Cops and Political Narratives

Our first black President will leave office with race relations more polarized than when he was elected with such hope eight years ago.

The police shooting deaths of black men in Tulsa and Charlotte in recent days are tragic and disconcerting, but based on what is known so far they also underscore the simple truth we have learned time and again since Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014: No one should rush to judgment.

We realize this is a prosaic point but it is also roundly ignored as the media and politicians try to fit each shooting episode into the same political narrative: trigger-happy, racist cops kill defenseless young black man, and then the racist system conspires to deny the victim and his family the justice they deserve.

The reality is that policing is hard and dangerous work, confrontations in the street are complicated, and the political uproar since Ferguson has made police more fearful and offenders more brazen. Sometimes the shootings are defensible, and sometimes not, depending on the specific circumstances. But shootings are investigated thoroughly in most cases and the truth does usually emerge.

In Tulsa the police and prosecutors investigated and have charged a white female police officer with first-degree manslaughter for shooting unarmed Terence Crutcher. The district attorney charged Betty Shelby with overreacting to a situation that did not justify lethal force. She will get her day in court and could go to prison for years, so this certainly is no law-enforcement cover-up.

The Charlotte investigation is still underway, but this too fits no easy narrative. The policeman who shot Keith Lamont Scott is black, and so is Charlotte police chief Kerr Putney. There are conflicting accounts about whether Scott had a gun. The video released Friday by Scott’s family is painful to watch but hardly definitive about what happened.

Chief Putney is withholding other videos from the public pending the investigation, a delay that offends distant progressives who want to make political statements. But the goal should be justice, not electing Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, and witnesses should be interviewed about what they saw before they can be influenced by publicly released videos.

Time after time in these cases reality has confounded politically motivated snap judgments. In Ferguson, the initial claim was that Darren Wilson, a white cop, shot Michael Brown while he was surrendering with his hands up. But it turned out Brown had scuffled with the cop over his gun, and even Eric Holder’s Justice Department found that the original witnesses weren’t credible and declined to indict Mr. Wilson.

In Baltimore in 2015, the district attorney charged six cops involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray with murder, manslaughter or illegal arrest. But three were acquitted at trial, another was freed after a mistrial, and eventually all charges were dropped in the case. Three of the cops are black, as is Judge Barry Williams, who presided over the trials.

Americans may disagree with these outcomes, but they cannot say that the cases were handled with racial animus or legal indifference. The cases in their various details also do not show that there is some widespread racial bias in American policing. With the exception of Ferguson, the police forces involved in most of these controversial killings are ethnically diverse and many have black chiefs.

In any event, none of these cases justify rioting in Charlotte or anywhere else. A civilized society cannot tolerate vandalism or protests that shut down business in a city every time there is a police shooting.

Political leaders, President Obama above all, should defend public order. Mr. Obama should defend police and the judicial system as they handle these sensitive cases. And he should highlight and work with House Speaker Paul Ryan and other politicians who have shown a commitment to bringing opportunity back to American cities.

One tragedy of the Obama Presidency—perhaps the greatest—is that our first black President will leave office with race relations more polarized than when he was elected with such hope eight years ago. The reasons are more complex than we can offer today. But in the weeks he has left, Mr. Obama could do his country a service if he would resist indulging easy but false narratives and do more to bridge the growing divide between the police and young black Americans.

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