I wanted to say thank you for supporting free speech. It’s one of our constitutional amendments, even coming before the Second Amendment that so many cheer and applaud and fight for so loudly. Pat Bagley’s “The Deep Hate” cartoon is, unfortunately, accurate, as have been other political cartoons drawing the line between such groups and law enforcement recently.
I would invite readers to look up events of the Freedom Riders, a group of citizens protesting segregation. They had their buses burned during riots in the South. Among the crowd were law enforcement, in full support of what happened and who then charged the bus riders, not rioters, for breaking laws.
The coziness with hate groups, much like racism, did not die in 1968. It has lived and festered ever since in the halls of government and power. It has surfaced in every fabric of society, disproportionately affecting minority communities, from high mortgage rates, to lower home sales values, to higher pregnancy deaths and infant mortality rates, to schools deprived of funding, to fewer business loan opportunities and higher loan rates, to suppressed votes, to criminal charges that carry sentences 20% longer than comparable crimes from others, and to yes, violence at the hands of law enforcement.
And it is law enforcement’s near immunity, in all but the rarest of cases, that allow such abuses to take place. When coupled with officers who are racists (they all aren’t, but many are), such abuses have deadly and prolonged consequences. Publishing the cartoon took guts.
Dave Murphy, Live Oak, Calif.
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