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DECEMBER 9, 2021

Meyerson on TAP

January 6th Defendants Allege Police Brutality. Come Again?

Cops to blame for violence during riots? That would be a novel, and
whites-only, development.

The most wondrous story in the grab bag of this morning's news is
that, according to a

**New York Times** report
,
some defendants in their upcoming trials for their violent participation
in the January 6th attack on Congress plan to argue that they were only
responding to police violence.

The odds that this line of defense will work are wafer-thin. Until the
George Floyd murder, it would be a cold July day in Death Valley for a
court to rule against the cops, and since the George Floyd murder, it
would still be a cold July day in Death Valley for a court to rule
against police conduct in the midst of a riot, much less an
insurrection. Moving from the general to the particular, there are also
the videos and photos of the defendants that those defendants will have
to overcome. The

**Times**reports, for instance, that one defendant making the police
brutality claim is "social media influencer" Edward Lang, charged with
assaulting cops with a baseball bat. Presumably, Lang will have to prove
that he was expecting to join a softball game and just got caught up in
the melee.

This kind of argument gives chutzpah a bad name.

But suppose, through some jurisprudential miracle, that that defense is
upheld. I recall no such defense prevailing in the aftermath of the two
great Los Angeles uprisings, or those that broke out across the country
in the second half of the 1960s. The Black Panthers, who arose in
specific response to the routine police brutalization and abuse of
inner-city African Americans, never prevailed in court by citing the
reason for their existence. For that matter, both of the L.A. uprisings
erupted in direct response to police violence (1965) and the acquittal
of cops for their videotaped beating of Rodney King (1992), just as the
riots of the '60s were also rooted in substantial part in the rage at
routine police brutality and the nonexistence of legal means of redress
against it.

Given the voluminous history of police violence, the Lang "defense,"
were it to succeed, would inadvertently validate some of the claims of
Black Lives Matter, not to mention the claims of many of those arrested
and jailed during the upheavals of the '60s-at least, the claim that
police brutality is alive and well, though not that it is systematically
directed against African Americans. Which, I suppose, is one
reason-and the only bad reason-why the Lang defense is DOA.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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