Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
Capitol Police officers in riot gear form a line in front of the U.S. Capitol during the Justice for J6 rally hosted by Look Ahead America, September 18, 2021.
The most wondrous story in the grab bag of this morning’s news is that, according to a New York Times report, some defendants in their upcoming trials for their violent participation in the January 6th attack on Congress plan to argue that they were only responding to police violence.
The odds that this line of defense will work are wafer-thin. Until the George Floyd murder, it would be a cold July day in Death Valley for a court to rule against the cops, and since the George Floyd murder, it would still be a cold July day in Death Valley for a court to rule against police conduct in the midst of a riot, much less an insurrection. Moving from the general to the particular, there are also the videos and photos of the defendants that those defendants will have to overcome. The Times reports, for instance, that one defendant making the police brutality claim is “social media influencer” Edward Lang, charged with assaulting cops with a baseball bat. Presumably, Lang will have to prove that he was expecting to join a softball game and just got caught up in the melee.
This kind of argument gives chutzpah a bad name.
But suppose, through some jurisprudential miracle, that that defense is upheld. I recall no such defense prevailing in the aftermath of the two great Los Angeles uprisings, or those that broke out across the country in the second half of the 1960s. The Black Panthers, who arose in specific response to the routine police brutalization and abuse of inner-city African Americans, never prevailed in court by citing the reason for their existence. For that matter, both of the L.A. uprisings erupted in direct response to police violence (1965) and the acquittal of cops for their videotaped beating of Rodney King (1992), just as the riots of the ’60s were also rooted in substantial part in the rage at routine police brutality and the nonexistence of legal means of redress against it.
Given the voluminous history of police violence, the Lang “defense,” were it to succeed, would inadvertently validate some of the claims of Black Lives Matter, not to mention the claims of many of those arrested and jailed during the upheavals of the ’60s—at least, the claim that police brutality is alive and well, though not that it is systematically directed against African Americans. Which, I suppose, is one reason—and the only bad reason—why the Lang defense is DOA.
