Violent ones! You got your wish--and it will hurt the movement tragically

Since the terrible gunning down of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, I've been arguing against those who increasingly call for "armed self defense" against police violence and for similar strands of argument for justified retaliatory violence when cops act like thugs and murder African Americans. At each occasion, I have been scorned by those who equate nonviolence with passivity. Often, but not always, those heaping ridicule have been young white males. I believe that they believe themselves to be superior allies to African Americans who have suffered so much injustice for so long.

I also believe they don't have a strategic thought in their heads. I get the emotional flare up when we can watch the thugs calling themselves NYPD choke an unarmed family man to death, on film, no indictment. The compound crimes beg for justice.

Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley

Was the benighted man who just executed two NYPD officers and then took his own life acting in the belief that he would be lionized by the movement that has been in the streets of virtually all American cities in the past weeks and months? Did he think he was acting in their name? Apparently.

The slain police officers: Rafael Ramos, 40, left, and Wenjian Liu, 32. CreditNew York Police Department

Brinsley, the shooter, sent out an Instgram message, “I’m putting wings on pigs today … They take 1 of ours. Let’s take 2 of theirs.”

Knowing what this will do, Al Sharpton, the families of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown all denounced the murder.

So, those who have been calling for such violence against police have their wish now. Last evening I was out with many hundreds of others first in an African American church and then in the rain on a long walk to the site where Kendra James, a young unarmed African American mother of two was mercilessly shot down and allowed to bleed to death by Portland police 11 years ago. The national movement has fed into the local movement and now I wonder what will happen.

Certainly the cops nationwide now have far more sympathy from the public, who are instantly made grateful for the cops who protect them, by the cops who come to work prepared to risk their lives, and now in the fresh memory of two cops--neither of them white--who have been slaughtered while sitting in their patrol car. Cops in New York city have already declared war and the consequences will be predictably nasty for regular folks, including those who have been demonstrating against police violence. It is going to get ugly fast there, much more violent, and the public will allow it much more than they have. These murders, done in the name of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, may destroy a movement. We shall see.

Those who have been calling for this now have their wish. I wonder if they are well satisfied? If they never actually cared whether a movement succeeded or not, I suppose this feels thrilling to them--their rhetoric, no doubt, inspired the killer. As someone with two African American sons and as someone who has been working on these issues for a long time, I remain deeply opposed to violence on any and all sides for any and all reasons. All violence backfires. The backfire against a largely nonviolent movement is commencing and those who have advocated for violence have much to answer for.