The Good Guys…and Gals

By Patrick Hall

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire

They made many believe that the police were killing blacks at alarming rates. The tragic deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and later the Deification of George Floyd, were skillfully employed to paint law enforcement as the bad guys. In the case of George Floyd, his death, followed by the bedeviled prosecution of Officer Derrick Chauvin and others, in retrospect, has raised more questions about the efficacy and adjudication surrounding his death. As I alluded to in an article back in 2021 entitled George Floyd as Metaphor, Mr. Floyd served his purpose for the black Democrats, guilt-ridden liberals, the Defund the Police ochlocrats, BLM, and Antifa rioters back in the summer of 2020.  It has become an article of faith to many Democrats, Controlled Opposition Republicans, the college literati, and their students that the police pose the greatest existential threat to the minority community.

Meanwhile, the murder and chaos, the atrocities, if you will, continue to be visited by many inner-city residents.  Despite hagiography surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd (someone with enough drugs in his system to kill a horse at the time of his encounter with law enforcement.) The socio-political drama of blacks being indiscriminately killed by the police goes on unabated. The mainstream media has crafted a scenario that portrays the police as the bad guys.  A drama that inadvertently provides a green light to the criminal roaches or thugs that infest many inner-city communities. But here is the truth.  It is the police in many of these inner-city communities who continue to do the hard job of protecting its residents from the omnipresent criminality. It is this unrelenting criminal ethos or mindset that is the main culprit in so many black homicides.

Black Lives Matter …. especially to the Police!

Having a relative who is currently part of a Metropolitan Police force, here is the real story.  Shots ring out in an inner-city neighborhood. Moments later, police cars go racing toward the violence that too often plagues the Chicago’s, Baltimore’s, DC's, and Philadelphia’s. The police respond to the violence, not out of malice but as law enforcement officials whose job it is to protect and serve all people from the criminal element. The police are the first ones who run toward the danger while most of us shelter in place. They leave their families and friends each day not to make a sport of shooting blacks. No, just the opposite.  Unlike Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Jim Clyburn (D-SC), or the feckless, victims-are-us-clown-show known as the Congressional Black Caucus. They have done little to nothing to stop the epidemic of black-on-black crime in their districts.  The police are the ones who, through their actions, truly believe and, more often than not, place their lives on the line to save others.  The secular heresy of police brutality that is obligatory in the talking points of black politicians and their Democratic Progressive compadres has inadvertently made urban communities less safe for the very residents that BLM, NAACP, and the Black Political class on the Federal, State, and local level claim to care about.

Here are some simple criminal stats that haven’t bunged much since I first cited them in 2014. Blacks are only 13% of the United States population but are responsible for over 52% of all homicides. In urban areas, where they make up 35% of the population, blacks commit over 75% of murders. Another tragic, if not pathetic, fact is that since 1980, there have been over 200,000 killings of blacks by other blacks. We have more blacks killed by criminal parasites among them than the number of United States soldiers killed in military engagement over the same period. The year 2015 was an especially murderous year, with over 5000 blacks killed by their criminal brethren.

Also, as pointed out by individuals like Heather MacDonald in her book The War on Cops, if blacks seem to come into more contact with law enforcement with the potential of these interactions going sideways, it is simply due to their “rate as a group” to engage in criminal offending.  

Personal Observations

Policing, especially within many metropolitan areas, is dangerous work. How many of us who leave our homes to begin our work day have to entertain the thought that we might not make it home to our families due to the nature of the work? Even firemen who risk their lives to save others don’t have to deal with the negative ambiance perpetuated by the Defund the Police and no-cash-bail nincompoops.

In my working-class neighborhood, many of us have firearms, not to protect us from the police but from criminals who happen to be black. People have Pit Bulls and German Shepherds in their yards. Once again, this is not to protect us from rogue cops but from the criminal element, who are black. Security systems, gated doorways, windows, and a very active neighborhood watch program are all ubiquitous features. They exist because of black criminality and not law enforcement.  The Police are not the murderous racist boogeymen as they are often depicted in the left-of-center media. Whether they are engaged in patrolling high-crime public housing projects, intervening to crack down on the illicit drug trade, or trying to maintain a deterrent against any number and types of bad people, that is what our men and women in blue have been charged with.  

 As a sidebar, I often think about what chaos would ensue if the police were ultimately prevented from doing their job. The nightmare would probably resemble what we now witness in many of President Biden’s foreign policy disasters. From the asymmetrical warfare conducted by the CCP against us to Iran's support of terrorism, Putin's aggressiveness in Ukraine, and the absence of anything resembling a border to protect our nation, all of it is the result of a lack of vigilance against some very evil actors or international criminality.  Biden’s and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's feeble, if not incompetent, foreign policy has turned out to be the global counterpart of Defund the Police.

Turning to local law enforcement, the police are the ones who, through their actions and sacrifices, “authentically” uphold the popular catechesis that Black, if not all, lives matter.