‘All lives matter’ is off-point: Other views

Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald: “Imagine for a moment that you broke your left wrist. In excruciating pain, you rush to the emergency room for treatment only to run into a doctor who insists on examining not just your mangled left wrist, but your uninjured right wrist, rib cage, femur, fibula, sacrum, humerus, phalanges, the whole bag of bones that is you. You say, ‘Doc, it’s just my left wrist that hurts.’ And she says, ‘Hey, all bones matter.’ If you understand why that remark would be factual, yet also fatuous, silly, patronizing and off-point, then you should understand why ‘all lives matter’ is the same. It’s not about ‘elevating some lives’ any more than it would be about elevating some bones. Rather, it’s about treating where it hurts.”

Heather Mac Donald, National Review: “Reluctance to act is affecting police departments across the country, as virtually every tool in an officer’s tool chest — from traffic stops to public-order maintenance — is vilified as racist. In Baltimore, following anti-cop riots and the indictment of six officers for the death of drug dealer Freddie Gray, arrests dropped 60% in May compared with arrests the previous year. In New York City, criminal summonses ... were down 24% through July. ... If the Black Lives Matter movement were correct that law enforcement is a scourge on the black community, this unraveling of proactive policing should be an enormous benefit to black well-being. Instead, the country is seeing the biggest violent-crime spike in 20 years, and the primary victims are, as usual, blacks. ... There are signs that law and order, and the moral support for such order, are slowly breaking down.”

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic: “The fact that violent criminals sometimes target police officers would, in a logical world, have no effect on support for body cameras that police departments don’t control; independent prosecutors for cases in which cops are accused of excessive force; an end to the War on Drugs; curtailing the power of police and prison-guard unions; restoring the voting rights of felons who’ve paid their debts to society; and other policy reforms that would make the criminal justice system more just. Unfortunately, many members of the public wrongheadedly react to violent crime by shying away from any efforts to reform policing, even though such cases demonstrate the vital need for quality cops.”