Found this a thought provoking article from the other side of the aisle than I am politically. (It is quite long so didn't include all but rest here
http://www.weeklystandard.com/its-trump-vs.-the-nfl-and-were-all-losers/article/2009805)
Some assorted thoughts on Trump versus the NFL:
(1) Why are the players protesting? Police brutality? To bring attention to Black Lives Matter? Trump? Institutional racism? Capitalism? Ask 10 different NFL players and you'll probably get 5 different answers. More confusing still: When should the protests be over? Once you start protesting open-ended societal problems there’s no obvious endpoint. The criminal justice system isn’t going to be perfected tomorrow, or next week, or by the time today’s NFL rookies retire. And even if we did fix the justice system, there would be other large-scale societal woes. Why not protest income inequality? Or the disparate racial impacts of abortion? Protests ought to be organized with bright-line goals and natural endpoints. Otherwise kneeling for the national anthem becomes like wearing pink to “raise awareness” about breast cancer: It goes on for forever (and loses meaning over time).
(2) That said, there are non-crazy reasons why NFL players might protest on the broader subject of police misconduct, which is where this story kind-of, sort-of began. The current unrest began with the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, but that case was always an imperfect
cause celebre: Brown wasn't an innocent bystander, and it wasn’t clear that the police acted poorly. But even as the Ferguson story was unfolding there plenty of other examples of police behaving badly. The
Eric Garner story sure as hell should have freaked out anyone in the country who worries about having a police force that is (a) empowered to kill for almost no reason; and (b) is not held to a reasonable degree of accountability by the other pillar of the criminal justice system.
(3) Anyone who looks around the country and believes that black folks don't have a totally different experience with the police than white folks is simply kidding himself. There are probably a hundred reasons for this, including: the proliferation of handguns (I say this as a factual matter, not a moral judgment), usage of illegal drugs, and actuarial facts about violence. Racism may have a little to do with it (as
Freddie Gray’s death suggests) or a lot (as the Colin Kaepernicks of the world would suggest). But the fraught nature of interactions between police and black people is a basic fact of life and you can't even begin to engage with the questions at hand if you don’t understand that it is a real thing.
(4) Conservatives have a blind spot for the police for reasons that are mystifying. Conservatives, after all, are hugely distrustful of government authority. Someone from the IRS or the EPA bosses citizens around and deprives them of their property and conservatives freak out. But call that agent of the government a cop, give him a gun, the authority to kill, and a public sector union devoted to ensuring he faces zero accountability? Suddenly only racial agitators and liberal namby-pambies question his actions.
(7) Yet in an important sense, none of this argument is really about police misconduct, per se. It’s about
the institutional response to police misconduct. Think about the Catholic Church’s priest-abuse scandal. The scandal wasn’t that there was a small number of priests who abused their charges. This sort of evil behavior has happened for centuries and will continue to happen for centuries more because people are fallible, all people, even priests. No, the “scandal” was that the bishops observed this evil behavior and then tried to cover it up.
The same is true for police misconduct. If police officers who acted badly faced criminal consequences for their behavior most of the time, then I suspect that society would not get so upset about incidents of misconduct. It would be much easier to accept the few-bad-apples explanation and move on about our lives accepting that the benefits of police outweigh the costs.
