Still, the conservative movement as a whole has no answer to corrupt cops or police departments, though they're among the most oppressive bureaucracies in the U.S. Prior to Baltimore, few voices on the right had even acknowledged the massive problem. Most commentary after the riots only highlights their blind spots. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger assigned blame for Monday's unrest to Al Sharpton, the phrase "no justice, no peace," and the unemployment rate. His column-length attempt to finger the causes of the riot makes no mention of Freddie Gray's unexplained death or Baltimore's long history of egregious policing. That hugely consequential local history is totally ignored.

The myopia sometimes manifests as a failure to apply "law-and-order" logic consistently. Jack Dunphy, a pseudonymous LAPD officer and longtime National Review contributor, wrote that "if you allow lawlessness to go unchallenged, you will very quickly have more of it. With the rioters thus emboldened, restoring order will now require a greater level of force than would have been necessary had the police been allowed to act decisively at the first sign of violence. As I write this no one has yet been killed in Baltimore, but I fear that will change soon enough." Why doesn't a policeman who believes that lawlessness begets more lawlessness have any record of urging reforms aimed at lawlessness by police officers? It isn't as if he's never seen misbehavior during his decades at a scandal-prone LAPD. Why isn't he professionally disgusted by the abysmal record of Baltimore cops? And one can't help but notice that when he says that "no one has yet been killed in Baltimore," he's using a timeline that arbitrarily begins after the killing of Freddie Gray.

National Review's editor, Rich Lowry, is similarly selective in the time horizons he chooses. "Of course, law enforcement should always act responsibility," he wrote, "but parts of Baltimore were burning yesterday because the police were overly restrained." After watching residents of Ferguson, Missouri, riot even in the face of aggressive militarized battalions on its streets, I'm confused by the certainty some conservatives apparently feel that overly restrained police is what went wrong in Baltimore. But even if more assertive policing would've helped Monday, one need only look back a bit farther to see that if not for the insufficiently restrained policing that may have killed Freddie Gray and definitely brutalized scores of blacks in recent years, there very likely would not have been riots in Baltimore, just as there probably wouldn't have been LA riots if not for the LAPD's epidemic brutality.

In the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley asks, "If the Ferguson protesters were responding to a majority-black town being oppressively run by a white minority—which is the implicit argument of the Justice Department and the explicit argument of the liberal commentariat—what explains Baltimore?" This is not difficult: that a city is run by back leaders does not make it immune to police brutality. Neither do black police officers, as the highly informed David Simon has attested:

When Ed [Burns] and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. The two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn't a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable. But in some ways they were empowered… You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers — however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required — it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.

It would be fair for conservatives to point out that police brutality meted out by black officers complicates the narrative put forth by the least thoughtful progressives. And it's fair for Kevin Williamson to point out that for all the ire directed at Republicans, American cities, including Baltimore, "are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party." What's missing from his article is the acknowledgement that when Democrats from Bill Clinton to former Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley adopted tough-on-crime policies and embraced the War on Drugs, they were drawing on movement conservative and neoconservative ideology and cheered by Republicans whose record of holding police accountable is inferior to Democrats. As ever, the embrace of oppressive policing policies is bipartisan.