After Dallas, Leadership The demonization of law enforcement will lead to more violence. Jason Riley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-dallas-leadership-1468017672
“Instead, what people hear most of the time from groups like Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton is inflammatory rhetoric that distorts reality and indiscriminately demonizes the police. Showing some awareness Thursday of this lopsided public perception, Mr. Obama said it is possible to express support for the police “while also saying there are problems across our criminal justice system.” Mr. Obama’s attempt at balance might have more resonance if once he said Black Lives Matter’s view of American justice is wrong.”
It was only two years ago, in the summer of 2014, that the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York’s Staten Island made it clear that tensions were rising dangerously between the police and the urban neighborhoods they patrol. It hasn’t stopped.
That December, two policemen were assassinated on a Brooklyn street. The following April brought the Baltimore riot and the Freddie Gray case.
Now Dallas.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said a lone shooter killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others in an ambush attack carried out during a march, which was protesting the shootings this week of black men in Louisiana and Missouri by police offers.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown described the words of one suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, before he was blown up by a police robot bomb: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
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America today has the feel of a country flirting dangerously with the 1960s. Back then, disruptions to civic and social order overwhelmed America’s political leadership, which found itself constantly behind the curve of events, on defense. We aren’t there yet, but a familiar deficit of political leadership exists today as social tensions rise.
In the 1960s and ’70s, various individuals and groups said that police brutality against black people justified a violent response. They included Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The Black Panthers famously coined the phrase, “off the pigs.”
Violence followed. Some of it consisted of ambush attacks or shootouts between police and group members. One of the most dramatic events, in January 1972, was the late-night gunning down of two New York City cops by three assailants on Manhattan’s lower east side.
Nothing then, however, reached the scale of the sniper attack in Dallas this week. Dallas represents an historically unprecedented escalation of anti-police violence.
President Obama entered office with the belief that significant and persistent racial inequities existed in American life, a matter he has raised frequently in public appearances. He did so again Thursday while in Warsaw, after the shootings in Louisiana and Missouri.
He said the two deaths “are symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He then cited several statistical studies “to try to put in context why emotions are so raw around these issues.” But he added, “To be concerned about these issues is not to be against law enforcement.”
We don’t gainsay Mr. Obama’s sincerity, and racial disparities exist, but one may ask: Why on Friday, after the Dallas murders, did the city’s police chief, who is black, wonder out loud about support for people on law-enforcement’s front line? “We don’t feel much support most days,” Chief Brown said. “Let’s not make today most days.”
If Chief Brown and many like him in American law enforcement don’t think they get much support, it is because they don’t—until after the cops are dead. Then, as always, come the official condolences. CONTINUE AT SITE
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