Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
WaitingforRuffcorn wrote:
Another shooting in Tennessee with the same motivation.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cops-tennes ... as-ambush/Again, don't think that the perception that the police are killing only black people is good for anyone.
It would be incredibly naive to think these police shootings are ONLY a response to police killing people. There are MANY reasons that this is happening. BLM is not a problem.
Here's a good article on the subject, surprisingly from a conservative source:
http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/201 ... yesterday/Compare to the esteemed Wall Street Journal Editorial page this morning:
Quote:
It was only two years ago, in the summer of 2014, that the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York’s Staten Island made it clear that tensions were rising dangerously between the police and the urban neighborhoods they patrol. It hasn’t stopped.
That December, two policemen were assassinated on a Brooklyn street. The following April brought the Baltimore riot and the Freddie Gray case.
Now Dallas.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said a lone shooter killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others in an ambush attack carried out during a march, which was protesting the shootings this week of black men in Louisiana and Missouri by police offers.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown described the words of one suspect, Micah Xavier Johnson, before he was blown up by a police robot bomb: “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
***
America today has the feel of a country flirting dangerously with the 1960s. Back then, disruptions to civic and social order overwhelmed America’s political leadership, which found itself constantly behind the curve of events, on defense. We aren’t there yet, but a familiar deficit of political leadership exists today as social tensions rise.
In the 1960s and ’70s, various individuals and groups said that police brutality against black people justified a violent response. They included Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The Black Panthers famously coined the phrase, “off the pigs.”
Violence followed. Some of it consisted of ambush attacks or shootouts between police and group members. One of the most dramatic events, in January 1972, was the late-night gunning down of two New York City cops by three assailants on Manhattan’s lower east side.
Nothing then, however, reached the scale of the sniper attack in Dallas this week. Dallas represents an historically unprecedented escalation of anti-police violence.
President Obama entered office with the belief that significant and persistent racial inequities existed in American life, a matter he has raised frequently in public appearances. He did so again Thursday while in Warsaw, after the shootings in Louisiana and Missouri.
He said the two deaths “are symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He then cited several statistical studies “to try to put in context why emotions are so raw around these issues.” But he added, “To be concerned about these issues is not to be against law enforcement.”
We don’t gainsay Mr. Obama’s sincerity, and racial disparities exist, but one may ask: Why on Friday, after the Dallas murders, did the city’s police chief, who is black, wonder out loud about support for people on law-enforcement’s front line? “We don’t feel much support most days,” Chief Brown said. “Let’s not make today most days.”
If Chief Brown and many like him in American law enforcement don’t think they get much support, it is because they don’t—until after the cops are dead. Then, as always, come the official condolences.
Instead, what people hear most of the time from groups like Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton is inflammatory rhetoric that distorts reality and indiscriminately demonizes the police. Showing some awareness Thursday of this lopsided public perception, Mr. Obama said it is possible to express support for the police “while also saying there are problems across our criminal justice system.” Mr. Obama’s attempt at balance might have more resonance if once he said Black Lives Matter’s view of American justice is wrong.
Not least among the current distortions is the implication that the U.S. is in the grip of a new era of Jim Crow racialism. Not much noted over the last two, disturbing years, including by Mr. Obama, is that the U.S. court system has been dealing systematically with charges of violent bias brought by prosecutors against law officers. Nor has it been noted how racially integrated the participants are.
In Baltimore three of the six officers indicted for the death in custody of Freddie Gray were black. Since May two of those officers—one black, the other white—were acquitted in a bench trial before a circuit judge, who is black. After the Garner episode on Staten Island, a black man drove from Maryland to Brooklyn and shot NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
In suburban Minneapolis this week, the officer identified as shooting Philando Castile is named Jeronimo Yanez, who is apparently Hispanic. But here is Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s contribution to cooling the racial flames: “Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white? I don’t think it would have.” That is a profile in political fox-holing.
***
Barack Obama came into the American Presidency as a self-declared unifier. As he departs eight years later, the country is polarized, politically and racially. This surely is not the legacy Mr. Obama intended.
White cops versus black people is a narrative that has reached the end of whatever use it may have had. It offers no exit for anyone. The moment has arrived for the country’s political leadership to say so clearly. The U.S. has been here before. It can get worse.
Whooooooooooooosh. Bad.
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