Faithfully yours - Lessons from Dallas and Baton Rouge, part one

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Published on Saturday, July 30, 2016

By Neil Strohschein

Neepawa Banner

The recent attacks on police officers in Dallas, TX and Baton Rouge, LA have left communities and nations in shock; with many people asking the same question: “What’s going on here?”

What’s going on here is easy to explain—when justice is denied (or perceived to have been denied) to those who seek it, some people will take the law into their own hands and fight back at what they believe is an unjust system that discriminates against them and others like them.

What these vigilantists don’t realize is that their actions may not produce the results they are seeking. If anything, they will create more tension in local police departments and increase the risk of excessive and possibly lethal force being used in situations where it is totally unnecessary. The end result—more senseless shootings, more protests and more acts of retaliation—which, when added together, will produce even more senseless shootings, even more protests and even more acts of retaliation.

It’s a vicious cycle that keeps getting more vicious and it obscures the message that people on both sides of this issue are trying to share. This is a message we’ve heard before. But unfortunately, we haven’t taken it as seriously as we should have.

It’s no secret that many Canadians have serious concerns about our justice system and are calling for significant reforms. While I understand their concerns, I would argue that before we can reform the system, we need to review the three essential qualities of a system in which everyone is guaranteed equal justice under the law.

I will deal with the first one this week and talk about the other two in next week’s column.

The first quality is this: in every just society must be governed by just laws. The laws must set forth absolute standards of right and wrong. They must be easy to understand so that those who make the law, those who must keep the law and those who enforce the law will interpret it the same way and know what is expected of them. There must be one law for all people; and there must be no grey areas (obscure or unclear definitions of right and wrong) or loopholes that allow those guilty of crimes to get off on a technicality.

In crafting these laws, we will find much wisdom in the Ten Commandments given to ancient Israel. This ancient law code divides into two parts. Part one deals with the ancient Israelites’ obligations to God. Part two deals with their obligations to each other. Here we find four principles upon which all civil and criminal law codes should be based. These principles are:

1.Respect for human life (don’t kill and don’t bear false witness against another).

2.Respect for authority (honor your father and mother).

3.Respect for private property (don’t covet and don’t steal).

4.Respect for established relationships (don’t commit adultery).

These principles share two things in common. First, they remind us that we should always be more concerned about the needs of others than we are about our own; that we should, as Jesus said so clearly, love our neighbors as ourselves.

The second thing these principles share in common is that they apply equally to all people, in all cultures and in all periods of time. Laws based on these principles will be as blind to the things that divide us as the original laws were.

Next week—how do we enforce the law so that justice is not only done, but “seen” to be done?