It’s been announced that the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has approved a marker for the site of the 1985 MOVE bombing in West Philadelphia. A statement from the Jubilee School, sponsor of the monument, states the dropping of explosives on a rooftop bunker during an armed standoff “paved the way for government assistance to, and tolerance of, police brutality.”
There should be a historical marker about MOVE. I’m troubled though by the framing of those terrible events as an extreme instance of police brutality. It’s better to talk about MOVE alongside groups like the Branch Davidians or Symbionese Liberation Army—radical movements occupying heavily-armed compounds that became sites of showdowns with law enforcement.
In all these cases police were put in the position of having to conduct essentially a military operation against people hunkered down with an arsenal of weapons. MOVE had already shot and killed a Philadelphia police officer in an earlier standoff. The decisions made by the police were terrible but the options before them were also terrible.
These things always seem to end in fire. In Waco, better trained and equipped ATF agents could not stop the carnage. The difference with MOVE was it occurred in the middle of a densely-populated city neighborhood.
If we’re going to allow private citizens to hoard weapons then police need training in urban warfare. It’s the unintended consequence of Second Amendment fundamentalism.
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