The Attempted Murder of the Two LA Police Officers and the Crowd Reaction Should Make ALL of Us Very Afraid

We’ve seen crime undergrounds before, but it looks like what we are seeing now is a criminal activity out in the open, up front, for all to see, insufficiently condemned by a frightened elite.

I refer not only to the attempted murder of two L.A. County police officers but to the giddy scene afterwards. The casualness of the shooting should strike fear into our hearts: The suspect approaches the car, where the officers are sitting, fires at close range, hitting both officers in their heads, and then vanishes into a waiting vehicle.

As sick-making as the shooting is, what happened afterwards must further shock all decent people. Rich Lowry did a good job of describing the scene:   

A black man who had witnessed the Compton shooting or its immediate aftermath narrates what has happened on video, his voice filled with joy and excitement. Using a slang term for shooting someone, he exults, “N – – – a just aired the police out, n – – – as!”

“It goes down in Compton!” he continues, the cruiser and the wounded officers in the background. “Oh, two sheriffs shot in the face!”

None of the several people on the sidewalk near the amateur videographer shows the slightest inclination to help the officers. In fact, shouts can be heard of, “No justice, no peace,” which would seem grotesquely inappropriate — except the go-to slogan of Black Lives Matter and other hard-left protesters has always carried the threat of violence.

…

[There] is no getting around the sentiment of the bystanders or the rabble that showed up, disgracefully, at the hospital where the officers were taken, shouting abuse at the police ( “Oink, oink,” “Y’all going to die one by one”).

There are several things to say about this. One is that these cretins apparently hadn’t gotten the message that BLM is supposedly all about reforming the police, rather than expressing a comprehensive, unthinking animus against the cops.

Another is that cops have to deal with these sort of spontaneous hostile crowds all the time now in the course of their work, which makes it more dangerous and difficult — with the citizens of crime-ridden areas paying the steepest price.

This is not underground activity. There is nothing furtive about this behavior. It is public, giddy, and threatening. And why not?

After all, the fancy gelato shop in my neighborhood has just put up a colorful “No Justice, No Peace” sign.  As have many businesses in the vicinity. I am sure your neighborhood is the same. It is ridiculous at this point not to recognize the intimations of viciousness implicit in the slogan.

Lowry continues:

Presumably, none of the elite members of the vast media, corporate and cultural apparatus that has made, almost instantaneously, BLM part of America’s civil religion supports killing cops or insulting them and their colleagues when they are gunned down. But in their fervent embrace of a poisonous and simplistic narrative about policing in America, they are telling a lie about the cops, one repeated over and over again and without challenge in swaths of American life.

If the police are a racist, occupying force, why not resist and harass them? Why not consider them all the same — and all equally guilty?

It would be nice if famous people bothered to learn the names of the wounded LA officers and held them up as heroes. It would be nice if they condemned not just the ambush but the ensuing verbal abuse of the cops. It would be nice if they decided to stand for the national anthem to pay tribute to the sacrifice of the LA officers and their fellow men and women in blue — but all that would require more respect for police than much of the American elite can bring itself to muster in 2020.

Can you imagine what it was like for the wounded officers, now struggling to live, to hear crowds chanting death? If they heard it. They were grievously wounded, after all. The humanity of the female officer, though bleeding from a gunshot to her jaw, who tried nevertheless to tie a tourniquet for her partner, is in stark contract with the monsters in the crowd.

Rorschach Test: President Trump called for the death penalty for anyone who kills a police officer—he described such people as “animals.” Former vice president Joe Biden, meanwhile, sent “kind words regarding the horrific ambush which our two brave deputies survived last night.” Which response better fits the situation?

A society that doesn’t recoil with horror and vow to punish such bloodthirsty behavior is in deep trouble. And, just FYI to the trendy stores on my street: Failure to condemn this viciousness by keeping up those BLM slogan signs won’t, if the mob takes a notion to go after you, save you.

When criminal activity is so brazen, we should all be very afraid of the breakdown in order.