Crimestoppers, North Carolina edition

By Leo Frank
Southern Bureau Chief of The Massachusetts Spy

Civic beautification ain't free, at least according to law enforcement in Durham County, North Carolina, the state that, notwithstanding its pretensions to civilization, somehow isn't too busy to hate.

That's the moral to be drawn from the police and prosecutors' response to the dastardly War on Statues now being waged by a group of protesters who have the temerity to demand the removal of monuments celebrating treason, white supremacy, slavery, and historical revisionism, or, as they are known south of the Potomac, monuments to Confederate soldiers, generals, pols, and other insurrectionists.

Earlier this week, a group of protesters, unencumbered by assault weapons, Tiki Torches, clubs, shields, or ill-fitting khakis did the following deed, according to the Durham, N.C. Herald Sun: (PS Don't let children read the bloodcurdling details of the outrage)

Monday’s rally began around 6 p.m. as more than 50 people gathered in front of the now Durham County administration building. They chanted. They shared their experiences in Charlottesville, Virginia and demanded that people fight racism across the South.

Sheriff’s deputies recorded the event but did not intervene as a protester climbed a ladder amid applause and chants and slipped a yellow, bungie-like cord around the soldier’s head and arm.

Protesters chanted “We, we are The Revolution” and cried out, “You can’t stop The Revolution.”

They tugged the yellow cord.

And the statue did a somersault, collapsing against the stone pedestal in front of the old county courthouse on East Main Street. Demonstrators kicked and stomped the soldier in front of the cameras the sheriff says his officers are now using to identify those responsible.

The sole victim of the “riot.”

Oh, the humanity!  At the end of the mayhem, there lay Johnny Reb on the ground as dead as Trayvon Martin.  Of course, Johnny Reb is a statue and Trayvon was a real-life young man.  Oh, and there's one more difference, if the Durham County District Attorney has anything to say on the subject: unlike the murderer of Trayvon Martin, the desecrators of Johnny Reb will be convicted of a felony.

What felony, inquiring minds want to know?  The individuals allegedly involved in ridding Durham of an unsightly public nuisance are being charged with:

▪ NC Gen. Stat. 14-288.2(c) Participation in a riot with property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class H felony).
▪ NC Gen. Stat. 14-288.2(e) inciting others to riot where there is property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class F felony).

A riot?  What riot?  They came, they pulled down a statue commemorating treason, they danced around, and they went home.  Is that a riot?  We think of a riot as more like when Nazis drive cars into and club protesters who have the nerve to stand up to them, or as the Bigot-in-Chief would call it, “Both sides.”

Doesn't a riot have to involve some serious breach of the peace, or at least more serious than littering with bronze symbols of white supremacy?  Apparently not – even the Model Penal Code Section 250.1 says that a person is guilty of riot if “he participates with two or more others in a course of disorderly conduct; (a) with purpose to commit or facilitate the commission of a felony or a misdemeanor . . . ”  So riot is an inchoate offense, like conspiracy, only louder.

And incitement to riot?  In North Carolina, when someone urges someone else to riot and sometime later there's a riot, that's also a felony.  So if you're sitting in a coffee shop whining about how oppressed you are by state-sponsored symbols of racism and treason, and your interlocutors are thereby inspired to pull down the offending statue of Saddam Hussein [Surely, a Confederate soldier? – Ed.], you've committed a felony!  There's no requirement of imminence or clear and present danger.  You can look it up.  There may be another body of law that has something to say about that, assuming it's still in effect at time of trial.  You can look that one up too.

We're not aware of too many miscreants charged with rioting when they for example go out together and one of them buys beers for the others on a forged ID (or weed), but that would fulfill the requirements of the Model Penal Code for the crime of rioting.  Thanks, Herb.

And who says big piles of treason worship are worth $1,500?  How much would you pay for a life-size bronze Confederate soldier?  Since the GOP-rigged North Carolina Legislature has determined that cities and towns can't remove such odious memorials without their approval, the answer must be that tokens of segregation are indeed priceless.  By the way, we bet you could get a redneck with a welding gun to glue Johnny Reb's head back on for a lot less than that.

Now we suspect that in a few weeks this case will quietly be buried and those who rid Durham of its Jim Crow excrescence will go on with their lives, as Bree Newsome did when she pulled down the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina (a different place, apparently).  But in the current climate of neo-Nazi subversion of our constitutional order, sanctioned by the deranged bigot in the White House, loosely using criminal statutes with serious penalties for what are at best petty offenses could be dangerous.  Bigly.