Forum: What's Your Reaction To The Nationwide Attacks On Police?

Every week on Monday, the Council, members of the Watcher's Council Community and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:What's Your Reaction To The Nationwide Attacks On Police?

 Don Surber : Pray. Blame the shooter, not the BLM or the president.

 The Razor : Why can’t we be pro-black and pro-cop? I’m getting sick of this black and white world we are living in.

My last few interactions with the police haven’t been all that great. I’ve been treated rudely and without respect. If they’re treating a 50 year old middle class white guy that way, I can just imagine how they treat minorities. I’ve seen the videos, and while some are more damning then others, the last few have shown the root of the problem. It’s not racism – contrary to what BLM believes – it’s poor police training. The shooter in the Castile video was scared witless, shaking and cursing and clearly out of his depth. We have a nation that trains cops to go to war and protect themselves at all cost – even if that means shooting an unarmed man in a car with a 4 year old child and her mother inside of it - instead of serving their communities.

Think about that: shooting a 40 caliber handgun into a car with a woman and 4 year old child in it. There is just so much wrong with what that cop did I don’t know where to begin. Cops have been taught how to use their guns but not how to use their brains. They have been trained to gain control of a situation and everyone in it, and then are shocked when this tactic backfires, escalating a situation that inevitably ends with an unarmed dead man.

We cannot be surprised that these video executions aren’t going to inspire some to take the law into their own hands and fight back. But just as the NRA can’t be blamed for every unarmed man shot by a cop, the BLM cannot be blamed for what went down Thursday night in Dallas. We have been afflicted with poor leadership for a generation. Great men and women could have built upon the Civil Rights movement to make MLK’s dream a reality. Instead they have divided us, fragmenting us like some kind of social grenade.

We need to find a middle path between the extremes of anarchy and a police state. Cops won’t feel that they are under siege when the people within the communities they serve believe they are being treated fairly. Perhaps cops can learn from police departments that have been successful with deescalation training or neighborhood policing. Ending the War on Drugs by legalizing possession of narcotics would help too. But cops won’t be safe until the people they serve feel safe.

If we can’t find this middle path, then America is dead.

JoshuaPundit : This isn't about the police, or ra-aaa-acism. It's about power, politics and control.

President Barack Hussein Obama has a long history of using the presidency as a platform to attack the police. From the 'stupid' police who arrested Professor Skip Gates when he was arrested and refused to show his ID after a neighbor reported someone breaking into the professor's home to his shoot from the lip comments about his 'son' Trayvon Martin, to he and his friend Al Sharpton essentially helping to incite a riot in Ferguson Missouri, to the Freddie Gray travesty. You'll also remember that the day before the nation-wide attacks on police, the president weighed in harshly on incidents involving confrontations between blacks and police in Louisiana and Minnesota where the full facts aren't known yet, saying police must 'root out racism.'

This is exactly the same type of gasoline our president always throws on this kind of thing and it almost always has the same result,followed by a carefully phrased condemnation of the violence it help create.

So, why would a sitting president do that?

Recall two things this president said in the early days of his first term. The first thing he said was tha the wanted to be a 'transformational president.'

The second? That he wanted a 'civilian security force, just as well armed, just as well funded, and just as well trained as our military.'

Remember that one?



Just as Obama has done his best to transform our military, he now intends to change the police, making 'social justice' and 'diversity' a paramount part of their mission rather than law enforcement and crime fighting, dictating the policies from DC and federalizing the large and mid-sized urban departments.

Both the president and Mrs. Clinton pointedly mentioned federalizing the police in their statements following last Friday's carnage...after blaming white ra-aa-acism, of course, which as Mrs. Clinton said, 'must change.'

That's the power aspect, and the political aspect is equally obvious. Has anyone but me noticed how often these incidents happen in election years?

Magnifying what amounts to rare incidents like these and making a convenient enemy out of the police using the Soros funded Black Lives Matter movement is a convenient platform for maximizing fundraising and black turnout for the Democrats. Without that, they simply don't win elections. Given how Obama's policies have severely hurt the black working class, something has to be created to keep them on the Democrat plantation.


GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD :  One of the pillars of any successful society - and let's face it - the American society is the most awesome of all - is Rule of Law.

Law enforcement is key obviously and works hand in hand with our criminal justice system.

Breaking down this pillar will result in tons of uncool chiz initiating a collapse of America as we know it.

The last week has seen perhaps the biggest skirmish in the War on Cops.

The current and the former Attorney Generals as well as 44 himself have constantly misdirected and encouraged lawless elements every since the Professor Skip Gates affair - when 44 LOL'd that "the Police acted stupidly. They followed through in the immediate aftermath of Ferguson.

44 should have briefly reiterated the grounds for not indicting the officer at Ferguson and applauded the decision as the product of a scrupulously thorough and fair process. He should have praised the jurors for their service and courage in following the evidence where it led them. And he should have concluded by noting that there is no fairer criminal-justice system in the world than the one we have in the United States.1

Instead, 44 reprimanded local police officers in advance for an expected overreaction to the protests: “I also appeal to the law-enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur. . . . They need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence . . . from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.”

Such skepticism about the ability of the police to maintain the peace appropriately was unwarranted at the time and even more so in retrospect; the forces of law and order didn’t fire a single shot. Nor did they inflict injury, despite having been fired at themselves.

The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department. 

 The Glittering Eye : I think there's a lot of exaggerated fear on all sides.

