De Blaiso’s Nightmare. By Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush. Politico, December 22, 2014.
De Blasio and Dinkins: When cops and mayors feud. By John Podhoretz. New York Post, December 23, 2014.
The High Cost of Anti-Police Demagoguery. By Thomas Sowell. Real Clear Politics, December 23, 2014.
The Monsters Who Screamed for Dead Cops. By Jacob Siegel. The Daily Beast, December 23, 2013.
NYC protesters chant for dead cops. Video. Carswell Lightnose, December 13, 2014. YouTube.
Mac Donald:
The real story behind the murder of two NYPD officers.
Since
last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in
growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to
black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black
Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that
the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass
doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and
whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods
unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has
now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.
The
highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated
in the mass hysteria. Following a grand jury’s decision not to indict a
Ferguson, Missouri, police officer for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael
Brown in August (Brown had attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun),
President Barack Obama announced that blacks were right to believe that the
criminal-justice system was often stacked against them. Obama has travelled
around the country since then buttressing that message. Eric Holder escalated a
long running theme of his tenure as U.S. Attorney General—that the police
routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police
properly.
University
presidents rushed to show their fealty to the lie. Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust
announced that “injustice [toward black lives] still thrives so many years
after we hoped we could at last overcome the troubled legacy of race in
America. . . . Harvard and . . . the nation have embraced [an] imperative to
refuse silence, to reject injustice.” Smith College’s president abjectly flagellated herself for saying that “all lives matter,” instead of the current
mantra, “black lives matter.” Her ignorant mistake, she confessed, draws
attention away from “institutional violence against Black people.”
The New York Times ratcheted up its already
stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the
Ferguson riots, the Times claimed
that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American
life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” Some facts:
Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a
minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of
civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk,
which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in
a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for
whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal
and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports,
kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about
40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police
at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks
made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks
are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black
suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the
percentage of blacks mortally threatening them.
There
is huge unacknowledged support for the police in the inner city: “They’re due
respect because they put their lives every day on the line to protect and
serve. I hope they don’t back off from policing,” a woman told me on Thursday
night, two nights before the assassination, on the street in Staten Island where
Eric Garner was killed.
But
among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s Mayor Bill de
Blasio. In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on
policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police is “based
not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that
theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict
an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. (The 350-pound asthmatic Garner had
resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes; officers brought him
to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black
lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. “It should
be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It
was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but
centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the
“dangers [his biracial son Dante] may face” from “officers who are paid to
protect him.”
The
mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader
and as its main exponent of the law. If he really believes that his son faces a
significant risk from the police, he is ignorant of the realities of crime and
policing in the city he was elected to lead. There is no New York City
institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than
the New York Police Department; thousands of black men are alive today who
would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the
homicide levels of the early 1990s. The Garner death was a tragic aberration in
a record of unparalleled restraint. The NYPD fatally shot eight individuals
last year, six of them black, all posing a risk to the police, compared with
scores of blacks killed by black civilians. But facts do not matter when
crusading to bring justice to a city beset by “centuries of racism.”
New
York police officers were rightly outraged at de Blasio’s calumny. The head of the
officers union, Patrick Lynch, circulated a form allowing officers to request
that the mayor not attend their funeral if they were killed in the line of
duty—an understandable reaction to de Blasio’s insult. De Blasio responded primly on The View: “It’s divisive.
It’s inappropriate,” he said. The city’s elites, from Cardinal Timothy Dolan on
down, reprimanded the union. The New York Police Commissioner called the union
letter “a step too far.”
Meanwhile,
protests and riots against the police were gathering force across the country,
all of them steeped in anti-cop vitriol and the ubiquitous lie that “black
lives” don’t “matter.” “What do we want? Dead cops,” chanted participants in a
New York anti-cop protest. Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in
a rap video extolling cop killings. Few people in positions of authority
objected to this dangerous hatred. The desire to show allegiance with allegedly
oppressed blacks was too great. The thrill of righteousness was palpable among
the media as it lovingly chronicled every protest and on the part of
politicians and thought leaders who expressed solidarity with the cause. At
another march across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, a group of people tried to
throw trash cans onto the heads of officers on the level below them; police
attempts to arrest the assailants were fought off by other marchers.
The
elite’s desperation to participate in what they hopefully viewed as their own
modern-day civil rights crusade was patent in the sanctification of Michael Brown,
the would-be cop killer. He was turned into a civil rights martyr. His violence
toward Wilson, and the convenience store owner he had strong-armed, was wiped
from the record. Protesters across the country chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”
at anti-cop rallies, allegedly Brown’s final words before Wilson shot him.
Never mind that the source of that alleged final utterance, Brown’s companion
Dorian Johnson, was a proven liar. There is no reason to believe his claim
regarding Brown’s final words.
Protesters’
willingness to overlook anti-cop homicidal intent surfaced again in St. Louis
in November. A teen criminal who had shot at the police was killed by an
officer in self-defense; he, too, joined the roster of heroic black victims of
police racism. This sanctification of would-be black cop-killers would prove
prophetic. The elites were playing with fire. It’s profoundly irresponsible to
stoke hatred of the police, especially when the fuel used for doing so is a set
of lies. Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality
during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow-laws and widespread
discrimination. But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the
black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their
way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the
black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression
of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of a
wrong.
Cop-killer
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who assassinated NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos
on Saturday, exemplified everything the elites have refused to recognize: he
was a gun-toting criminal who was an eager consumer of the current frenzy of
cop hatred. (Not that he paid close enough attention to the actual details of
alleged cop malfeasance to spell Eric Garner’s name correctly.) His homicidal
postings on Instagram—“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours . .
. . .Let’s Take 2 of Theirs”—were indistinguishable from the hatred bouncing
around the Internet and the protests and that few bothered to condemn. That
vitriol continues after the assassination. Social media is filled with gloating
at the officers’ deaths and praise for Brinsley: “That nigga that shot the cops
is a legend,” reads a typical message. A student leader and a representative of
the African and Afro-American studies department at Brandeis University tweeted
that she has “no sympathy for the NYPD officers who were murdered today.”
The
only good that can come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would be
the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. Whether that will happen
is uncertain. The New York Times has
denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officer’s union
that there is “blood on the hands that starts on the steps of City Hall”—this
from a paper that promotes the idea that police officers routinely kill blacks.
The elites’ investment in black victimology is probably too great to hope for an
injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race,
crime, and policing.
