Al Sharpton was arrested today while protesting the acquittal of three New York City cops involved in the Sean Bell shooting incident (for details, see Andy McCarthy’s piece here). Sharpton said, “If you’re not going to lock up the guilty in this town, I guess you have to lock up the innocent.”
As you could probably guess, none of the protesters were “lock[ed] up” today. I was at one of the Sean Bell protests, and I recorded one of the protest organizers giving instructions to those whom he was recruiting to get arrested. “If you get arrested and you have identification on you… you’re gonna be taken straight to central booking, and you’ll be released from there with a desk appearance ticket, so no one’s going to have to go through the system,” he said:
The police dealing with the protesters in midtown were civil to a fault. Actually, I couldn’t believe they let the protesters obstruct traffic for as long as they did. Meanwhile, they had to put up with chants of “Murder the murderers”:
The definitive rebuttal to this sort of craziness remains Heather Mac Donald’s “No, the Cops Didn’t Murder Sean Bell.” (Heather’s latest, if you missed it, is also a must-read.)