Police now face the knowledge that their superiors and the politicians to whom they answer will sacrifice them without a second thought if it meets the approval of the woke mob and the political leaders and media figures who amplify its demands. Take over an entire neighborhood in downtown Seattle, including a police station? No problem, says the city’s mayor—it will be a summer of love! That didn’t turn out to be the case.
Too many still believe that the police are at the root of what troubles America’s cities, but reality has a way of reasserting itself—often cruelly. In New York City, where the city council has voted to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget, weekly shooting incidents in mid-June increased by 358 percent over the same period in 2019. In Chicago, homicides are up 34 percent so far this year compared to last year, and nine children have been killed since June 20.
This wave of violence hasn’t aroused even a fraction of the outrage that attended the deaths of Floyd and Brooks, a fact not lost on the nation’s cops. I spent the latter half of my 30-year LAPD career as a supervisor, encouraging officers to extend themselves in the effort to reduce crime. Given the present political climate, if I were still in that position, I couldn’t offer that same encouragement in good faith.
America’s police have gotten the message: they’re the problem. And they’re responding accordingly. How many more lives will be lost before the country sees through this lie?
– Jack Dunphy in Demoralizing the Police