‘We Hope They Die’ Protesters cheer a shooting ambush of sheriff’s deputies in L.A.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-hope-they-die-11600031160?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
No one other than the shooter is responsible for the gunfire ambush Saturday of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies as they sat in their patrol car. But the same can’t be said for the protesters who blocked the entrance to the hospital where the two are being treated, and chanted “we hope they die.” The latter is a cultural poison nurtured by the left-wing anti-police movement sweeping the country.
The two deputies were “ambushed by a gunman in a cowardly fashion” in the Compton neighborhood, said Sheriff Alex Villaneuva at a press conference. The deputies hadn’t been identified by name as we write this, but press reports say one is a 31-year-old mother and the other a 24-year-old man. Both have been with the department a little more than a year.
Police haven’t identified a suspect, but the randomness of the ambush suggests someone looking for any available police target. We’ve seen this before when anti-police fever is hot. A gunman shot and killed two officers in their car in New York in 2014 following the death of black suspects being arrested in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.
The protests are worse this year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the anti-police violence is more widespread. An officer was stabbed in the neck in Flatbush in New York City in an ambush in June. The officer survived.
Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti called the chants and protests at the hospital “unacceptable” and “abhorrent,” but he and other Democrats need to do more to condemn and ostracize these protesters. Democrats may fear the wrath of Black Lives Matter, but the backlash elsewhere in America will be far greater if pleasure at cop killing becomes common on the left.
Policing reform is impossible amid a war on police. Mr. Garcetti and other mayors should abandon their cuts to law-enforcement budgets and express regular solidarity for cops on the beat. Without such a signal, police will continue to retreat from enforcing the law in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and those who suffer most will be the law-abiding in the likes of Compton and Flatbush.
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