Save our gentle giants, lock them up.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

The Justice Department has taken a break from its ambitious program of freeing drug dealers and organizing race riots to continue its war on police with a database of police shootings. That way the community organizers of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service can know exactly which town or city to swoop in on in their snazzy sunglasses and windbreakers for another round of peaceful store lootings. And the DOJ’s best criminal advocates can know which police force to sue into dysfunctionality.

Sadly the DOJ has yet to figure out that its twin missions of freeing drug dealers and protecting them from being shot by police are in conflict. Drug dealers are least likely to be shot by police officers in the comfort and safety of their local penitentiary. They are most likely to be shot by police while on their way to their next transaction with underwear full of baggies of heroin and a stolen handgun.

The best way to prevent police shootings is with prison. A serious sentence keeps the gentle giants most likely to be shot by marauding police officers safe and comfortable at the prison gym.

Obama’s Ferguson Effect began when Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and then assaulted a police officer. The officer intolerantly shot him, instead of giving him a lollipop. News stories dubbed Brown, who could be seen on video manhandling a convenience store manager, a “gentle giant”.

Protests still continue over the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. The Washington Post mentioned that Scott, who had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states, was described as a “gentle giant” who was loved by all the little children.

Except possibly his 8-year old son whom this gentlest of giants beat with his fists.

Scott had a gun stolen in a burglary and had wrapped up a 7 year prison term for trying to shoot one of his friends. If he had been locked up for good, this gentle giant would still be alive today.

Tragically the world is very intolerant of gentle giants. It misunderstands their violent attacks, murder attempts, and occasional armored robberies, burglaries, rapes and assaults on small children. It does not understand that these are really efforts by gentle giants to communicate their love for the whole world.

Consider the case of Andre Green, who is back in the news again because Deborah Ross, the North Carolina Democrat running for Senate, called his case “sympathetic” and did his best to defend him.

Andre, a 180lb gentle giant, has had plenty of defenders over the years. The Charlotte News Observer called his case “unconscionable” and fulminated that legislators who had helped send him to prison for life “ought to be ashamed”. Allen Breed of the Associated Press visited the gentle giant in prison and asked him, so cutely, if “he got to kiss a girl before being put away”.

While we don’t know if Andre got to kiss a girl, we do know that the gentle giant smashed his way into a neighbor’s home after stalking her for six weeks. He ripped her phone out of its socket, hit her with a broomstick, punched her over a dozen times, tore off her clothes, sexually abused her and raped her.

He also threatened to “rip out her insides”. All while his victim’s baby boy was in the room.

We really ought to be ashamed of ourselves that this wonderful human being is locked up instead of rampaging around the neighborhood. But on the positive side, the gentle giant’s life sentence means that he won’t be kissing any girls or smashing through their doors in the night while threatening to rip out their insides.

He also won’t be shot by any police officers who fail to understand that gentle giants really don’t mean any harm even when they’re beating and raping the woman they’ve been stalking for six weeks.

Andre’s defenders claimed that he has a low IQ. Keith Lamont Scott’s defenders insist that he suffered from a brain injury. If you listen to pro-crime activists, every single felon out there is really suffering from a low IQ, brain injuries and lead poisoning from eating paint chips while volunteering at soup kitchens. Far be it from me to be skeptical about the claims that sociopaths and their fellow traveler sociopaths make on their behalf, but is this really an argument for freeing gentle giants?

Isn’t prison the best place for a stupid violent giant criminal? How many more gentle giants must be shot while rampaging around their daily rounds of handing out candy to small children and trying to eat police officers before we understand this simple lesson?

Take Officer Betty Shelby on trial for shooting marauding gentle giant Terence Crutcher who was on PCP. As politically correct progressives marinating in goodwill, we know that there is never any excuse for shooting a gentle giant. The right thing for Betty to do was what an unnamed female police officer in Chicago did when confronted by a gentle giant, gently marauding on PCP.

She let him slam her head again and again into the pavement rather than fight back. She told African-American Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson that she thought she was “gonna die”, but she didn’t want her family to be harassed by the media over her termination of a gentle giant.

And that’s the right thing to do. Yet sadly most police officers won’t just lay there and let the giants gently stomp all over them. They’ll shoot and then there will be riots and media coverage and Obama will come down and make a speech and the DOJ will find a racist email joke that someone in the department forwarded eight years ago to their cousin and force a major settlement.

But there is a better answer.

We must protect our gentle giants. We must care for them and save them from themselves. We must find a place where they can gently express their violent tendencies without access to firearms, PCP, women, children and any civilians. And fortunately we already have such facilities.

They’re known as prison.

Entire herds of gentle giants are known to roam these fenced-in habitats safe from predation by intolerant police officers who irrationally hate them for their peacefully homicidal ways.

Taxpayers already spend a fortune on these habitats for gentle giants. Sadly some misguided progressives insist on releasing these gentle giants into the dangerous outside world. While their motives are laudable, they fail to understand that most police officers will not accept having their heads slammed into the pavement and most civilians won’t accept a life in which a gentle giant might smash through their door at any moment to rob, rape or murder them.

It might be intolerant of ordinary puny humans who fail to understand gentle giant humor, but there’s something about being beaten and brutalized that makes even small fellows like Bernie Goetz into giantslayers.

The last time pro-crime activists got their way and set the criminals loose, there was a backlash that helped give us giantslayers like Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani. They began locking up the gentle giants and crime rates began to fall. They fell so steeply that, like the population in Attack on Titan, many forgot that there was a giant threat at all. And a proposal to tear down the walls and let the gentle giants back in no longer seemed objectionable. But as incarceration rates fall and crime rates rise, that will change. Even many progressives, like police officers, would rather not have their heads slammed into the pavement though the heads of the former are far harder than those of the latter.

If we truly love the gentle giant, we must lock him up for his own good. And for our own.