Now that he is in hot water, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose heart is clearly with the anti-police rioters, has called for a suspension of politics and the rioting until after the two assassinated police officers are buried and de Blasio feels the mob will be less embarrassing to him.
But that is not how mobs operate. Especially mobs led by White House-Sony adviser Al Sharpton. The anti-police protests in New York will continue. “Jail killer cops” was a popular slogan yesterday.
Progressives have reduced public discourse to simple-minded smears so that one constantly must state what should be obvious: no, I don’t approve of killer cops. Yes, black lives matter. But these riots started over the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, a black teen, who apparently went for the gun of a police officer, and Eric Garner, whose family has said repeatedly that race was not a factor.
The riots are based on what Heather Mac Donald terms a “lethal lie:” turning would-be cop killer Brown into a civil rights icon. The rabble and the elites have embraced this lie:
Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.
The highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated in the mass hysteria.
Mac Donald writes about the inner city’s hatred of the police:
Hatred of the police among blacks stems in part from police brutality during this country’s shameful era of Jim Crow-laws and widespread discrimination. But it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of a wrong.
She also states that “police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk. … In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the US — almost all killed by black civilians.”
Like Mac Donald, Thomas Sowell fears the anarchy we see unfolding in the anti-cop mobs:
The cold-blooded murder of two New York City policemen as they sat in their car is not only an outrage but also a wake-up call. It shows, in the most painful way, the high cost of having demagogues, politicians, mobs and the media constantly taking cheap shots at the police.
Those cheap shots are in fact very expensive shots, not only to the police themselves but to the whole society. Someone once said that civilization is a thin crust over a volcano. The police are part of that thin crust. We have seen before our own eyes, first in Ferguson, Missouri and then in other communities, what happens when there is just a small crack in that crust, and barbarism and arson burst out.
Sowell's final caution:
The race card is nothing to play with. It can ruin us all.