How do we bring back law & order? Judge Nap explains the 'nightmare' for police
Judge Andrew Napolitano discusses what can be done legally to bring back law and order to the cities facing violent protesters
In the wake of protests and riots across the nation over the death of George Floyd last week while in police custody, Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano on Monday explained the “nightmarish” predicament for law enforcement.
“It’s a nightmare for the police because the police, under the First Amendment, that jurisprudence which guarantees the right to assemble peacefully, the police have the obligation to protect those who do the assembling,” Napolitano told “America’s Newsroom.”
“First, the police are going to protect themselves and then they are going to protect those who are lawfully there, which includes our colleagues in the media and those who are not bent on violence."
Napolitano said that police have to deal with the people who "suddenly in the midst of protected activity, peaceful assembly, engage in an unprotected activity" like violence or vandalism.
Napolitano said that it is a "nightmare" for the police to “protect those who are being lawful, to remove from the group those who are engaged in violence, and to get "evidence” against those engaged in violence.
Napolitano said that getting evidence against the people engaged in violence at protests is the most important task for officers.
“We don’t have group guilt or group prosecutions in America. We only have individual prosecutions so they may get somebody who threw a Molotov cocktail out of the group and in a police van. But if they don’t have evidence that he actually did it, he’s not going to be prosecuted and he’s going to be let go within 24 or 48 hours, only to come back to the spot where all this started.”
An upstate New York woman faces federal charges for allegedly firebombing a police vehicle in Brooklyn, as protests across the country grow increasingly violent.
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Samantha Shader, 27, of Catskill, already had been charged with four counts of attempted murder, as well as attempted arson, assault, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon.
A video taken Friday night by a witness captured the 27-year-old Shader lighting a Molotov cocktail and throwing it at a police vehicle occupied by four officers in Crown Heights, shattering two of its windows. The device reportedly did not explode and all of the officers escaped.
Fox News' Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.
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