The Black Lives Matter movement targets a very specific problem. That problem is that police officers seem to be rather trigger happy when it comes to interaction with black people. The metrics seem to be very fuzzy, largely due to a lack of any level of reporting or accountability when it comes to police killing people, but the one thing that does seem to stand out is the number of black victims shot by police while completely unarmed. This BLM movement, and the police shootings of innocent black victims, has lead to another problem. Now, people are trying to fight back against the police. Recently we have seen a number of BLM related shootings of police officers. The response to the shooting of a few police officers has been very different from the response of police shooting unarmed and innocent black people though. The media immediately reported it when the police were shot. When the black victims were shot, it was only reported when public outcry reached a threshold where it was starting to go viral. It is as if the media actually cared about the police who got shot but only cared about missing out on a viral story when the black people were shot by police. It is clear that police lives matter, but black lives only seem to matter when it makes a good story. This is a problem, for many reasons, but what it really comes down to is that all lives matter.
I would love to discuss why all of these lives matter, but I am not in the mood for a religious discussion, and the point of this article is to discuss why we seem to treat police lives as mattering more and whether they actually do. Before I start though, I want to stress that regardless of whose life matters more, all human lives are equally valuable.
Why do police lives seem to matter more? Police deaths have always been treated as tragic, especially when those deaths were caused by others. Killing a police officer is considered a greater crime than killing a civilian or even a private security guard. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons. The first is that we tend to revere authority. Police officers have been granted authority by the government beyond what regular civilians are granted. If the government is a legitimate source of authority (and most law abiding citizens will agree that it is, to at least some degree), then police officers have legitimate authority over civilians. Killing a police officer is seen as worse than killing another civilian, because a police officer is part of a higher social class than regular civilians. Aside from a question of the Constitutionality of government mandated social classes (explicit or implicit), we should be questioning this. The reason is that police officers are not appointed leaders. They are law enforcement. Their primary job is our protection. So, without the authority argument, are police lives still worth more than civilian lives? This is a harder question. If they are our protectors, and they get killed, who protects us? On the other hand, if they survive but we get killed, are they really protecting us?
The answer should be obvious. Police officers swear to protect the people they serve. They do this with the understanding that they are putting their own lives at risk by doing it. In short, when a police officer fails to protect an innocent civilian, that police officer has failed. When a police officer is killed while protecting civilians, that police officer has done his or her duty. A police officer that kills an innocent civilian has become part of the problem that he or she has sworn to protect everyone else from. The fact is, police officers are people who have sworn to protect the people with the knowledge that they are risking their lives in doing so. Civilians have made no such commitment. Police officers are like soldiers in this respect. In pure value all lives are equal. When it comes to who's lives matter the most though, those who have committed to protect the lives of others have sworn that the lives of others matter more than their own lives.
All lives matter, but the lives of innocent civilians matter more than the lives of police officers, because those officers have declared it so with their own mouths. When a police officer expressed relief that the murder victim was only a security guard and not a government mandated police officer, that officer violated his or her oath of service. When police arrive a crime scene, and the only death is a police officer, that is when they should be relieved. When police arrive at a scene where innocent civilians have died, they should feel like they have failed their sworn duty, because they have! We should mourn police deaths like we mourn the deaths of soldiers. When soldiers die, we revere them (if we have any sense or gratitude) for the sacrifice they have made for our freedom; we don't get outraged that anyone would dare to kill a soldier. When we express outrage that a police officer was killed in the line of duty, we deny their oath and their sworn purpose, and we raise them above ourselves. Police officers are no better than anyone else, except perhaps in their willingness to risk their lives for our safety. The fact is, black lives matter, and so do white lives, Asian lives, native American lives, and the lives of police officers. The fact also is, police officers have sworn their lives to our protection, and when a civilian dies instead of a police office, we should not feel relief, we should feel ashamed for the officers who did not fulfill their duties. In short, all lives matter, but civilian lives matter more than police officer lives, because police officers have sworn to protect them, with their own lives if necessary.
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