The recent shooting of the Texas police officers should not shock anyone. We have seen countless liberals rise up against police since the rise of the Occupy Movement in 2011. The #BlackLivesMatter protests contain the same anger against police. If police respond, they are videotaped, photographed and lambasted on social media and left-wing websites. Last year, following the murder of two NYPD policemen protesters gathered in New York chanting, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!”
Police throughout the nation say they fear a growing anti-cop sentiment driven by a handful of racially charged incidents is making their jobs more dangerous on the streets, where the number of officers killed in the line of duty is rising sharply. Now, many protesters, like White House favorite and MSNBC host Al Sharpton, claim they aren’t anti-police, they are pro-justice.
While racially tinged incidents are nothing new, the firestorm that erupted with the shooting of an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, was followed by a grand jury’s decision not to indict an NYPD cop in the death of Eric Garner, the death of Freddie Gray while in the custody of Baltimore police and this week’s decision by police in Madison, Wisconsin, not to charge a police officer in the March 6 shooting death of an unarmed Black youth. Former NYPD Commissioner Howard Safir believes there is a “war on police,” and said the flames are being fanned from the nation’s highest office.
“After 20 years of incredible crime reduction accomplished by thousands of dedicated police officers, the public has become complacent now that they are safer ... They have let the anti-police pundits and talking heads convince everyone from the president to the attorney general that police are racist and brutal.”
Officer deaths in 2014 doubled to 51 from 27 the previous year. One particularly shocking case was the Dec. 20 assassination of two NYPD police officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn. Their killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had posted threats online about killing police officers, killed himself on a nearby subway platform as police closed in on him moments later.
Many within the law enforcement community say President Obama has been too quick to judge police and not sufficiently appreciative of what they do day in and day out. Vice President Joe Biden during the annual “Top Cops Dinner” last summer acknowledged the tough task of cops. “We expect you to be constitutional scholars. We expect you to have instantaneous reactions to a crisis without making any mistake or without knowing what’s behind that door or what’s in that guy’s pocket,” Biden continued. “When you make a mistake, we come down on you like a ton of bricks. But you still do your job.”
