The “Hands up, don’t shoot!” slogan is a fraudulent rendition of the Michael Brown shooting, but it is clearly political speech presumably intended, however wrongheadedly, to advance policy arguments about institutional racism and police brutality. It may not be forbidden. The state does, however, have the power to forbid it from being yelled outside my bedroom window at 2 o’clock in the morning. And it has a duty to forbid it from morphing into calls for killing police and a license to shut down major thoroughfares — such that police, fire-fighters, and ambulances cannot respond to emergencies, people cannot get to their jobs and homes, and merchants cannot operate their businesses.
People who organize mobs knowing full well that eruptions of violence are foreseeable are culpable when violence erupts. You want to say they are not guilty of murder? Fine, but that should not absolve their contributory responsibility for the loss of life that predictably occurs. The same goes for others who incite the mob: those who call for the killing of cops. They are not equally as culpable as the murderer. That’s why our law punishes murder more harshly than it does incitement. But those who incite are proportionately responsible — and when what they are inciting is atrocious, they should be regarded as atrocious, too.
Public officials also bear responsibility because they have special duties. They are keepers of the order that must be assured if liberty is to thrive. They are not like the average 21-year-old anthropology major bemoaning the police because “black lives matter” — notwithstanding that the cops protect millions of black lives while the nitwit student protects none. When public officials signal to the mob that its anger is so justified that its criminal behavior, even if not exactly condoned, will be rationalized, minimized, or ignored, they are facilitating criminality. So of course they should be deemed contributorily culpable when the criminality happens.
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