Chicago police in riot gear | Chicago Tribune photo
By Nancy Thorner & Ed Ingold -
The “Ferguson Effect” has a long reach, including Chicago and Dallas. Here in Illinois, Chicago's violence is reaching epidemic proportions. Police have been put on notice that the ACLU and DOJ are watching, while the President continues to express “disappointment” at every perceived transgression without first waiting for the facts to surface.
Ferguson, Missouri, where the shooting of Michael Brown occurred on August 9, 2014, gave rise to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a combination of concerned local citizens and professional agitators. Making their opinions public is of far less importance than the havoc the Movement can cause through disrupting traffic, business, and promoting confrontations with the police. In Ferguson, the police responded in force to the ensuing demonstrations, only to be ordered to stand down under pressure from the DOJ, a Democratic governor, and the mainstream media. Consequently, the “peaceful” demonstrations devolved into a violent riot accompanied by arson and widespread looting.
Although the President said nothing, he did sent Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate, of all things, the police, while the demonstrators were granted a free pass. Obama subsequently ordered the return of armored vehicles that were being used by the Ferguson police to send and retrieve police officers from dangerous areas. For according to the President, there was "too much militarization of the police."
A few weeks later, Freddy Grey was injured while resisting arrest and later died. Baltimore, state and federal politicians quickly blamed the police. What followed was Black Lives Matter taking to the streets across the nation. In Baltimore the police were ordered to stand back for a week while square blocks of businesses were looted and burned. Six officers were indicted for their roles in the Grey death. Two were acquitted and one had a mistrial (hung jury), and three await trial, with convictions unlikely. With all six officers initially charged likely to be found not guilty, where is Obama with this information? If facts are so important to Obama, now that the facts clear the police officers of killing Freddy Grey, shouldn't the President make public these facts to help dispel racial tension and misunderstanding in the black community?
The latest event is an ex-soldier in Dallas (the deadliest attack since 9/11) who opens fire on lightly armed police tending yet another Black Lives Matter protest march, shooting twelve police officers, of whom five died. The killer’s dying declaration was that he hated whites, and white policemen in particular, and wished to kill as many as possible. While the President denounced the violence, he was unwilling to call the killers actions an hate crime. Apparently to Obama, hate flows in only one direction, white to black.
With our nation still in shock and mourning the loss of five Dallas police officers, President Obama wasted no time playing the Gun Grab card and calling for stricter gun control legislation. As noted, the President described the situation as a failure to get along, and the easy access to “powerful weapons”:
"We also know that when people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes attacks like these more deadly and more tragic, and in the days ahead we're going to have to consider those realities as well.
There was no mention of a hate crime, because hate flows in one direction only to the President – white to black:
And what does the presumptive Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, have to say about the Houston shooting? Hillary Clinton used a CNN interview on Friday to completely embrace the Democrats’ claim that white people and cops must change to help reduce the number of African-Americans killed in tense exchanges with cops.
The BLM protest in Dallas was indeed peaceful, in large part to the tolerance exercised by the police. This may have something to do with the Texas tradition where good men are armed, willing and able to defend their lives and property. Not surprising is that the press is silent in this regard. Looting in Ferguson stopped when armed civilians volunteers, called vigilantes by a press unable to distinguish self-defense from revenge, to protect the few remaining stores. According to the press, police were only there to “protect the demonstrators.” This belies the fact that there were no counter demonstrations nor any threats to the demonstrators. Simply put, the police were there to protect other citizens and businesses should the demonstrators not be satisfied with marching and shouting. That said, once shooting started the police rushed into the line of fire to move the protesters to safety, and to rescue at least one wounded woman and her son.
Parallel demonstrations occurred in other cities, including New York, Washington DC, and Chicago. The demonstrations were not peaceful, resulting in many arrests. Is the real damage yet to come? Are marches, riots, and curfews coming soon to a city near you this summer? Following the heated protests of past years in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, an NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll noted how 96 percent of the American people believed a similar series of heated protects were likely to unfold in the urban center closest to where they lived. Given the unrest so far this summer, summer, 2016, seems to have gotten off to a bad start.
Since Ferguson…
- Police show up to demonstrations without proper protective gear, weapons or backup – handguns and batons are no defense against rifles, even one rifle.
- Without a show of force, it takes more police to maintain order – a target-rich environment.
- Rules of engagement allow demonstrators to disrupt traffic and the rights of other citizens almost without restraint.
- Subsequent to Dallas, police in many cities, including Chicago and New York, have been ordered to travel in pairs, for self-protection. This reduces coverage by 50%, without any real improvement in safety to the officers.
- The BLM movement has attracted the attention and support of the New Black Panthers, willing to use violence to advance their cause. The Dallas shooter appears to have been a follower, if not an affiliate of the Panthers.
In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. The warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case that Justice Department lawyers had brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke. Allies in the media echoed the narrative that the defendants in the voter intimidation case were harmless clowns.
Then as now, there is too much political correctness!
