Over the coming days, Providence will publish a series of pieces exploring the multiple dimensions of police brutality, race, political responsibility, justice, dissent, and the violent social upheaval that have convulsed our nation the last week. I want to talk mostly about courage.
In the wake of the horrific killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, David French tweeted a link to a National Review essay of his from a couple years back in which he reflects on a series of police shootings—including the killings of Philando Castile, Daniel Shaver, Walter Scott, and the then-recent slaying of Stephen Clark. French describes what he saw—rightly—as the police’s unjustified lack of restraint in each case. Such a lack of restraint, he observes, was of a caliber that would have been shocking to even the amped-up tension and violence of the Middle East warzones.
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