Guillory
sent notice to area nonprofits asking that they hold up with shelter
establishment in the wake of the storm’s strike last Thursday, While the Lafayette
area received just a glancing blow, to the southwest major property damage
occurred, displacing many and likely for some time. As justification, Guillory
noted protest activity stemming from the police
shooting of Trayford Pellerin, who ten days ago brandished a knife a
convenience store. He exited, with Lafayette police in tow, walked half a mile
to another store, and made set to enter it, ignoring multiple times police
instructions to desist and two unsuccessful Taser attempts. Apparently fearing
Pellerin would attack people inside the second store, police open fire when he
attempted to enter, killing him.
Since then, protests have popped up around
Lafayette, without any reported acts of violence. But Guillory noted the
potential for it to occur, and therefore he could not guarantee the safety of an
influx of refugees. This didn’t mean that organizations couldn’t take people
in, just that the city gave notice that they might be at risk. For that, some
of those invested in protesting cried foul (with one particularly uneducated
complainer saying Guillory wanted to instill “fear” into people from coming
together to exercise their “second amendment” rights; rather than promote
gunplay, she probably meant to refer to the right to assemble peacefully under
the First Amendment).
Experiences elsewhere prove Guillory correct. Even
if no reports of violence had surfaced from Lafayette protest activities, with
gatherings full of misdirected passion, ignorance, and hatred, it doesn’t take
much for harm to come to innocent people, as
happened in recently in Portland, OR.
And it’s impossible to argue these protests don’t foment
emotionally-driven mass ignorance. Like others, without evidence they assume not
only did a police shooting occur unnecessarily but also it came with a bad
motive, relying on the canard
that “systemic racism” in America somehow creates a “war” on blacks. Nor do
they know the true statistics of police shootings in America, in that police
are less likely to open fire on black suspects than the proportion of arrests
by race would suggest.
Consider as well that among several high-profile
incidents where police shot black suspects, in almost every instance the
suspect was, in a word, high. That was true in the previous such incident in
Louisiana, the death of Alton
Sterling in Baton Rouge, and at national level concerning the death of George
Floyd at the hands of police, his autopsy shows he had ingested a
potentially lethal dose of fentanyl just prior to his death.
Such people act erratically and irrationally, hence
the refusal of Sterling and Floyd (and Pellerin perhaps; an autopsy will tell
all) to comply with lawful police commands and continue to struggle with and
threaten officers and/or others. It’s no wonder police in these situations
increasingly take no chances, and jurisprudence as
such gives officers wide behavioral latitude without prejudice in these
instances.
Yet despite this knowledge base, protesters ignore
or reject it in a rush to judgment with unsustainable assumptions and patently
false notions that adhere to ideology rather than fact. There’s a word for such
people: unreasonable, and unreasonable people do unreasonable things, such as
what went down in Portland.
But perhaps worst of all is this form of venting
also caters to a need to draw attention to oneself, whether the form of protest
becomes violent. What to make, for example, of the idiot who declared the way to
peace was to set up a barbecue on the street outside of Guillory’s house,
thereby impeding traffic and disturbing the neighborhood?
Unfortunately – as true today as it was three decades
ago when a significant portion of my doctoral dissertation dealt with the
impact of personality on political attitude formation – not much is known about
how personality plays into political behavior, as a consequence of measurement
issues and definitional difficulties. There is somewhat of a consensus around a
“big five” traits that have an indirect impact, more mediated by factors
inducing collective action, but not much else.
In this paucity of information, suffice to say
that protesting over what is for most an abstract issue far removed from daily
experience, and investing so much personal capital into doing so, fulfills a set
of psychological needs rather than instrumental ones. Which is to say emotional,
rather than rational, behavior holds sway, elevating the unpredictability of such
behavior.
An environment that encourages this mode of
behavior to come to the forefront among both residents and the magnetically-attracted
like-minded protest tourists probably isn’t one that you should invite into a
whole bunch of folks from out-of-town, even for humanitarian reasons. So, while
it’s unlikely that a storm refugee while in town will become engulfed by a mob
protesting under the guise of a false narrative, should it happen we’ve seen the
consequences of when these attitudes become expressed to their logical extreme,
as in Portland.
Best to err on the side of caution. Guillory did
his job by giving fair warning. Regardless of whether refugees show up if
shelters open in the city-parish, not to do so would have made him derelict in that.
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