On December 20th, two New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were sitting in their car and were ambushed and killed by a narcissistic murderer who later shot and killed himself. The murderer had posted on social media that he hated cops and that he was going to shoot some police officers in retaliation for the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
These officers had wives to love and children to raise and they were killed for no reason. They died while having lunch on an anti-terrorism drill. The murders were an abomination, plain and simple.
With that said, what would have happened if the murderer had been captured alive? He would have been arrested, indicted, tried and convicted. The police would not have called for justice for the officers because they would have gotten it without a word.
The question is, why would having justice for the slain officers been assured? There would have been no question because the value of the lives of the officers was not open to discussion as to whether criminal accountability for their deaths was required. No one would have tried to justify the murderer and his actions.
The deaths of Garner and Brown did not receive the same absolute reaction as the murder of Officers Ramos and Liu because they were labeled as criminal and a threat to the police. Those who spoke out against the unjust killing of Garner and Brown had to first elevate the lives of these men to a level deserving of accountability. Such is the sin of moral equivalency.
It is written in the scriptures that God created male and female, that He created human life and it was precious in His eyes. When the son of the generation that ate the fruit of the forbidden tree spilled blood in murder, the answer from Heaven was not, Abel what did you do, but rather Heaven said his “blood cries out to Me from the ground.” Within a few millennia from that day, God said He was sorry that He had created man because the thoughts of his heart were continually evil. From then until now, human life has not been measured by its inherent value from creation, but rather by comparing one person to another. In the American context, that comparison is based on wealth, race, gender and personal behavior. Justice is defined subjectively and politically.
Moral equivalency is used to make distinctions between evil (one evil is not as bad as another) or to make distinctions between events in which one requires a certain result while another does not. Historically, the lives of black males have not held the same moral equivalency as white lives and certainly not equivalent to police lives. While the days of Jim Crow lack of equivalency are a thing of the past, subtle expressions of the lack of equivalency are still voiced. In cases of a black man killed by the police, an assumption is made at the outset that the black man must have been doing something that resulted in his own death. Questions are raised about his criminal history or behavior before the police shooting.
It’s the lack of equivalency at the beginning of the inquiry that sparks protesters to claim “black lives matter,” and to demand the same result that would have occurred if the murderer of Officers Ramos and Liu had lived, that result being, at the very least, an arrest, an indictment and a trial.
Arrests, indictments and trials are social actions that publicly vindicate the value of a life. They implement public justice, and public justice includes the requirement that justice must be seen to be done. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in 1954, “Justice must satisfy the perception of justice.”
The sin of moral equivalency is manifested by the justification for the police. The role of the police is to protect society. The subtly of the sin of moral equivalency is in the answer to the question, the police are to protect who and protect them from whom? Those who are behind the shield of the police will oppose those who are subjected to the sword of the police, and they will defend them for that protection.
When protesters and politicians demand accountability in the use of the sword, they are seen as opposing the saviors of society. When the police commit an injustice, that injustice is not perceived as morally equivalent to the harm caused by those who the police control.
In the American context, it’s the young black male that is the source of crime and thus a threat to the greater society. The result being that the life of the young black male is not assumed, much less treated, to be morally equivalent to the protection of society and the value of the police. Without that assumption, it’s less likely that the criminal justice system will vindicate the value of a black man killed by the police. The sin of moral equivalency manifests itself in the protests and complaints by African Americans and how those complaints are minimized and met with contempt by the defenders of the police.
Dr. Arthur Garrison is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Kutztown University. This piece is the work of Dr. Garrison and does not reflect the opinions of Kutztown University or its faculty, staff, students or alumni.
