July 10th 2016 Newsletter
In this business you know when you hit a nerve as the emails and sometimes phone calls will flood in. Generally you don't hear a whimper when the stories aren't controversial. Last week's crop of emails was no different believe it or not, only one two sentence email accusing us of anti police bias was received so the vast majority of our reader were not shocked or upset about our article stating that more police killings would be coming as we had reached a tipping point.
Sadly that turned out to be true, the morning news brought us the details of the Baton Rouge shootings where a rather disturbed black man from Kansas City traveled to Baton Rouge to kill and wound police officers. Three dead, three wounded, with one or more facing life threatening injuries. This guy was also ex military, hopefully not the panty snatching pervert that the Dallas shooter turned out to be according to news stories. But the guy wasn't well prepared and you have to wonder how he racked up the deaths given that he was walking down the side of a road carrying a rifle and wearing a mask.
We did get one interesting letter to the editor on the "Only One Sniper on the Rooftop?" story and it was worth sharing;"There are still a lot of socialization analysis that needs to be understood as society seeks unbiased recognition of how we got here as a society, but you have made some very objective summations of the police/citizen challenge that we are having to address in the wake of these recent acts of violence involving law enforcement officers. I see that you have done your homework and identified that the victims were making every effort to avoid being viewed as a threat which is characteristical in most police involved shooting of citizens who are otherwise complying with lawful orders which have been given by the police officer (excluding subjects who discharge firearms at police officers) As a constitutional conservative, I appreciate the tone of your article as it relates to the rights of ALL law-abiding citizens' constitutional right to bear arm... and I commend you for having the courage to say that in the cases included in your article, these citizens should not have experienced a fatal encounter. Good and honest reporting sir... may our country's tomorrows be made better by the things that you have done on this day!!""W.L., OKC"
We don't have to like what needs done but we do have to do it if we want to live in peace and safety. We as citizens, legislators, and human beings need to hold our police, the trainers, and the politicians supervising the police to high standards. Things have reached a tipping point and people are lashing out, people that have not been personally gored by a particular act of violence by the police, but people that are unhappy with their lives and upset with the shootings, so much so that they are willing to lay down their lives to settle the score.
Some public statements call the attacks on police "cowardly" but really these attacks are a thousand things more but hardly cowardly. We as a society need to avoid making statements that dismiss these deranged shooters as that is indicative of us not understanding that the shooters were responding to police violence and more than willing to lay down their own life to make a statement or gain their 15 minutes of fame or infamy. Call the attacks unconscionable, brutal, uncalled for, but cowardly just doesn't fit.
We as a society don't have to believe all of what the BLM organizers are trying to feed us because they are viewing things through their own set of optics that distorts much of the facts and we covered them in last week's article. Black men are not killed more than other races; American Indians actually take that dubious achievement. Far more whites than blacks are killed because far more blacks commit more and more heinous crimes. Blacks are looked at as threatening because the statistics confirm that you are more likely to be a victim of black men. Unfair, I know, but such is life and the black community has as much blame in these police shootings as the police, their trainers, and the politicians that ought to be holding these murderers accountable.
But what we had better accept from the BLM organizers is that things need changed and we are past the tipping point. People are willing to die for change and it is going to be impossible to stop small groups or even single individuals from taking out cops without turning America into an even harsher police state.
As the Muslim in Nice France, and there is no need to preface that with the word terrorist, has shown us there are plenty of ways to commit mass murder and terrorism so we need to start dealing with the root of the problems instead of trying to lock down all possible avenues and weapons. Declare the Muslim ideology and the adherence to Sharia Law acts of terrorism and deport ALL Muslims just like we would deport enemy non combatants in time of war. Don't take their property and put them in camps like we did the Japanese; just send every man, woman, and child back to their country of origin and when the day comes that Muslim terrorism is gone then we can talk about letting the best of them back into the country.
Face it, cops have a tough and brutal job and we are so lucky to have men and women that are willing to take on the task. But they aren't fans of accountability as we saw the OKC police union reject the body cameras. But they are our employees and we are in control, not the police union. Make the wearing and use of body cameras mandatory and punish any instances of tampering with the devices and make 100% of the video public record just by visiting a website. That in itself would weed out the handful of bad cops present in a force, the power mad, the bullies, the sadistic. Make the killing of a citizen a mandatory criminal case if there is no weapon that actually belongs to the suspect.
If the citizen is practicing his Constitutional right to bear arms that ought to be no excuse to being murdered in cold blood but if the suspect actually points a weapon at a cop then the suspect will get his just reward. Set up citizen review boards for acts of police violence but make those boards follow existing Supreme Court dictates as they can't be star chambers. Pull the reviewers out of the jury pool that gathers at the court house each Monday morning so the folks are varied and fresh.
Do these things and it might become safe to be a cop again. That thin blue line is all there is between a lot of very bad people and polite society and we have to support our police and recognize that they do a tough, thankless job that takes the human scum off our streets so we can all be safer. That is a weapon for freedom but like all weapons if not used with common sense and humanity it will brutalize segments of the population and breed terrorism.
