Reacting to the recent killing of a Texas deputy, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (shown on right) named high-profile accessories in the murder: Barack Obama and ex-attorney general Eric Holder.
The comments were made Saturday to Judge Jeanine Pirro, who’d noted that “without leadership” nothing would change the current climate of hostility toward law enforcement. This is when Sheriff Clarke responded, “And that’s why I said that the president of the United States started this war on police.”
Telling Pirro that he was “too p***** off to be diplomatic,” Clarke was understandably angry about the fatal shooting of Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth. The uniformed officer, a 10-year veteran of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, was ambushed Friday while pumping gas into his police cruiser at a Chevron station on the outskirts of Houston. The killer, a 30-year-old with a long criminal record named Shannon Miles, shot the deputy in the head from behind, then straddled his body and fired three more shots into his back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIm8nhKuCn8
The attack is widely presumed to have been instigated by anti-police sentiment stoked by the bigoted Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In fact, just hours after the shooting BLM held a march to the gates of the Minnesota State Fair during which protesters chanted, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” Saint Paul Police Federation President Dave Titus called the chant “ignorant” and “disgusting.”
These anti-police feelings — along with anti-white feelings — are widespread. As the Telegraph reports, just days before Goforth’s murder, “a caller to an internet radio show based in Texas had called for the ‘lynching’ of white people, and the killing of police officers, to ‘turn the tide’.” And, not surprisingly, Friday’s crime appears to have a racial component: Miles is black while Goforth was white.
Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman also made note of this factor, saying after his deputy’s murder, “I think that’s something that we have to keep an eye on. The general climate of that kind of rhetoric can be influential on people to do things like this.… As far as we know Deputy Goforth had no previous contact with the suspect, and it appears at the outset to be clearly unprovoked.”
But none minced as few words as Sheriff Clarke, who rightly took issue with the labeling of BLM and its fellow travelers as “activists.” As he also said to Pirro, “I’m tired of hearing people call these [individuals] black activists; they’re not activists; this is black slime, and it needs to be eradicated from American society and American culture.… This whole movement, Black Lives, I’ve renamed it ‘l-i-e-s’ because it’s based on a lie, the ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’ That’s why I said this slime needs to be eradicated.”
The lie Clarke referenced was, of course, the now-discredited notion that criminal Mike Brown had his hands up when he was shot last year by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. Even Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) had to reluctantly admit as much, clearing Wilson in March of charges relating to the incident. Despite this, “protesters” still saw fit to demonstrate in Ferguson on August 9 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the shooting, a demonstration that, like the “protests” last year, turned violent.
In light of this, many could wonder, does the truth matter at all? The DOJ — a bureaucracy that itself had continually stoked the fires of racial unrest in Ferguson — ceded that “Hands up, don’t shoot” was a lie, yet this doesn’t matter to the so-called activists. Only the narrative does, as the “protests” continue like a perpetual-motion machine of irrationality. Of course, some now claim that “Hands up” is a metaphor for the supposedly widespread problem of the targeting and killing of blacks by police.
Yet the idea that this is a reality is a lie itself. As black pundit Larry Elder pointed out last year, “In 2012, according to the CDC, 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, the CDC reports that 2,151 whites were killed by cops — and 1,130 blacks were killed by cops.” Furthermore, Elder reports that “in the last several decades the numbers of blacks killed by cops are down nearly 75 percent.”
Of course, this isn’t surprising given that whites outnumber blacks in America five to one. So what do studies and deeper statistics tell us? Contrary to popular belief and as I reported in May:
• As this recent Washington State University study shows, police are actually more willing to shoot white than black suspects. Why? Because police know that, as Ferguson officer Darren Wilson’s experience illustrates, shooting a black criminal can mean media crucifixion, career destruction, death threats, and, basically, the end of your life as you know it.
• Black suspects are as likely to shoot at police as to be shot at.
• Relative to whites, blacks are shot by police at a lower rate than their involvement in crime would suggest. As sociologist and ex-cop Professor Peter Moskos writes, “Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks [to] die at the hands of police. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”
• According to FBI statistics, 46 percent of those who’ve murdered police officers during the last decade have been black.
It is protesting in the face of such facts — and the spreading of the lie contravening them — that has inspired Sheriff Clarke to condemn BLM as “slime” and implicate figures such as Obama and Holder in the murder of police officers. And Clarke isn’t alone in speaking this harsh truth. Late last year ex-FBI Special Agent K. Dee McCown, currently director of Global Security and Loss Prevention at W.W. Grainger, Inc., penned a scathing letter to Eric Holder in which he called the then-attorney general a “hypocrite” and a “coward.” He wrote that Holder shares “in the blame for much of the violence and protests we are now witnessing against law enforcement officers” and has sacrificed his “integrity on the altar of political expediency.” McCown further wrote, “Rather than be a man of moral courage you [Holder] chose instead to cower, further inflame racial tensions, advance false narratives and play progressive political activist.… You, President Obama and Al Sharpton own this problem [of attacks on police] lock, stock and barrel and now it is your legacy.”
And so it is. Barack Obama has rarely missed a chance to inflame racial tensions. After the 2012 Trayvon Martin self-defense shooting, he remarked, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” After the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police arrested a black college professor, Obama weighed in and, before getting all the facts, said they’d “acted stupidly.” He also secretly met with Ferguson activists, including rabble-rousing race hustler Al Sharpton. Moreover, his former attorney general, Holder, and other DOJ officials actually traveled to Ferguson, an involvement that apparently just stirred the pot of racial discontent. In fact, even after exonerating Officer Wilson, the Obama/Holder DOJ insisted on obfuscating the matter by issuing a report accusing the Ferguson Police Department of “institutional racism.”
Unfortunately, with the real institutional racism coming from Washington, critics such as Sheriff David Clarke might say that accusing Obama of having “acted stupidly” is the kindest thing you could say about him.
