This article contains news with liberal commentary.
St. Louis cops have issued trespass citations to 9 of approximately 300 protesters for walking on a private street in front of a paranoid gun-wielding couple’s mansion, ABC News reported on Friday, September 11, 2020. Read story here.
Protesters demand the resignation of St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson at her home on June 28, 2020. (Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
About 300 mostly-black George Floyd protesters walked past the McCloskeys’ castle on their way to the mayor’s house (photo, left) on June 28, 2020. The McCloskeys weren’t the target of that protest, merely neighbors of the mayor, but the protesters returned on July 3, 2020, to demonstrate against the McCloskeys’ threatening and boorish behavior outside the gated community’s walls (photo below).
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On that occasion, the McCloskeys hired a private security company for protection (story here and photo below), then went on Sean Hannity’s Fox show to bleat about how threatened they felt:
“‘[They said] that they were going to kill us,’ Patricia McCloskey told Hannity …. ‘They were going to come in there. They were going to burn down the house. They were going to be living in our house after I was dead, and they were pointing to different rooms and said, ‘That’s going to be my bedroom and that’s going to be the living room and I’m going to be taking a shower in that room’.'”
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Of course, nothing remotely like that happened; the protesters stayed outside the gate community, and merely made noise. A week after that demonstration, police executed a search warrant of the McCloskey’s home and seized Mark McCloskey’s AR-15, but couldn’t find Patricia McCloskey’s pistol, which had apparently been spirited away to their attorney’s safekeeping.
That came after the county D.A. charged the McCloskeys with felony unlawful use of weapons, following police refusal to take action against the McCloskeys (photo, right). After those charges were filed, Missouri’s Republican governor publicly promised to pardon the McCloskeys if they’re convicted. That prosecutor isn’t involved in the trespass case, which will be handled by a municipal prosecutor’s office, who said it’s reviewing the trespass citations. The municipal prosecutor could decline to prosecute the protesters for those infractions.
It’s unclear why the cops cited only 9 of the several hundred protesters, but the most logical explanation is a handful of the protesters strayed off the private street, over which the McCloskeys have asserted “squatters rights” (see my previous article here) but only own in common with their neighbors, onto precious grass they exclusively own. Cops, of course, aren’t trained to make these nuanced legal distinctions; they only need to know the difference between “grass” and “concrete” for the purpose of writing police reports.
The McCloskey case, like the Kenosha shootings and other incidents, have become symbolic to partisans on opposing sides of America’s yawning political and cultural divides, between people who sympathize with protesters demanding police reform and reactionaries who like the idea of shooting protesters for walking on grass or driving cars into crowds for blocking street traffic.
It’s hard to have a functioning democracy if people can’t commit minor civil infractions to demand changes to big flaws in society without getting shot or run over. Such a repressive society accumulates festering social grievances until those left out of the system begin to think violent revolution is the only solution. In a healthy society, protests act as a force for change, and a safety valve for pent-up frustrations. We can afford to sacrifice a bit of grass and traffic flow to the preservation of civilization.
In a functioning criminal justice system, a jury — not a governor — would decide whether the McCloskeys were justified in threatening the lives of protesters merely walking past their house, and a municipal judge would decide what fines the obviously guilty trespassers should pay. That’s called rule of law.
It goes without saying that suspects like the McCloskeys and the accused trespassers are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law, but I think they’re all guilty and deserve the appropriate penalties. That’s just my personal opinion. I strongly believe in the rule of law, but that’s not just my professional bias talking; you don’t have to be a lawyer like me to figure out what the alternative is. If rule of law collapses, or is subverted by political interference to the point where it no longer functions, we’ll all be living in Tombstone.