Once again, a large mob of rioters is running amok in an American city in response to a judge’s ruling that a police officer shot a black man who had just committed a felony in self defense and was not guilty of murder. St. Louis may well turn into Baltimore if the rioters become more violent, and if the mayor of St. Louis does what the former Baltimore mayor did and instruct the police to stand down and just let the rioters burn part of his city down.
Both riots — in Baltimore and St. Louis — are essentially the result of the war on drugs. Freddie Gray, who died in a Baltimore police van after being arrested in a drug bust, and the man shot by the former St. Louis policeman in a high-speed car chase with the police, are victims of the war on drugs, not racism.
At the same time, we are stuck with drug prohibition for now. The judge in the St. Louis case produced a 30-page decision explaining how the policeman behaved in self defense and was not guilty of murder. It has been impossible to learn of this by the news coverage, which seems to assume that the judge was wrong and that the riots are justified. The effect of this in Baltimore has been that the police simply refuse to respond to calls for help because when they do so, they are surrounded by mobs “armed” with cameras and fear being sued. Consequently, Baltimore criminals have gone wild in the past two years, averaging a murder a day in the city. This is now what St. Louis can expect to experience.
11:52 am on September 17, 2017
