In response to a comment about the murder of a jogger/burglar in Georgia, I said:
I don't care whether he was burgling every house on the block. Chasing him down in a vehicle and then shooting him was not their job.I was promptly accused of virtue signaling and casting aspersions on Southerners as racists.
Yes...I claim the mantle of virtue here, and wear it proudly. We are a nation of laws, and vigilantism does not belong in America. As for the imagined suggestion of racism? I am not a mind reader...I have no idea whether racial animus had anything to do with this killing, and nobody else does either. But, a reflexive defense of murderers because they are White and the victim is Black is just as bad as screaming racism every time a Black man is killed.
16 comments:
As I was saying below, the laws in Georgia embrace citizens' arrests and so forth. Not 'chasing people down and murdering them,' but chasing them down and holding them for law enforcement. I support a judicial hearing to sort all this out in open court, but I fully expect them not to be convicted of any violations of the law.
If people don't like that, and they are citizens of Georgia, they can call their legislators. It's not really anyone else's business.
CBD, the author of that silly rant, is obviously not up to speed on the matter at hand.
"We are a nation of laws, and vigilantism does not belong in America."
The Lone Ranger, Batman, Spider-Man, and Max Payne, notwithstanding ...
Every nation has laws. Few have made quite such a mythic culture of unofficial and often anonymous Furies or Agents of Nemesis lurking about and wreaking (limited, targeted) vengeance where formal justice has been perceived to have failed.
"Up to speed" seems to vary from day to day. For example, the father, sporadically referred to as "former law enforcement" apparently was never a policeman, but worked in the District Attorney's office. The son clearly was never in law enforcement. As for citizen's arrest, there's some debate as to whether it was properly invoked. If the victim was seen peering into windows of a home, that might constitute a crime and therefor justify a citizen's arrest. But it might not, if he simply stopped in front of the property on the road or sidewalk before jogging on.
And the facts seem to shift around on this depending on who you ask. I generally support the concept of citizen's arrest as there is no such thing as castes or classes in our Constitutional Republic. Someone does not gain rights over other citizens by serving in a particular job. One may incur duties, and possibly privileges, but no more rights. And I am strongly against the modern acceptance of "the press" as some kind of government appointed rank or title granting them special access to the First Amendment that the rest of us lack. The plain meaning of "the press" in the constitution is a device (a printing press), not a profession. Likewise "law enforcement". Both are jobs, neither of which particularly existed in the days of the Founding. But I digress.
"We are a nation of laws, and vigilantism does not belong in America."
The Lone Ranger, Batman, Spider-Man, and Max Payne, notwithstanding ...
All of whom (with the notable exception of the Lone Ranger, who properly IS a Texas Ranger) are actually at risk of being arrested during points of their carriers for the crime of vigilantism. Oh, and the fact that all of them are completely fictional. As for the Americanism of the myth of the noble vigilante, I won't disagree. But such figures are also controversial, because while they are fighting crime that "no one else will", many times they're not just breaking other laws themselves but in fact hold themselves above the law. It is only the fact that they're "noble" in their intent that they're tolerated. Many darker vigilantes are anti-heroes at best (like The Punisher, or the Death Wish character).
And for the record, like CBD, I cast no aspersions of racism on the two accused or any who defend them. But likewise, I think it requires some introspection if the gut reaction to the story is to assume the black man WAS a burglar (or suspicious enough to warrant armed intervention) and that it's proper to leap to the defense of the two men based on either their skin color or the phrase "former law enforcement".
What someone used to do for a job says precisely nothing about their character. John Kerry is a former Naval Officer. John Murtha was a former Marine (as was Lee Harvey Oswald). Bradley/Chelsea Manning is a former soldier. Reality Winner (yes, that's her birth name) is a former airman. I'd not give you a cup of warm spit for all of them combined.
"And I am strongly against the modern acceptance of "the press" as some kind of government appointed rank or title granting..."
I'm just as against the idea of treating the police as a special class with extra rights. The government's appointment of them does not protect against corruption; as Aristotle says if you read the full part of the justice section, you find out the quality of a man when you give him an office. We're seeing how police badly misused their powers even against elected or appointed government officials they disapproved of in the Flynn case. At the famous Shootout at the OK Corral, everyone involved either was a law enforcement officer or would shortly be appointed one (except the dead, of course).
I like the Georgia system, which treats the police as exactly like everyone else. Formally, at least; practically juries and courts hold them to much less strict applications of those standards. North Carolina treats police as formally a separate and superior class, with lots of extra rights and powers. All human systems lead to tragedies because humanity's lot is tragic.
Anyway, I'm not sure 'vigilantism' is properly applied to people who were acting as citizens in an attempt to enforce the law. 'Citizen' is an officer of the state too. Vigilantism is properly, I would say, things like lynch mobs that dodge the legal system in order to apply extrajudicial force. The fact that the guy got shot in a struggle over a legally-carried gun doesn't change the fact that their intention was to hold him for law enforcement, to be arrested and tried according to the law. They were acting as a part of the legal system; it turned out badly. It often turns out badly when people who hold the office of 'police officer' rather than 'citizen' attempt the same thing. We don't dismantle the police power or disarm the police because of the (literally daily) police shootings, many of which are questionable.
