Terrorist lives matter, or: Take another knee, Kaepernick

This isn't the first blog to note the irony of the suspected Chelsea bomber being taken alive, despite exchanging fire with cops, while the news showed us footage of an unarmed Tulsa OK man being killed by police, apparently for touching his SUV the wrong way. But let's not overstate the irony. The suspected terrorist, after all, is a potential asset. Alive, he may tell the NYPD, FBI, etc. important things about jihadi networks and terror cells. By comparison, of what use was the "bad dude," as a helicopter cop called the Tulsa victim, to local law enforcement? Tulsa, it seems, is a bad place; one of their "finest" (a reserve deputy, actually) is already doing time for shooting an unarmed man with his revolver when he meant to taze the bro. Once again, of course, the latest Tulsa victim was condemned for failing to comply. In a possibly addled state, he seemed to think it okay not to obey instructions so long as he kept his hands in the air. He sealed his fate by moving as if to get something out of his car -- it wasn't a gun, we now know -- and was tazed and shot just about simultaneously. Someone did the right thing, at least, or at least relatively speaking.

So here we are again, just as a lot of Americans had convinced themselves that "privileged" football players had nothing to complain about. Of course, a lot of those Americans remain convinced even after the news from Tulsa. The nation arguably is more visibly divided between the "comply or die" party and those who refuse to accept such outcomes as the breaks of the game than it is along more conventional party lines. One side insists that you have to choose between maximum safety and discretion for police and the lives of self-evident troublemakers. They've already decided that "blue" lives matter more than others in this country. The rest of us believe that it's not for the cops on the street to decide whether any lives matter less than others, unless someone is indisputably threatening other lives. Shooting-involved officers are defended invariably in the name of their own self-preservation -- the idea being they should not be punished for making mistakes lest they err the opposite way before a real threat -- and not the protection of others. Yet if we accept that police risk their lives to protect the innocent, doesn't it follow that police must accept risk in order to avoid injuring or killing people who are neither real threats nor (it must be conceded) real bright? This should not be too much to ask in a purportedly civilized society, yet look what happens when people ask. They're condemned as if they're complicit in the next such incident or the death of any police officer -- and lately they're condemned as if they're traitors to their country. I suppose they might be traitors if we lived in a police state, but despite some people's wishes we're not there yet.  I will note that so far I haven't heard as much rabid defense of the police from some of the usual channels that I usually hear on such occasions. There may even be a consensus that the police really did botch this one. Why don't we ask our presidential candidates about it?...