Over the weekend, a speaker at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis encouraged the crowd to burn down police stations and continue looting and rioting they way the city experienced during the 2020 BLM riots.
The protest came after 22-year-old Amir Locke was killed by Minneapolis police during a no-knock raid while serving a search warrant last week. Body camera footage showed police unlocking the door to the apartment and then shouting “Police!” as they entered. Locke was asleep on the couch and wrapped in a blanket. Within nine seconds, police shot Locke after seeing he was armed with a handgun. Locke was not named in the warrant, according to Fox News.
The protest, which was attended by about 1,000 people, was peaceful. But, some wanted to take things further.
“Feel your anger fully. Be mad! BE MAD! Because your anger is justified. Build barricades, burn precincts, reappropriate what they’ve stolen from you for thousands of generations!” one speaker said on Saturday.
“Power to the looters! Power to the rioters!” the man continued.
The same speaker said the reason why former police officer Derek Chauvin is in prison for the killing of George Floyd is because of the mass lawlessness Minneapolis and St. Paul, along with much of the country, saw in 2020.
In contrast, Locke’s father called for peace and said they [the family] do not hate police officers, but the bad ones need to be rooted out.
“There’s great officers that are white. There’s great officers, period,” Andre Lock said. “But they have bad seeds. They have the bad seeds and those bad seeds are the ones who don’t need to be in our communities.”
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Harbingers Daily reporter, Brandon Beckham, wrote about the increase of lawlessness, specifically brought about by way of demonizing, restricting, and calling for eliminating police departments.
In Beckham’s recent reporting on a Bill to defund the police, which was narrowly defeated by voters, he wrote:
Scripture teaches that civil authority, including police, is established to restrain lawlessness in society. Romans 13:4 expressly states that authorities, like peace officers, “are God’s servants, sent for the very purpose of punishing those who do what is wrong.”
Tim Barfield, a law enforcement veteran and Chief of Police in Wellington, Ohio, writes that “America was founded on Biblical principles.” With this, Barfield argues, “Romans 13 lays out that the commission of the civil government is to stand against evil.”
Chief Barfield contends that eliminating police from society is to invite evil, explaining that “evil is the war [police] are fighting against,” and scripturally, “law enforcement is the hand of the civil government and [the role of police] is to bear the sword against evil.”
In a 1970s New York Times article, Billy Graham wrote, “The Bible teaches that there will be a future generation with certain characteristics to indicate that the end of the age is near.” One of these discernible signs is an observable and exponential increase in lawlessness (Matt. 24:12).
