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By Harold Meyerson
Lawlessness happens when the law breaks down. That sounds like a tautology. It’s not.
The urban — and now, with Ferguson, suburban — riots of the past half-century have characteristically broken out only after the notion that we’re all equal before the law has been mocked by judicial verdicts or police practices that fairly scream that blacks are not the equals of whites — indeed, that they’re fair game for hyped-up, bigoted police. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, which I covered, didn’t break out when the videotape of four policemen beating the prone Rodney King was aired. They erupted when the cops, all evidence to the contrary, were found not guilty. The fires of Ferguson, Mo., blazed not when Michael Brown was killed but when a plainly biased county prosecutor announced that the grand jury he’d guided refused to indict Brown’s killer.
Source: Ferguson’s Lawlessness is Not a Big Surprise
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