The chant “no justice, no peace” is an apt rallying cry for Ferguson, Missouri, where protesters don’t truly want justice and there has been no peace.

What justice demands in the case of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in disputed circumstances is a full and fair deliberative process that goes wherever the evidence leads. But is anyone marching so that Wilson can go free if the facts don’t support charging him?

No, the demand is for him to be arrested immediately and to be prosecuted no matter what. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, relaying the mood in Ferguson, has said that the security problem there isn’t solvable absent an indictment of Wilson. As if a grand jury should be beholden to looters.

No less a personage than the inept governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, seemed to buckle to this logic when he said on Tuesday that the case deserves a “vigorous prosecution.” (His office subsequently explained that he was misinterpreted and he only wants the case thoroughly investigated.)

All of this is noxious. Just because there is a mob on the streets, as well as on the Internet and TV, braying for a rush to judgment doesn’t mean we need mob justice.

Ferguson is angry and grieving, and the rallies, meetings and prayer vigils during daytime hours are natural and commendable. The confrontations with the police, the rock throwing and gunshots, the looting and Molotov cocktails are not. They are self-indulgent, self-destructive, and (given the fate of a few businesses set on fire) literally self-immolating.

For more than a week now, there has been an effort to shift moral responsibility for this mayhem from the protesters to the police. There is no doubt that the police have acted ham-handedly and even appallingly at times (there is never any justification for pointing weapons at peaceful protesters), but at the end of the day, they are attempting to restore order to a town in desperate need of it.

Initially, we were told the police were “provoking” otherwise civil protesters with their military posture.

The real world test of this militarization-of-police theory came last weekend when the cops backed off almost entirely. Free of the oppressive influence of this allegedly occupying force, looters ransacked local businesses at will and even firebombed the Domino’s Pizza.

Perhaps they took the “no peace” thing too seriously.

On Monday night, the aforementioned Hayes got to briefly feel what it’s like to be a cop or innocent business owner in Ferguson when a couple of rocks were pointlessly thrown at him while he was on the air. Hayes brushed the whole thing off as people being very angry.

Yes, but why are they angry at Hayes? He is a genuinely nice guy. He doesn’t have a militaristic affect. He has no history of using his microphone as a crowd-control device. His ready explanation for the rock throwing recalls the old saw about how a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a fight.

To their credit, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful, and many of them have tried to restrain a lawless fringe. But one of the reasons we have police is to control such a fringe, and if it includes people who throw rocks or shoot at them, the police aren’t going to look like a friendly neighborhood beat cop from a Norman Rockwell painting.

It took about a week of looting before people began to seriously wonder what was accomplished by milling around on the streets and sidewalks at night and yelling at cops anyway.

You get the feeling that the enormous emotional investment in Ferguson from the left—from Eric Holder to MSNBC on down—reflects a nostalgia for the truly heroic phase of the civil rights movement.

They (most of them, at least) can never be Freedom Riders, but they can write blog posts complaining that the police gear in Ferguson looks scary.

They can never register voters in the Jim Crow South, but they can tweet dramatic pictures of tear-gas canisters going off.

They can never march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge circa 1965, but they can do some cable hits.

Ferguson is all they’ve got, so it must be spun up into a national crisis—our Gaza, our apartheid—to increase the moral drama.

The whole world is supposed to be watching Ferguson. But the world should have better things to do than watch what are, in the scheme of things (and up to this point), relatively minor clashes between police and a handful of protesters. The crowds that have been dispersed the last couple of nights have typically numbered in the dozens, surrounded by lots of journalists. Protesters aren’t getting beaten by the cops, let alone killed. The property damage is shameful, but it is minuscule compared with other civil disorder in American history.

Even if Officer Wilson executed Michael Brown in cold blood, he would be one murderously bad cop, not an indictment of the entire American system of justice.

If he acted in legitimate self-defense, on the other hand, he shouldn’t be jailed or charged. That would be justice, but given what we’ve seen from Ferguson so far, it would not bring peace.

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.