Nelson A. Pryor: Guest Columnist
Heather Mac Donald, author of the book: The War on Cops, just authored the above entitled article for the July 13, 2016 Wall Street Journal, p. 15a. She maintains that we have had two years of corrosive rhetoric about racist cops, based on falsehoods - with disastrous effects.
Media allies of the Black Lives Matter movement allege that U. S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.
Nelson Pryor and Nancy Moral, both of Lee, show their support for the police. Nancy is a retired Research and Training Specialist at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
An Appalling Increase
Most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black. This backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime has had consequences. This stream of falsehoods about police may be spinning out of control. Look at Dallas, with the assassination of five police officers last week or the three police officers just killed in Baton Rouge and the other attacks on cops in other cities.
Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But, Mc Donald says that “no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.”
Many Studies
In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is “zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.”
Black Lives Matter, Rhetoric
The headline of the July 10, 2016 New York Times, p. 1a., runs: Group’s strides brought to halt by sniper fire. The Black Lives Matters message of outrage and demands for justice has been pushed aside by a crisis, some say, of their own making. It is scrambling to distance itself from a black sniper in Dallas who set out to murder white police officers and also trying to rebut a chorus of detractors who blame the movement for inspiring his deadly attack.
Turned on a dime
Killing police officers could jeopardize the movement’s appeal to a broader group who have gradually become more sympathetic to cause. In the days before the Dallas massacre, Aesha Rasheed, a New Orleans BLM activist, thought that - at long last - a national consciousness was sinking in. After the massacre in Dallas, she said, “It turned on a dime.”
In Texas, several state officials, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, lashed out at BLM, directly linking its tone and tactics to the killings.