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Verbal attacks on police
have
led to five dead and six injured
by George Hofstetter
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| George Hofstetter |
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On July 7, 2016, the verbal attacks on police in America that began two years ago led to the brutal assassination of five Dallas police officers and the attempted assassination of six more.
The Dallas shootings are in part the tragic consequences of vitriol from an irresponsible few who seek to demonize all cops. A common tactic when waging war is to dehumanize "the enemy" because to
dehumanize the enemy
makes it easier to kill them. What we have witnessed during the past two years, since Ferguson, Missouri, is an unrelenting verbal propaganda war against law enforcement from a handful of elected officials, professional agitators, and others, amplified by the editorial and opinion pages of leading national newspapers and broadcast media.
Sadly, even a Supreme Court Justice entered the mix with her own hyperbolic statement about law enforcement. In this narrative, all police officers are racists, and because of either expressed or subconscious biases, harass and oppress minorities. Law enforcement officers are not people doing a job and protecting the community, but instead, they are automatons cut from the same oppressing cloth.
Launched in Ferguson, Missouri with the "hands up, don't shoot" invention, suggesting a police officer gunned down a surrendering African American man, this narrative has gripped the nation over the past two years. It doesn't matter that this claim was proven false 18 months later during an
exhaustive investigation
by the United States Department of Justice - the propaganda war had its slogan. The verbal assault on law enforcement had already reached full throttle even before the facts of that report were released, and what actually occurred became incidental to the false narrative of "police violence" spun by politicians, activists and the news media.
The notion of police as an occupying force which "routinely targets" minorities was proffered by United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who penned a
written assault
on law enforcement claiming that "for generations black and brown parents" have been forced to instruct their children how to act around police, "all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them." Per Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court's ruling upholding a search encouraged law enforcement to harass minorities.
The nadir of this police dehumanization was reached just before the Dallas police assassinations. Hours after the police shooting in St Paul, MN, and before an investigation had scarcely begun,
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton
made the preposterous and baseless claim that Philando Castille would not have been killed if he were white. The
New York Times editorial board
thundered the shootings in St Paul and Baton Rouge were part of a "gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok."
In the wake of this continued dehumanization and demonization of police officers, it's a small step to move from verbal attacks to seeing on
video an execution
of a police officer in Dallas - when an assassin shot an officer multiple times from behind, then walked up and fired the coup de grace into the fallen officer's head. This lawlessness and brutality is the natural outcome of the rhetoric labeling police officers as an enemy to be hated, as was chanted by some protesters, "
Pigs in a blanket
, fry them like bacon."
Those who protest the loudest to "stop the violence" should look inward, as well as outward. Words have consequences. Calls to "lower tensions" when coupled with harsh, divisive rhetoric that incites anger in people against police in general divides communities and, as we witnessed in Dallas, have tragic, deadly consequences.
George Hofstetter is President of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. ALADS is the collective bargaining agent and represents more than 8,200 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County. George can be contacted at [email protected].
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