NYPD murders are on leaders' hands
Somehow I sense this is something that the moral preeners masquerading as national leaders won't even grasp, but they are wallowing in the midst of what feels like a historic abdication of principles of leadership.
Leaders are supposed to be the antithesis of opportunistic moral poseurs. They do not assign group responsibility for tragedies to one side of a dispute, or the other. They don't point fingers. They don't insist the problem is with the behavior of that other group of citizens.
They don't infer pointed fingers, either. They don't push these infernal, oppressor-identifying narratives.
They don't talk mysteriously about worries shared with their bi-racial sons — as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claims to have done with his son — about the dangers the lad may face at the hands of the (apparently) brutal and racist NYPD.
Fathers talk one way. Leaders speak differently. If nothing else, a little more generously about the men and women who are effectively under their command. As a leader, de Blasio is a loser.
All of the presumed leaders who have seized on the bare outlines of entirely separate police-related shootings in recent months bear some responsibility for the tragic — and increasingly destructive —direction of these events.
No, not the destruction itself. But of society's tone. Of the movement of things.
They have bought into the framing of these incidents, collectively, as evidence of a single trend: police violence directed, more or less intentionally, toward Black males. Leaders don't do that.
And, as ever, our national media have helped frame the tragic narrative.
It led to the violent rioting in Ferguson, which they insisted on euphemistically calling "protests," even when reporters were unable to find an interview subject who wasn't throwing bricks.
It led to the attacks on two New York police lieutenants during another violent protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. And, now, it has led to the shooting deaths of two New York City officers.
We have fostered and nurtured a meme that has cast entirely separate incidents as a single drama involving Black victims and White perpetrators.
The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., was a complex set of tragic events, many of which reflect badly on Brown. Yet the narratives to which we cling reflect none of it. He is an "unarmed Black teenager," and none of his violence that day, attested to by witnesses and captured on video, will dent that benign narrative.
The narratives are immune to context. There is nothing at all tying the shooting of Rumain Brisbon by a Phoenix police officer to the Ferguson incident except that one barest of outlines, a White officer and a Black male.
According to witnesses, Brisbon ignored multiple commands to get to the ground. The officer pursued. There was a scuffle, and the officer shot Brisbon in the course of what he believed was a life-or-death struggle. Brisbon's background, including numerous drug arrests and at least two aggravated DUIs, suggest someone who was not inclined to follow the law.
Yet the narrative and imagery surrounding Brisbon remains persistently passive. He was a "34-year-old, unarmed, father of four." The photos of Brisbon tenderly holding his baby child have appeared countless times on news reports. His multiple mug shots? Considerably less often.
From the mayor of New York City to self-appointed race-activists to the media, we have drawn a stick-figure picture of a complex series of unrelated events. And, now, two cops in New York lie dead as a result.
Who's to blame? No question about it, a sociopathic man with a gun.
What caused him to do what he did? Unanswerable question. A better one: what could have calmed the surge of events that preceded what he did?
A measure of leadership may have helped.