Amid all of the finger-pointing, accusations and heated conversation over the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and nameless others at the hands of police, there is a common thread that runs through each of the cases, which nobody seems to want to recognize. It is ironic that the media, support and protest groups and family members refuse to face that reality and acknowledge the profound effect it had in each situation. The factor to which I refer is that each of these individuals refused to comply with the lawful orders of police officers who were performing their duties. I submit that had any of these men chosen to comply with the instructions of those officers, the results would certainly have been less tragic.

Everyone is saying that these individuals died as a result of actions by the police, attempting to enforce laws whose violations should never resulted in their deaths, but nobody is saying that their deaths occurred as a result of their conscious action to defy police officers in their efforts to enforce those laws. It appears that only the grand juries in those jurisdictions considered these facts.