Lawless in Baltimore

There was a complete breakdown of law and order in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Innocent people’s homes and places of business were destroyed. The police were attacked and sometimes badly injured. The political leadership of the city of Baltimore completely ran and hid for a good 24 hours. The vacuum in political leadership in turn castrated the police and made the whole idea of law into a bad joke.

We can be thankful that the days when police horrifyingly swept up black people for loitering, or public intoxication, or gambling — or for just no reason at all — then beat them and then worked them to death on chain gangs, are long over. We can be thankful that even the man arrested for a crime or suspected of a crime has rights.  And we can and should be bitterly disappointed — when those rights are ignored, so writes Ben Stein, in The American Spectator.
Ben Stein is a writer, actor, and lawyer, who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes cast him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.