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People Are Waking Up to the Dark Side of American Policing, and Cops Don’t Like It One Bit
Pushing back against a creeping police state.
If
you've been listening to various police agencies and their supporters,
then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming -- and it's all
the fault of activists.
In May, a
Wall Street Journal op-ed warned of a "
new nationwide crime wave"
thanks to "intense agitation against American police departments" over
the previous year. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went further.
Talking recently with the host of CBS's
Face the Nation, the Republican presidential hopeful
asserted
that the Black Lives Matter movement wasn't about reform but something
far more sinister. "They've been chanting in the streets for the murder
of police officers," he insisted. Even the nation's top cop, FBI
Director James Comey, weighed in at the University of Chicago Law
School,
speaking of "a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year."
According
to these figures and others like them, lawlessness has been sweeping
the nation as the so-called Ferguson effect spreads. Criminals have been
emboldened as police officers are forced to think twice about doing
their jobs for fear of the infamy of starring in the next viral video.
The police have supposedly become the targets of assassins intoxicated
by "
anti-cop rhetoric," just as departments are being
stripped
of the kind of high-powered equipment they need to protect officers and
communities. Even their funding streams have, it's claimed, come under
attack as anti-cop bias has infected Washington, D.C. Senator Ted Cruz
caught the spirit of that critique by
convening
a Senate subcommittee hearing to which he gave the title, "The War on
Police: How the Federal Government Undermines State and Local Law
Enforcement."
According to
him, the federal government, including the president and attorney
general, has been vilifying the police, who are now being treated as if
they, not the criminals, were the enemy.
Beyond the storm
of commentary and criticism, however, quite a different reality presents
itself. In the simplest terms, there is no war on the police. Violent
attacks against police officers remain at historic lows, even though approximately 1,000 people have been killed
by the police this year nationwide. In just the past few weeks, videos
have been released of problematic fatal police shootings in San Francisco and Chicago.
While
it's too soon to tell whether there has been an uptick in violent crime
in the post-Ferguson period, no evidence connects any possible increase
to the phenomenon of police violence being exposed to the nation. What
is taking place and what the police and their supporters are largely
reacting to is a modest push for sensible law enforcement reforms from
groups as diverse as
Campaign Zero,
Koch Industries, the
Cato Institute,
The Leadership Conference, and the
ACLU
(my employer). Unfortunately, as the rhetoric ratchets up, many police
agencies and organizations are increasingly resistant to any reforms,
forgetting whom they serve and
ignoring constitutional limits on what they can do.
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