I am not rallying against the current spate of presumed police brutality against black men. Much of what I am seeing is uninformed histrionics: here’s what we think we know, here’s what we saw on TV, here’s what we heard, here’s what we’ve been told. For me, there’s too much emotion loose on the streets of the nation and not nearly enough intellect.

Our outrage seems mostly an anti-intellectual embrace of rhetoric over analysis, and the wrongheaded and deeply troubling determination to fight our legal case on city streets where no such cases are ever won. Simply failing to obey lawful instructions from a sworn officer is legal justification for the very tragedies we are rallying against. I’d rather fight the actual problem than flail away at a symptom of it. (more…)