If you think the police aren’t to your liking now, just wait until you see them after they’re “reformed.” This be-careful-what-you-wish-for reality apparently eludes the Memphis City Council, which just passed a resolution calling on its police department to adopt the policies of Campaign Zero, an anti-police group that grew out of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
Campaign Zero ultimately (and ostensibly) wants to eliminate the cops, but this didn’t stop council chairman Patrice Robinson from announcing last week in an e-mailed newsletter that she was advancing the radical entity’s agenda.
Robinson wrote, the Tennessee Star reports, “The Council also realizes that violence against minorities has been an issue in our country for far too long.” It sure has — and the violence is mostly committed by other minorities.
In fact, approximately 90 percent of black homicide victims are murdered by other blacks; moreover, most of the rest are likely killed by Hispanics. The reality: White-on-black murder is a very rare phenomenon.
So are instances in which white cops kill black suspects.
In fact, studies show that non-white cops are more likely than white cops to kill non-white suspects. Additionally, police not only shoot more white than black suspects every year (video below of three striking examples the media buried), but are more likely to shoot them relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot police.
So what, then, is the BLM-inspired police “reform” movement’s justification?
Nothing.
Nothing but a lie, that is.
Unfortunately, the big lie that police inordinately target blacks has been repeated so often, and so intensely, that being foisted on America is a dangerous cure for a nonexistent disease.
As the Star also relates Robinson as saying, “To ensure the City of Memphis is moving toward progress in resolving these issues, the Council also passed a resolution in Executive Session requesting that the Memphis Police Department and Shelby County Sheriff’s Office adopt each of the ‘8 Can’t Wait’ principles. These strategies were devised by anti-police brutality group Campaign Zero.”
As for specificity, the Star writes that according “to the #8CANTWAIT website, members of the group want, among other things, for law enforcement to ban chokeholds and require a warning and exhaust all alternatives before shooting. They also want police to ban shooting at moving vehicles.”
This could only sound realistic to those naïve regarding life-or-death situations. A warning before shooting is sometimes possible, but not always, as police often have only a second to avert a potentially deadly attack.
Second, criminals will sometimes try to run over police with their cars, in which case a moving vehicle has become a deadly weapon. And is it at all reasonable telling cops that they can’t react proportionately and use deadly force to counter deadly force?
Regarding chokeholds, what about when an officer is grappling one-on-one with a formidable suspect? If he doesn’t subdue the individual — and chokeholds are invaluable in this regard — his gun could be taken and used against him. Moreover, is it reasonable to say that chokeholds can be used in MMA, a sport, but not in potentially deadly street confrontations?
As for the media armchair critics, many “police departments have computer or role-playing simulations to help train police in shoot/don’t shoot situations,” wrote American Thinker (AT) yesterday. “Periodically, both reporters and anti-police activists take this training, and they are invariably surprised by the speed with which situations develop. They shoot unarmed people and get killed by armed people.” Here are few videos of these training sessions, courtesy of AT.
“This third video [below] is especially interesting because it shows how confusing it is when members of the public, complete with a video camera, put the police on the spot,” writes AT.
Speaking of the above, training suffers when law enforcement funding is cut, and this is just one reason why the “defund the police” movement is so destructive. It would lead to more bad shootings, not fewer.
Unfortunately, though, many other cities are now joining Memphis in further handcuffing the police, and this can have a devastating effect.
As I wrote earlier this month while pointing out that the only logical reason why leftists would want to dismantle law enforcement is because they want to become law enforcement, the “unrelenting attacks on the police could if nothing else degrade them incrementally…. After all, if cops continue being handcuffed and forced to treat thugs with kid gloves while they get abused, get vilified and charged with crimes when they allegedly violate what could becomes unrealistic ‘rules of engagement,’ and consequently begin ‘de-policing,’ what will happen to morale? Will good people still want to become cops?”
Sure enough, just days after I wrote the above stories began emerging about how police want to quit the profession. Below is a video, posted just Saturday, made by one such officer.
Our country is currently in an untenable position. With a vast land of 331 million people, probability dictates that there will be a case here and there of a white cop using unnecessary force against a black suspect. Despite this, the message is now clear: If there’s even one such case, the media will agitate, protesting and rioting may ensue, politicians will demagogue the issue, and the police will be further demonized.
This is a recipe for continual unrest, increasingly bad policy, and the degradation of law enforcement. After all, the more you alienate good people from becoming cops, the more you’ll have bad people fill that role.
So remember that general rule in life: The consequence of not submitting to just authority is to suffer under the yoke of unjust authority.
Image: Sean Pavone/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
