Quote of the Day:

[NYPD Officer] Brian Moore was only 25. There can be no justice for him, and the only peace he will know is the peace of the grave. In death, he is called a hero by some of the same people who, while he was alive, saw him only as a villain.

Michael Goodwin in the New York Post

There are two must-read pieces today on the killing of Brian Moore, the young police officer, a decorated, second-generation cop, who was shot twice in the face over the weekend in Queens, allegedly by career criminal Demetrius Blackwell.  

The first is by Bob McManus, who suggests that New York’s “retreat from aggressive policing,” including the stop and frisk policies so deplored by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and other progressive luminaries, made a life of crime easier for people such as Blackwell:

It wasn’t so long ago that Blackwell would have been seen for what he is — a violent ex-con with a thing for guns and no redeeming virtues worth mentioning.

But times change, and with them administrations, and now the Demetrius Blackwells of New York City — victimizers slowly achieving the status of potential victims themselves — have less reason to fear the law than at any time since David Dinkins left office.

That’s the inevitable net effect of City Hall’s retreat from aggressive policing — Exhibit A being the sharp decline in the use of the stop-and-frisk anti-gun practices that animated New York’s dramatic drop in violent crime two decades ago.

President Obama and Mayor de Blasio both praised Officer Moore after his death. Michael Goodwin may manage to be even more cynical than I am about the posthumous praise for Officer Moore by the nation's two most consistent cop detractors:

[President Obama’s and Mayor de Blasio’s] remarks are welcome, with Sharpton calling the murder an “unpardonable crime.” His comments reinforce the old-fashioned idea that attacking law enforcement is out of bounds, always and everywhere.

Unfortunately, however, the progressive ringleaders could also have a less noble motive for joining the common-sense chorus. Maybe they concluded that dead cops are bad for business.

In their day jobs, all three routinely make excuses for those who break the law and blast cops first and get the facts later. Each offered encouragement to the law-breaking rabble known as Occupy Wall Street and expressed varying degrees of support for anti-police protesters in New York, Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., even as they criticized arsonists and looters.

The effort to separate good protesters from bad rioters is doomed to fail because too many people in both groups are motivated by hatred for cops. Fanning that flame while expecting to control the damage is mission impossible, even for Sharpton and the skilled community organizers in the White House and City Hall.

In related news, did you know that there is a shrine to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.? (See: “Ferguson Mulls Moving Michael Brown Shrine from Middle of Street”)

Michael Brown was a teen-ager and his death is heart-breaking, even if it was entirely preventable: according to witnesses whose testimony was accepted by a grand jury, Brown lunged for a policeman’s gun. This was after shoving around a diminutive clerk in a strong-arm robbery of a cigar store.

Making Michael Brown a hero practically ensures that young men will seek to emulate him. Is Michael Brown really the role model for young black men? What does it say that the shrine is regarded by some as “a hallowed symbol of a new civil rights movement”?

To me it says that many more young black men and upstanding officers such as Brian Moore will die.