It’s a riot!

“Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!”
– The Riot Act, in force August, 1715

It seems like old times to this child of the ‘60s. Ferguson, Missouri, population 21,000 is burning. A curfew has been declared and as of this writing the Missouri National Guard has been called out to do the job a highly militarized police force, and the Missouri State Police couldn’t handle.

The immediate cause was the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a city police officer. Circumstances are still under investigation but a depressing series of revelations all seem to point in the general direction of exonerating the officer.

Would it were otherwise! Why oh why can’t he be a sadistic psycho bigot who somehow slipped through the screening process? Then we could arrest him and after a decent interval and the motions of a trial have him hanged, drawn and quartered in the city square.

If in fact it turns out the officer was assaulted by a huge man with a long rap sheet for offenses including theft and assault with grievous bodily injury then the officer will be exonerated. After which he’ll be hounded to his death with further trials for violating the civil rights of the deceased and endless wrongful death lawsuits. That is if he’s not murdered in his home whose location the media conveniently found and reported.

And of course, following the verdict there’ll be more riots.

In the course of the riots police will stand by while the businesses that make Ferguson an even marginally viable community are looted and destroyed.

Unless more business owners stand at the entrance to their property with guns and say, “Not here you don’t.”

And what if one of them has to shoot, and yet another “good boy who’d been in some trouble but was turning his life around” gets killed?

Al Sharpton may just have to move to Ferguson.

The fact is, the riot could have been stopped on day one. Draw up a line of armed men in the street where the mob is assembled and “read them the Riot Act,” i.e. command them in no uncertain terms to disperse, give them a stated time to do so, then back up the threat with deadly force.

Follow up by arresting the Revs. Sharpton, Jackson and New Black Panther Minister-of-Whatever and charge them with inciting to riot.

Of course we can’t do that.

The brutal reality is it would be career suicide, and very possibly real suicide for anyone who gave such an order. And perhaps this is a good thing. With all the surplus military equipment being handed out like party favors to local police forces this might start to look like the easy option whenever a crowd got out of hand.

What can we do? Isn’t there some way to address those fabled “root causes” of riots?

Here’s the root cause we’re all too polite to talk about. Rioting, looting and destroying property are fun.

Does any other explanation make sense? Does destroying the source of jobs and livelihood do anything to address poverty, unemployment and injustice?

What they’ll do is try to contain the damage as much as is possible with the tepid levels of force they can use and wait until the mob has had all the fun it can stand, for now.