The attempted arrest, ending in the suspect's death, continues to smell bad to me. I'd really want solid evidence that the citizens witnessed a crime in progress. Suppose a passerby had witnessed the attempted arrest, concluded it was an assault, and defended Arbury, killing one or both of the plain-clothed citizens in the process? The father-son team set up what seems like an unreasonably dangerous situation, merely on the suspicion that Arbury fit the profile of a burglar.
I don't normally cut an actual burglar any slack. If he gets killed in the act I don't shed tears. In that case, he's the one that set up an unreasonably dangerous situation.
Once again, Tex more properly expresses my position than I myself did.
I agree there are legitimate questions, and that a trial is appropriate to consider them.
What is the Other doing?
Who is winning the argument?
Mirror the Other.
No, you actually don't get to pick your side in this matter.
No, there is no moral high ground.
As for mythic cultures....what is the law but myth backed by force?
A myth that is dead wherever we are the Other. This is the hard truth.
These are rules made for us, and don't apply outside us - they won't have it. They are clear on this matter. They'll not have it.
The laws are for the law abiding, our laws more than most or any on earth.
We're on the Honor system, even the criminals. A fair cop and all that.
One for the Road -the condemned on his own power walked into a tavern for his last drink, back to the wagon taking him to his execution - on his own.
When you resist arrest - and wrestle for the gun - you reject the law.
The life of crime - like casing the houses under construction - ends badly.
No one jogs into someone else's construction site innocently - 10 times, including at night.
Pile on, I care not. I can quite lose the internet.
The only myth that claims any real victims isn't The Lone Ranger, or Batman, or the rest. The myth that claims victims is the myth of laws.
Our laws are gone.
The laws against property crimes are long not enforced.
Property crimes are a joke, usually not investigated.
The crime these people committed was protecting first their property, then themselves.
That and their the wrong hue to get away with killing.
But I return to the first principle: what is the Other's position?
Mirror it. Without flinching. They do, so we must.
And the only racism in this comment is: The Human race. Men will forgive any aggression or past misdeed. They cannot bear cringing or weakness - our evolution does not allow weakness. It's repulsive to us, to our very biology.
Mirror the Other, show strength, show solidarity. Then...perchance seeing strength the Others will relent...and then we can find common ground.
No common ground can be made with weaklings; if you want peace be strong.
If you ever want your laws to return show strength - and unflinching solidarity. Today that is the price of perhaps respect for us, then for our laws. Tarry longer, equivocate longer, apologize again...and strength will move from the price of respect to the price of survival.
I'm wondering how many here would take well to two guys pulling a gun on us and saying "This is a citizen's arrest. We're just holding you here until law enforcement arrives."
If our county had a good record of punishing people for improperly detaining others, so that we had some assurance that this was going to be highly vindicating and amusing for us in the end, we might sign on, even with the inconvenience. If not, we might believe that fighting back, against any odds, might be our better choice.
I don't know Georgia law, but I would wager that case law has established some minimum standards over the decades for citizen's arrest, and that "There was a crime around here weeks ago" plus "we thought he might be preparing to be a criminal" is going to fall short of that. Because some of the critics of the shooters have tipped their hand that they don't like Citizen's Arrest at all, the defenders of the two have set up the contrary position that this is all about defending that principle. But even granting the principle, this doesn't look good.
Agreed.
I know this aspect of Georgia law fairly well, having been licensed to carry a firearm there since 1995. I'm only opining on what I think the outcome will be, based on that knowledge.
(I also know Brunswick, one of the claimants for being the home of "Brunswick Stew," which is near the mouth of the Altamaha river and the site of the historic establishment of Scots in Georgia. Members of Clan McIntosh who were Jacobites were imported to live there, a bit south of Savannah, as a hedge against the Spanish in Florida. They formed the backbone of the Georgia Coastal Rangers, and the Georgia Highland Rangers, which were incorporated into the National Guard more than a century later. They fought a significant campaign in 1740, though it ended in withdrawal back to Georgia.)
Everybody has a strong opinion about this one, I notice. Fewer want to talk about justice in the abstract; but if you can't say what justice is, how can you say if it was well applied in the particular case? Engage the philosophy more, and the politics less, so say I. Ultimately in the particular case, particular courts and officers have this in hand, and will do whatever they do. But if there is a universal improvement to be found, it might alter the innumerable future cases.
It's highly unfortunate that our media has no interest at all either in justice or the truth, and is happy to cast aspersions and intimations of guilt (if not outright assumptions) without really examining the facts or even trying to fully inform the public about what is and isn't known. It's all agenda all the time to try and "shape the narrative". It's a corrosion that reaches well beyond them, though, and widely, but they amplify and disperse it further.
Sadly that is true. There is a profound lack of virtue in the media, combined with a great deal of self-confidence in their possession of the virtue they lack.
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