Amidst all the horrifying images of police violence last week, one of the underappreciated tragedies was the rapid spread of armed vigilante groups roaming the streets and attacking protesters under the pretense of “preventing looting.” The liberal elite may point and laugh at rural communities for busting out machine guns to guard against Antifa busses that exist only in their meth-fueled fantasies, but it’s not like their own cosmopolitan utopias were free of this mentality. The mob in Philadelphia was infamously given a free pass by nearby authorities as they assaulted and threatened people at random. Law enforcement nationwide spent the week claiming that protesters were hoarding bricks and other weapons — though the NYPD could only scrounge up hapless delivery guys with bike tire repair kits — and yet these people carried hammers around with impunity.
New York had its own “armed patrol group” in South Brooklyn and one of its organizers is a self-described conservative law student at Fordham[1] whose experience putting together a posse should have taught him exactly how problematic his worldview really is.
But don’t worry, it didn’t seem to teach him anything.
The story begins with a post on a school group chat:
Well, if no one else is going to use a baseball bat this year.
Why would anyone loot Sheepshead Bay? Looting was, in the grand scheme of things, fairly rare over the last week but to the extent it happened, Manhattan and its big box stores have everything someone could possibly need. The convenience of one-stop shopping doesn’t, like, cease to be a draw. Sheepshead Bay is where Macy’s sends its junk products.
In a story by NY1, the group’s organizers explained that they were focused on responding to police scanner traffic (which I can personally attest to being rife with specious rumors last week that were debunked within hours) and chasing down people “looking for hidden weapons such as rocks inside of crates, gasoline containers” — a paranoid falsehood spread through right-wing media and the NYC Mayor’s office.
As you can probably guess, the group quickly ballooned into a hive of racist conspiracy theorists posing problems for the student earnestly trying to keep things as civil as a private security force can. As the student would later write in the group chat, “This group went from 2 to 1000 in 2 days so it’s very hard for me to stay on top of it and I am working with other admins to enforce our rules.” Yeah… who would have thought that telling yahoos to arm themselves would bring out the crazies. This should have been the teachable moment, but even Batman couldn’t stop the hockey pads guy from messing around in Gotham, so what chance could this subtle lesson in board moderation have?
One classmate appealed to him over the group chat:
I truly don’t want to think that you have bad intentions, but you should see what people are saying in response to your coalition. I have personally never seen so many openly racist and aggressive people coalescing under one call to action. Do better I am pretty sure i want the same thing as you guys.
Honestly, his response is so meta in the context of a vigilante response to a protest over police brutality that it should collapse the universe:
There are definitely bad apples and we are working to talk to them, explain, etc!
As the other student pointed out that “Bad apples kill people.”
Ultimately, Dean Matthew Diller posted a statement for law students to “express that as a community we should denounce this type of rhetoric and to underscore the inappropriateness of the conduct.” This should have ended this troubling chapter in the school’s history.
Friends, it did not.
However, I wanted to share with you the email that I sent to Dean Diller when I first found out that he might issue a school-wide statement. Please note that even though he took the time to respond to YOU and YOUR CONCERNS, it seems that my side of the story didn’t even merit discussion. So much for a tolerant academic environment where conservative students are treated as equal to their liberal counterparts. I’m really glad that we’re going in this non-tolerant direction as a society (and I don’t mean non-tolerance to racism), it fills my heart with joy (not).
Yeah, it might be less of a liberal-conservative thing and more of a “only one of you created a 1,000-person private army of bad apples” thing.
Also, just want to give a give a quick shout-out to the true hero of Fordham Law, not me, the guy who ended up being an organizer of a community group that has stopped burglaries and made people feel safer, has not confronted not one protestor or any person, and is working to do a lot of good in the community, but actually supposed human-rights attorney Urooj Rahman ’16, who was arrested on May 30 for throwing a molotov cocktail at a police vehicle and passing out incendiary devices at the demonstrations.
Vetting process at work. Also, when this group falls apart, Jimbo says he’s going to law school. Coincidence?
Indeed, Rahman is very much in jail for allegedly throwing an incendiary device at an unoccupied police vehicle. Rahman also isn’t a Fordham Law student that the class has to interact with every day and the guy calling for armed civilians to go out and enforce their own subjective sense of the law is. So Dean Diller’s obligations are more properly focused on this situation.
Also, how did he stop burglaries and never confront any person? Not to double up on the Simpsons references, but is this like Lisa’s Anti-Tiger Rock? Maybe there just wasn’t ever any threat of burglaries in the first place.
In any event, this is an opportunity to realize that, regardless of conscious intention, this whole project sprung from racially tinged rumor-mongering. That’s why the group grew so quickly to include so many “bad apples” and it should give the student pause.
Instead… oh no… he’s gonna do it, isn’t he? He’s really going to go to the same bullshit playbook:
Although I am still extremely busy I challenge the school to have the courage to set up a debate/conversation on these issues with myself as one of the participants….
A quote-unquote debate! Someone please call 911 because I’m bleeding from my eyeballs. These aren’t debates, they’re exercises in empty sophistry designed to give the illusion of credibility to crackpot ideas. Don’t fall for it.
… rather than resorting to your usual mob-like tactics and giving in to them. I hope you are all excited about the new world order that you are trying to build.
Please, tell us more about mob-like tactics.
[1] As we often do with law students who don’t file lawsuits or otherwise post in a public forum, we’re not going to identify the star of this story, even though he’s named in mainstream media stories about the group. We do this gratuitously in the usually vain hope that law students will get their act together before they enter the profession.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.