It is not true that police are being murdered in numbers. Here in Chicago there hasn't been a police officer killed in the line of duty in five years. Police killings, e.g. Laquan McDonald, simply can't be attributed to rational fear on the part of police.

It's also not true that blacks are being murdered in numbers by police. Blacks are killed by police in numbers proportionate to the number their arrests for violent crimes at about the same rate as whites. Black anger of the sort that apparently motivated the murderer in Dallas last Thursday simply can't be thought of as a righteous response to black men being hunted by the police.

The United States is a country of 320 million people and there are more than a million law enforcement officers. With such a large population and tens or hundreds of thousands of encounters between the police and black menu daily, occasional tragic incidents are inevitable. Comparing the United States with, say, Denmark is facetious. Denmark is the size of a good-sized U. S. county. There are thousands of U. S. counties where no police officers or civilians have been murdered in decades.

Why the fear? I think there are several reasons. The power of social media and every phone a video camera mean that these inevitable incidents are made available to a worldwide audience in minutes. The news media pick up these viral accounts and perseverate on them, giving the impression that they're much more frequent and much more severe than they actually are.

Another contributing factor is political leadership that feels the need to provide a misguided balance in their statements about these unfortunate incidents. IMO if President Obama merely said nothing on the grounds that these incidents are local matters and he shouldn't insinuate himself into them or supported the police unconditionally we'd all be better off.

Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason : We must understand the nationwide attack on police in this country is being orchestrated by the radical left in an effort to create chaos, destruction, division, and death. This past week we saw the shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 5th and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota on July 6th. The Black Lives Matter movement organized protests in several cities following these shootings. As we have seen they are very good at quickly mobilizing protestors. They do not care that the facts surrounding these shootings have yet to be determined. Their rush to judgment, along with our President, condemns the police and portrays the men who were killed as not guilty of anything except being black.

American blacks need to realize they are being used by the most radical forces at work in this country to divide us in order to destroy us. The police are not our enemy. Of course there are some bad actors and they will be brought to justice. We must respect our legal system to determine guilt or innocence in these cases. The media spin on the left and the right will not reveal all the facts in their rush to judgment. As the song says “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” Time after time we have a black man killed by police, and time after time we have protestors in the streets, always at night it seems, protesting the actions of the police. Of course the instigators use these protests to riot, loot, burn and destroy everything they can until the next time. The pattern repeats because the pattern works. The Obama administration would jump at the opportunity to nationalize our police force and to strip law abiding citizens of their Second Amendment right to possess firearms. The left would not hesitate to create circumstances to hasten such a move if possible.

Does anyone else find it odd that the Dallas shooter was able to commit his terrorist acts, killing five policemen and wounding many others, seemingly spontaneously with a hastily assembled Black Lives Matter protest in a city with very little racial unrest and where the diversity of the police force reflects to a good measure the diversity of its citizens?

It is also interesting how FBI Director James Comey’s announcement on July 5th of Hillary Clinton’s many felonious actions and his determination they did not rise to the level of indictable offenses but merely “extremely careless” was the media story for less than a twenty-four hour news cycle. Once these shootings occurred there was no more coverage of the Clinton scandal. The American people are being manipulated by the media.

Stately McDaniel Manor :Statistically, policing is not among the most dangerous professions, however, every day, back in the 1400s, when I put on the blue suit, I understood just how vulnerable I was. If someone really wanted to ambush me, there was little I could do to avoid it. I practiced good tactics, varied my routine, and was always extra alert at choke points and potential ambush sites, but the truth is, if someone wants to kill you, and is willing to die in the process, it’s likely they’ll succeed.

I also knew that if the job required it, I would, without hesitation, put my body between people I didn’t know, had never met, to protect them from the bullets of killers. I would, of course, do my best to make them pay with their lives, but being willing to sacrifice myself was a matter of duty, of honor.

And I also had no doubt that if I had to shoot, to kill another human being, I would do it without hesitation. Any police officer that hasn’t worked that one out is a danger to him self and the public. Hesitation can kill.

I am glad--very glad--that I am no longer a police officer. Today’s officers not only have a very large and racist target on their backs, they can no longer be reasonably certain that if they have to shoot to save their life, or the lives of others, they can expect a competent investigation under the rule of law, particularly if they have to shoot a member of a favored victim group. At the moment, that group is young black males, who, coincidentally, commit serious, violent crimes in numbers far out of proportion to their numbers in the population (around 5%). In addition, they can no longer expect that prosecutors will analyze their shoots using the same legal standards that apply to those victim groups, namely probable cause, and the ability to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.

It’s a lie, you know--the idea that the police are engaging in some racist conspiracy to kill black men. Police officers—justifiably--kill far more white people than black, and police officers are less likely to be racist than the general population. Police agencies spend a great deal of time and money in recruiting, hiring and continuing supervision to screen for that sort of deviance, and very, very few Americans are actual racists. The Civil Rights Movement achieved its goals, and rightfully so. Actual racists are treated as social pariahs. All Americans of good will are proud of that, and glad for it. That’s in large part why Barack Obama was elected President, to make that point, to demonstrate the ultimate vindication of the Civil Rights Movement. Look how he has repaid us.

Every officer knows, every day, the extent of their vulnerability, which is bad enough without the President of the United States and other racist twits lying about the police and stirring up irrational hatred toward them. Yet every day, they still go out there on the streets and pray their number isn’t up.

So do I.


  Well, there you have it.

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