Lexington’s double standard: Social justice protesters arrested while drunk rioters go free.

As of Wednesday morning, the ridiculous remaining charges against the Black Lives Matter protesters from the summer of 2020 have been dropped.

It seems that Sarah Williams’ sham trial was enough to convince prosecutors that it was indeed a waste of everyone’s time to continue this strange civic vendetta against the people who opened our eyes to systemic injustices. Attorney Daniel Whitley said Wednesday that mediation led to the latest action.

But we still need some educating. Because also as of Wednesday morning, there are no charges filed against the hooligans who celebrated the University of Kentucky’s football victory over Florida Saturday. Those “celebrations,” which were actually riots that caused more property damage than any BLM protests, were not apparently serious enough for any arrests at the time, despite the fact that police watched as a young man’s car got destroyed.

UK police and Lexington police say they are now working together to find the people who were filmed flipping that car. “We’re not going to turn a blind eye to that,” Chief Lawrence Weathers said two days after his officers turned a blind eye to that. I just hope they can find some clues from the roughly 10,000 videos posted from the evening.

It’s a celebration, not a protest, some will say. Boys will be boys, after all.

White boys, that is.

If the boys had been Black or the car-flipping had happened in the East End, do any of us really think police would have just been standing around?

“The bigger question is why do the police feel like they have to punish people who question their authority, but allow privileged kids to the be the exception to the rule?” asked Daniel Whitley, the attorney who represented Williams and other BLM protesters. “It’s that blatant bias we’ve been talking about that we need to get rid of.”

Valeria Swope is a former WKYT journalist who now lives in Cincinnati, but stays in touch with happenings here. She also used the word “blatant.” State Street post-game parties frequently cause property destruction but it’s seldom anyone has been held accountable.

“Had this happened in another part of the city, police would have been right there arresting people, but because it was UK students, they just stood there,” she said. “It’s just so blatant.”

UK says its police force can’t arrest people on State Street because it’s not officially on campus. It seems like there could easily be some kind of agreement with Lexington Police to give them those powers to actually crack down on students, which is ostensibly why UK needs a police force in the first place. Lexington police are understaffed and overworked with a serious crime wave, but that is not a good reason to ignore less serious but still extremely destructive crime by a bunch of drunk college kids.

This is not just a criminal justice problem, it’s a societal one. Once people questioned the double standard in how we treat social justice protesters versus drunk college rioters, police announced they would do something about it. Now let’s look at marijuana arrests, traffic stops, juvenile detention and all the other ways that justice is applied unequally by race and class, and stop turning a blind eye to that, too.