GUEST COMMENTARY-On December 20, Ismaaiyl Brinsley fatally shot two New York police officers after shooting his ex-girlfriend outside Baltimore. The motive for the former seems clear. Brinsley referenced Eric Garner in an Instagram post, and said it might be his last one because he was "putting wings on pigs today." This was before he ambushed NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu as they sat in their patrol car.
Stretch radicalism as far as it goes, and maybe you'll find a few people who would support cold blooded assassination of cops, but not many. They were random, uniformed targets who might have on the best end of the spectrum for their job, the worst, or—maybe most likely—somewhere in the muddy middle.
But never mind the pointlessness of the murder. A great deal of the right seems to have been waiting for this tragedy. (A third cop—himself a former NYPD office—was killed early Sunday morning in Tarpon Springs, Florida.)
To a certain type of pundit or rabble-rouser, these deaths are confirmation that the darkest parts of police reform protests—the looting, one incident last week where what appeared to be 50-100 protesters chanted, "What do we want? Dead cops!" and a few other occasions where the sentiments were similarly homicidal—are its true face.
Now it's apparently time to score some political points. It's time to waffle and take back the progress towards bipartisan police reform that conservatives have been making ever since Rand Paul has shown that it's okay to notice that police are militarized, there are a lot of people in prison right now, and things like mandatory minimums are to blame for that excess.
According to police and their allies—including law enforcement unions—protesters at large, ones who chanted nasty things, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the Reverend Al Sharpton have blood on their hands. Even President Obama is suspect for offering political platitudes about "dialogue." (And pundits can join in with thinly-sourced accounts of poor people cheering the assassination of the NYPD officers.)
Obviously, police unions exist to defend cops at all costs, so their outrage over this real tragedy makes sense. But the conservative indignation is bizarre. Police enforce laws, many of which target consensual activities, mostly related to buying and selling sex, drugs, or any kind of good or service without the proper regulatory permission. Conservatives and anyone lazily pro-cop seems to have confused wanting reform and accountability within an institution to "making war" on it, or hating it and all its members. They also don't seem to know the meaning of the small government values they profess to hold.
Police should mourn the three officers killed last weekend, but they cannot use this awfulness to shield themselves from the national conversation that finally really got going in August. They cannot be allowed to evade this, or to act as if there is some kind of "war on cops."
Last year, 27 cops were killed with intent—a record low. Meanwhile, 2013 also hit what seems to be a 20 year high—though it's hard to tell, due to lax record keeping—for felony suspects killed by police, at 461.
If you marched and chanted something about killing cops, maybe the fact that a 13-year-old lost his dad the week before Christmas should give you a pang of guilt and a realization that cops are humans, too, no matter how bad our criminal justice system is.
Still, no matter what came out of anyone's mouth during these last few months, the person to blame for a homicide is the person who commits it. Public servants tasked with legal, lethal force should have the the highest standards of behavior, and the most critical eyes pointed at them. They are supposed to be tough enough to take that, even when tragedy strikes.
(Lucy Steigerwald is a Pittsburgh-based writer and photographer. She’s a contributing editor for Antiwar.com, and previously worked as an Associate Editor for Reason magazine. This commentary was posted first at Vice.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 103
Pub: Dec 23, 2014
