner or later, there will be more shooting, and more death.

I look upon these organized looting crimes as mini-January Sixes, which they are in a strictly physical sense: mobs attacking poorly defended targets. To me, these are truly alarming situations requiring the development of comprehensive response plans – and soon.

 

Threats Are Not Idle

 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it with these stories about public servants getting death threats from people upset with their policies, actions, or perceived inaction. It’s one thing for some folks to get angry, but when they pick up the phone or hit their keyboards to threaten election officials or even school board members with firing squads, haven’t they crossed a line from free speech into felonious behavior?

The thing that makes me angry is that most of these offenders don’t have the slightest intention of carrying out their threats. They don’t have to invade the Capitol. All they need are words, but they aim them with enough accuracy to strike real fear into their targets, some of whom feel they have to go into hiding. Some threateners say things like, “I know where you live, and I know the names of your children.”

According to an investigative story by Reuters, law enforcement, especially at the local level, isn’t doing very much about this. One police agency said it was impossible to trace an anonymous call, but reporters tracked down that caller and others with ease. Even more surprising, some of the people they found were actually proud of what they had done.

Cable and broadcast news play back some of these messages, so laced with bleeps to cover the obscenities that they’re almost unintelligible. Still, words like “traitor” do get through.

Some may blame the former President for opening the door to this, but I’d like to see more of an effort to blame the actual threateners. My own fear is that if nothing is done, we will start accepting these things as normal modern background noise.

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear, as the song lyrics go. But what seems clear to me is that there has been a dramatic rise in apocalyptic thinking. Civil war isn’t enough for some folks, they believe that they are soldiers in the battle against Satanic forces and that the streets will have to run red with blood – preferably, not their own, of course.

Hey, I like good horror movies and those cautionary tales about the future that awaits too, but I don’t live in them. Real life is already offering us apocalypses: a pandemic, climate change, and a collapsing supply chain, just to name a few. We should have plenty to occupy us all, even the drama-deprived. There is no need to make stuff up.

But it would please me greatly to see some high-profile prosecutions of those who make these off-the-scale threats, wherever they fall in the political spectrum. Words can be weapons too.

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