The overnight casualty reports serve as a grim reminder of just how perilous it is to be a police officer. Open season has been declared. Some of the incendiary rhetoric stoking and inciting violence is coming from strange corners — the folks who define what is going on as “peaceful protests.”
In Oakland, California, federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood was killed by someone who fired at him from a vehicle. In New York, the scene of some of the most rampant looting, a police sergeant was mowed down in a vicious hit-and-run, and another officer struck by a vehicle. In Buffalo, an officer and a state trooper were injured when a car brutally plowed into a police skirmish line. In Las Vegas, two officers were struck by gunfire — one in the head. And in St. Louis, four more were shot.
Enough is enough.
Peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis have devolved into a week of murder, mayhem, looting, and arson — none of the tactics remotely reminiscent of civil rights movement protests that slowly but effectively effected change in the 1950s and 1960s. Gratuitous violence directed at innocent people is antithetical to protected free speech and peaceable assemblage rights.
That said, the anger is certainly understandable. Yes, both the official autopsy report on Floyd and the independent autopsy commissioned by Floyd’s family now confirm that the cause of death was homicide. The murder weapon? An officer’s left knee, for which there is no excuse. Countless career law enforcement professionals have expressed outrage. I shared my own disgust and demand for justice.
But what happened to Floyd was an aberration and not normal for the vast majority of sworn members of the policing profession. I’ll prove that.
Society is constantly lectured not to isolate the few in order to smear the whole, but seemingly only as it applies to race, class, gender, and creed. Where it relates to police, we are conditioned that the infinitesimal few brutal and lawless officers such as Derek Chauvin, the alleged murderer of Floyd, are instructive of the entire profession. Ignoring that is operating in bad faith.
Thousands of angry protesters have enjoined with scores of professionally organized agitators swarming cities across the nation and leaving in their wake a smoldering hellscape of violence, looting, and destruction. Undermanned police forces have been rendered impotent and vulnerable. Big-city mayors and state governors are far more concerned about optics and appeasing the vulgar mobs. You can also ignore coronavirus quarantine directives and social distancing edicts when the proletariat and the grievance industry demand it. The situation is only made worse by idiotic bail laws in New York and Philadelphia, as well as the waves of criminals released from jails and prisons in a shortsighted attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Appeasing the faction of violent vandalizers and looters is wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s feckless and cowardly “leadership.” Attorney General William Barr has described the professional rioters as “anarchic far-left extremist groups” employing “antifa-like tactics.” Anyone who has been paying any attention the past few years would be hard-pressed to disagree. Incredibly, Minnesota officials tried to blame out-of-state agitators, but they were quickly debunked by police records showing a majority of arrests were of Minnesotans. This assertion was quickly walked back and substituted with a new excuse. “White supremacists” and “drug cartels” have also been blamed by the Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who offered no evidence to support his claim.
As a career FBI agent, I have extensively investigated extremist groups and drug cartels. This isn’t their handiwork.
We’re told to disbelieve our lying eyes. The white, hipster people with antifa face coverings aren’t who they appear to be? Graffiti depicting hammer and sickles, Black Lives Matter, and vulgar anti-police rhetoric, we’re told, are false flag operations. The videotaped footage of roving black looters viciously pummeling white small business owners and destroying their livelihoods are operating at the direction of racist 4chan posters, right? And Susan Rice, the former Obama administration official, has pushed the narrative, without evidence, that the violent interlopers in the protests are right out of President Vladimir Putin’s Russian playbook.
In reality, the thuggish antifa cowards are intermingled with some Black Lives Matter activists, who can be seen on video after sickening video viciously attacking shop owners, looting stores, destroying property — hooliganism all in the name of Floyd, whose brother has told protesters, “Don’t tear up your town.” Police precincts have been subject to firebombings. Rioters are taking full advantage of overwhelmed police resources.
What we have witnessed these past few tumultuous nights is not America. It is an anarchist’s dream. Their end goal is to abolish the police and install socialism. Public safety and order are overrated. Police, those “evil” instruments of the state, must be forced to endure being screamed at, spit on, taunted, baited, attacked with Molotov cocktails, and even blindside-ambushed with a brick to the head.
Who could possibly want to be a police officer in 2020?
There is no sense attempting to explain the statistics that flatly debunk the false narratives about “racist white cops” and the “hunt for unarmed black men.” Providing facts to those who have already made up their minds because of the amplification of the rare instances of criminal officers committing extrajudicial slayings only inflames passions and emotions.
The FBI finally began tracking officer-involved shootings last year. Their initial findings have yet to be released. However, the Washington Post has been collecting data related to fatalities resulting from police use of deadly force since 2015. The numbers simply don’t support the “racist cop” narrative.
In 2019, for instance, police shot and killed 19 unarmed whites (out of a total of 370 killed) and nine unarmed African Americans (out of 235 killed). This means 5.1% of white people fatally shot by police were unarmed, compared to 3.8% of black people killed by police. The definition of “unarmed” also includes those who violently struggle, attack, or attempt to disarm the involved law enforcement officer.
The counterargument that will assuredly ensue is that blacks (13.4% of the population) are slain by police at a disproportionate rate. But this fails to take into account patterns of offending. All groups do not commit crime at equal rates. This is a sad but inconvenient truth. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, for example, between 1980 and 2008, black offenders committed 52% of all murders. Higher rates of criminality equate to more required police interactions. We are led to believe these racial disparities are caused by police bias — but it is actually a proportional response to the disparate conduct of groups.
But none of that matters to the anarchists and activists who are venting their violent rage at police. Nor does it matter that, as criminologist Heather Mac Donald points out for City Journal, “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”
No matter what the demagogues and those adhering to rigid orthodoxies will have you believe, it is possible to exist within the conjoined space of a Venn diagram that acknowledges: 1.) Floyd was murdered, 2.) there exists a problem with a tiny percentage of bad officers that need to be identified and prosecuted, 3.) reforming the criminal justice system should be a bipartisan concern, and 4.) the trope smearing the policing profession must be upended.
Some of the law enforcement officers viciously attacked are in serious condition in area hospitals. Pray for their full recoveries. There have been 92 line of duty deaths this year and 24,294 in the history of the profession. The job has always been perilous. It has always been thankless. But the next generation of potential sheepdogs is witnessing the demonization of a noble profession. This will have an indelible impact on the recruitment and retention of good officers.
Will that serve the cause for necessary reform and honor Floyd’s memory?
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
