By George Ball

I live in Bridgewater.  About half a mile from the Bridgewater Commons Mall, where my town made the national news after a police encounter went viral. Police broke up a fight between two young men by seating one of them on a bench and siting on the other to place him in handcuffs.

This column is about the people who are almost certainly more at fault then the two young men who were fighting or the police officers that intervened.  It is about my community and, by extension, perhaps, many of you.

Bridgewater is a red town in a purple county in a blue state in a culture war riven country. Over 11,000 Bridgewater voters supported Trump in 2020.  A segment of them were proud Trump backers who displayed lawn signs, and banners.  A much larger number group of his supporters were more circumspect.  For every Trump lawn sign in town there were ten that expressed support for the Bridgewater police.  Meaning – as per the false battle lines drawn in the culture war – that they also supported Trump.

Biden received about 14,000 votes, and the social justice segment of his base draw oxygen from their conviction that we are a nation founded on systemic inequality, committed to white privilege and – you guessed it – riddled with racist cops.

It is hard to know which of these two groups – who now seem to dominate our public discourse – is more destructive to what our nation can be. But it is quite easy to discern the fundamental attribute they both share.  The devotees of the hard right and the hard left each start with a conclusion and then cherry pick half-facts to justify a decision already reached.

If we were one-celled organisms, this might work.  It doesn’t because we aren’t.

All of us can readily recall many times in which our first read of a situation, people, and events was mistaken. I don’t know what happened in the Bridgewater Commons Mall (although the fact that neither of these young men was Caucasian does complicate the racist cop narrative). There is a very brief film clip, some audio, and some quotes.  I do, however, know this.  At this early stage – before even the basic facts are in – Phil Murphy was wrong to weigh in on behalf of the idiot left.  Our local elected Republican officials are wrong to weaponize this as a clarion call to the idiot right.  And from what I am reading it seems that any number of the social justice demonstrators seeking the officers’ heads are just idiots.

If it turns out that the police officers behaved appropriately then they are owed a sincere apology.  But what if they didn’t?  What if they acted on racial bias?  What then?

As a Jew, I remember every anti-Semitic comment ever directed at me.  Each one of them hurt.  When I was four years old, and forty years old. I want prejudice to stop yesterday.

But consider this. Drunk driving, which kills 20,000 of us each year and maims many more, is bad. Very bad. Yet – if you have five drinks and run a red light you lose your license.  If you have the same five drinks and kill someone, you go to jail.  Misconduct matters, but so does the damage that it does, or does not, cause.

Here, no one was shot.  No one was hurt.  No one was arrested.  If after the facts are learned it turns out that the police officers did act out of racial bias it should not be dismissed or ignored.  Nor should the officers be destroyed. Instead, they should be retrained and also sit down with both of these adolescents – plus their parents – so that they can interact with each other as human beings.  After which we should all move on.

We are in a moment in this county where silence is not working.  Every time race comes up a smug talking head talks about the need for a “conversation.”  That then never happens.  Here is part of one.