No True Scotsman

So this is a more opinionated post, but I feel this topic should be addressed, and that those who have already done so have not done it in the best way it should/could be. The topic is the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and the issue of police brutality in America (or, if you prefer, the non-issue thereof). I will discuss how the "No True Scotsman" argument--that no "true" member of a group, as opposed to a traitor to the group, would do a bad thing that a claimed member of the group recently did--can be applied to these issues.

Certainly the name BLM seems pretty uncontroversial. But of course, the fact that they are casting a critical eye on the police and calling some actions taken by multiple individual officers into question, as well as arguing that their practices may be racially biased, is the real root source of controversy here. We have already seen the cycle occur multiple times:
1. Police officer shoots unarmed black man. This shooting can be fatal, but this is not absolutely necessary for the cycle to proceed.
2. BLM protest the shooting and, more generally, police brutality and racism in America.
3. Someone, sometimes (as in Dallas this July) motivated by these protests and criticism of police, decides to murder a (or multiple) cop(s).
4. Conservative critics of BLM pounce on step #3 as proof that BLM "hates cops" and wants them all (or at least the white ones) to be murdered. They then call on these leaders to, at least, renounce violence (as Sargon of Akkad recently did, which partly motivated me to write this post). If they are particularly radical, like Heather Mac Donald, they may demand that BLM and other "anti-cop" individuals and movements stop "demonizing police" by creating a "stream of falsehoods", and allege that these entities' statements have led to "an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America."
5. BLM and other advocates for police reform respond that theirs is a nonviolent movement.

So I'm gonna talk about the fact that BLM is a movement, not an organization, and how for this reason, anyone can identify with this movement, even if their goals or plans (e.g. murdering cops) are out of line with those that BLM was founded to pursue.

This is where the "No True Scotsman" argument comes in: if someone kills a cop, even if that person says that police brutality and BLM were their motivations to do so (as was the case in Dallas), that doesn't necessarily mean that that person is a "true" member of BLM. 

Now, you could also flip this argument around and apply it to cops, which would look something like this: if a police officer does something they definitely shouldn't have done, then they must not be a "true" police officer, but instead someone who did something contrary to what policing is really about.

So is one of these arguments more valid than the other? Yes, in my opinion: the one about BLM. I am saying this because BLM is a loosely organized movement, meaning that there is no vetting process or authority who decides who "gets in" to this movement. In stark contrast, not just anyone can be a police officer; you must first graduate from high school, pass an entrance exam, and then, among other things, undergo about 600 hours of training (though the exact amount varies from state to state). So this is why it matters more when a police officer does something he/she shouldn't do than it does when a BLM member does something he/she shouldn't do.

I will close by adding a link to an excellent blog post I recently found about this subject.