Stalin is said to have remarked, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” With attribution credit to the monstrous mass-murderer, I’ll paraphrase this as: One death at the hands of police is a tragedy; ten thousand deaths in the inner city is a statistic, and a statistic we ignore almost entirely.

If we are religious, we believe that every human being is created in God’s image, and therefore infinitely precious. If we are practical, we believe that a dead person is 100% dead, no matter who killed him. If we are compassionate, we feel empathy for all bereaved families, no matter who killed their loved one. But if we are progressive, we grieve – and demonstrate – if police kill one person, even if he was in the act of committing a serious crime. But we yawn in apathy if scores of innocent people – including children and even babies – are murdered in one weekend. After all, they weren’t murdered in our neighborhood.

You can call this behavior progressive if you wish. You can call it almost anything you please. But you can’t call it moral. And you can’t call it compatible with the survival of a free nation.

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