For God’s sake, stop demonizing the NYPD

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, has this op-ed with the above title in the New York Post.

Whenever I go back home to Missouri, family and friends ask me, “What do you like most about New York?” The list is lengthy, I reply…. But near the top would be the men and women of the New York Police Department.

Our valiant police officers have one of the most perilous, stressful duties around, and from what I have seen in my nearly dozen years here, they do it with care, compassion and competence.

Now we have added to their load with continual, at times exaggerated, rash and inaccurate criticism, combined with rocks, Molotov cocktails and taunts.

Do police forces deserve criticism sometimes? You bet they do. The vicious killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd by a policeman, with his partners idly watching, reminds us in a nauseating way that for some cops, black lives do not matter. The most stinging rebuke of that outrage in Minneapolis that I hear comes from — guess who? The cops I chat with on the sidewalks of New York.

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One of the tumors on our beloved nation, past and present, is that we often target African-Americans, profile them, caricature them, blame them and suspect them as the cause of all evil and woe in society. That is raw injustice. But for God’s sake, let’s not now, in a similar way, stereotype the NYPD.