You’ve probably heard NY police union head Mike O’Meara’s impassioned plea for respect for the men and women who wear the badge. Standing with fellow police officers he said this:  

We all read in the paper all week that in the black community, mothers are worried about their children getting home from school without being killed by a cop. What world are we living in? That does not happen! It does not happen. I am not Derek Chauvin, they are not him. He killed someone. We didn’t…

Everybody’s trying to shame us. Legislators. The press. Everybody’s trying to shame us into being embarrassed of our profession. You know what? This [badge] isn’t stained by someone in Minneapolis. It’s still got a shine on it, and so do theirs…
Stop treating us like animals and thugs, and start treating us with some respect! That’s what we’re here today to say. We’ve been left out of the conversation. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting.


“Stop treating us like animals and thugs, and start treating us with some respect!” he said. “That’s what we’re here today to say. We’ve been left out of the conversation. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting.

There are good cops and bad ones like Derek Chauvin, whose despicable act triggered fury and destruction across the nation. But lumping them all together is smearing decent people.  

It’s also really dangerous to civil society. The call to defund the police is a call to anarchy. George Floyd’s terrible death was the trigger, but we need to recognize that the cause is in many instances a call for civic dismantling. Defaming good men and women is just something you have to do on the road to a goal.

In testimony before the House Committee on the Judiciary yesterday, Heather Mac Donald, who has written extensively on law enforcement, called upon lawmakers to “repudiate the anti-police narrative.” A few nuggets:

But I urge this committee to reject the proposition that law enforcement today is systemically biased. The evidence does not support that charge. Police officials and officers across the country have expressed their disgust at the chillingly callous behavior seen in the Floyd video. It is a violation of everything that the profession currently stands for. Embracing the systemic bias allegation will only lead to more lives lost to criminal violence; many of them, sadly, will be black. To move from the stomach-churning specificity of Mr. Floyd’s case to broader numbers is jarring. Nevertheless, if the charge against policing is systemic racism, we need to look at the system as a whole.

Policing today is driven by crime data and community demands for help. Victim reports send police disproportionately to minority communities because that is where people are most being hurt by violent street crime. …

Heather has observed community meetings in minority neighborhoods:

[An] elderly lady blurted out in the middle of a police-community meeting in the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct: “How lovely when we see the police. They are my friends!” This sentiment has been echoed time and again in the dozens of police community meetings I have attended. The percentage of black respondents in a 2015 Roper poll who wanted more police in their community was twice as high as the percentage of white respondents who wanted more police. The activists who seek to disband police departments will have to explain to these terrified seniors and other law-abiding residents that they are just going to have to fend for themselves.

Without the police we will all be fending for ourselves.

It will be anarchy.

And in many cases, that is the goal.