Biden Discovers the War on Cops

After eighteen months of insisting that the most serious problem facing America is white supremacy, the Biden Justice Department has finally noticed that violence against law enforcement “doesn’t get enough attention,” as noted by FBI Director Christopher Wray.  Wray told 60 minutes that last year there was a 59% increase in murders of police officers, with an officer murdered nearly once every five days.

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has this piece in the New York Post calling the administration’s fixation about white-supremacists “preposterous.”

“It is violent street crime — drive-by shootings, sadistic robberies, carjackings — that has been destroying lives at an increasing rate since the George Floyd race riots. White-supremacist violence played no role in the record-breaking 29% national homicide increase in 2020 or in the ongoing crime surge since then.

As startling as that 2020 homicide increase was, cop murders rose at twice that rate in 2021. A significant portion of those fatalities were ambushes, which were up 91% by mid-2021. Through April 26 of this year, gun murders of cops are up another 13% over the same period in 2021. Shootings of officers, lethal and nonlethal, were up 43% by early April.”

“These cop killings emerge from a national rhetoric of cop hatred and racial animosity. The Floyd riots and their long aftermath featured the graffiti tag ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) sprayed across public buildings from New York City to Seattle.

Biden has repeatedly alleged that black parents are right to fear that their children will be shot by a police officer every time those kids go outside. This charge, too, defies reality.

At least 50 black children were fatally gunned down in 2020 — an unthinkable toll if the children had been white. Those young black victims, many of them toddlers, were killed by black criminals, not by police officers, and were therefore ignored by Black Lives Matter activists and the mainstream media.

The wider charge — that police shootings of black men are epidemic — is likewise echoed by Biden and likewise fallacious. Six unarmed blacks were fatally shot by the police in 2021, according to The Washington Post’s classification of unarmed victims of police shootings, out of a self-identified national black population of nearly 47 million. (By contrast, Biden judicial nominee Nusrat Choudhury has claimed that cops kill unarmed black men every day.) Seventy-three police officers were murdered in 2021, out of a national law enforcement body of well under 700,000 officers.”

MacDonald notes that a police officer is 400 times more likely to be killed by a black criminal than an unarmed black citizen is to be killed by an officer.  She goes on to describe multiple recent incidents of violence and murders by black criminals, including teenagers, against unarmed whites.

The claim that America is fundamentally racist used to come primarily from race hustlers like Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.  President Barack Obama made this false claim a national issue, setting in motion scores of government initiatives to amplify racial hatred into school curriculum, law and policy, every federal agency, popular culture, and the national media.  The level of entrenchment was evident after a black felon, high on drugs, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020.  Even during a worldwide pandemic, politicians including the current president, the national media, the largest corporations, sports stars and celebrities celebrated the rioters for demanding racial justice and equity, as they smashed, burned and looted the central districts of hundreds of cities and attacked police officers brave enough to try and stop them.   In many cities local political leaders made their police departments, which they labeled as racist, stand down.

MacDonald closes writing;

“Democrats may face a rout this November, in significant part because of the violence that is spreading from the inner cities into the rest of the country. If Biden wants to minimize the electoral losses, he should join his FBI chief in repudiating anti-cop violence. As important, he should retract his own false statements about policing and America’s enduring racism.”