For the last two years the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has been a rallying cry for those who suggest black lives don’t in fact matter to whites or to the police. In seeking to make sure that no one misses the point, across the nation citizens just trying to go through their everyday lives have been subjected to restaurant sit ins, manufactured traffic jams and various other protests. As annoying as those activities are, the movement has become entwined with a more sinister trend, delegitimization of police.
From Barack Obama’s “The police acted stupidly” to Bill de Blasio’s suggestion that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program was racist to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s invoking the thug mantra “No Justice, No Peace” as she indicted six police officers for the death of Freddy Gray, black Americans have been endlessly warned that the police are the enemy. They have been told that the police are racist and that the criminal justice system will provide them with no justice at all.
The consequences of this indictment of the police and the criminal justice system are exactly what you would expect. Police have been targeted, literally and lethally, across the country. From getting shot while sitting in their patrol cars, to getting attacked with axes as they stand on the street, to being swarmed as they try and make arrests, police today have targets on their backs like never before. Such is the obvious outcome from government officials and race pimps telling blacks that the police are the enemy.
That, however, is not the only outcome that was predictable as the false narrative behind the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. There is another, even more sinister tragedy that gives lie to the words themselves: skyrocketing crime and the flowing of black blood in the streets in places like Ferguson, New York and Baltimore. And, most of that blood is shed neither at the hands of whites or the police, but usually at the hands of other blacks.
As police have their authority and legitimacy challenged, the citizens of the neighborhoods they police have become targets and victims. Murder rates have jumped in NYC under de Blasio as police feel neutered. In Baltimore, as police have become fearful of doing their jobs, black citizens are paying the price as shootings and murders skyrocket and anarchy reigns.
Conservatives don’t typically suggest that every cop is a Boy Scout. The killings of Walter Scott and Akai Gurley are certainly troubling and rightly raise flags. And there are still many questions that remain about the circumstances of Freddie Gray’s death. But, thankfully, those deaths are news because they are so rare. Of the tens of millions interactions police have with black Americans each year, only a tiny fraction of them result in wrongful bloodshed or inappropriate behavior. Indeed, most of those interactions are with blacks who have been victims of crime or who are citizens seeking help from police.
But when police become the enemy, they cease to be able to provide the basic service they are intended for… fighting crime and preserving the peace. As crime victims are disproportionately black, when police become less effective, blacks disproportionately pay the price. To put that in perspective, following the April riots in Baltimore, where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down so that rioters could have space to “destroy”, May saw an unprecedented jump in violent crime, with shootings up 72% from the previous year and murders reaching 40, more than any month since August, 1990. And most of those victims were black… and the hands of other blacks… but those lives don’t seem to matter to the liberals and the race pimps who are using the extraordinarily rare deaths of black men at the hands of police to decimate the entire criminal justice system.
While we’re told that “Black Lives Matter” what apparently is really the case is that only some black lives matter… those who give liberals and race pimps a platform upon which to enrich themselves or increase their power. The black lives of men, women and children who die at the hands of black criminals emboldened by the neutering of the police… not so much. And unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former exponentially.
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Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told people at a morning ceremony to honor McKenzie Elliott, a 3-year-old, ”The killing of African-Americans in Baltimore has to stop, 189 of the 208 killed last year were black men.”
Apparently the 19 other dead (black women, children and people of other colors) are just chopped liver.
Maybe she’s done giving space to thugs, maybe not.
This is going to be a long, hot summer.
I’m glad I’m in Utah near Salt Lake City. More than 80% of Utah’s blacks are people from Caribbean and African countries (and their children) , not ”ex-slaves.”
The values these Utahan blacks have stands as a sharp contrast to how blacks in the rest of the country see things.
Black lies do not matter.
If you get that your life matters, then you will act in accord with that belief. You will walk the walk . A person who thinks that his life matters will act with dignity and integrity on a consistent basis. A person whose life matters acts with self-discipline and self-control. He pursues a course of productivity and responsibility. He rarely gives in to base and destructive behavior.
A person whose life matters accepts responsibility for his circumstances, his actions and where he is in life. Responsibility goes hand in hand with power. To whom you give responsibility for your life is to whom you grant power. People whose lives matter take power over their lives by accepting responsibility for those lives. A life that matters does not blame others.
A life that matters is a life that lives in appreciation and gratitude rather than resentment, hostility and ingratitude. A life that matters chooses to be productive and is committed to improving itself, its family and the world around it. The person who thinks that his life matters is on a path of growth and improvement. If your life matters, then you will not waste it. You will not waste your time and energy on the nonproductive or destructive, the low and the dark.
A life that matters acts with honor, dignity and respect. Self-respect and respect of others. All lives matter. But all too few actually accept that their life does matters.
Should anyone believe that the problem is never on the part of the police…
Cops Crash Pool Party
Somebody need counseling, and it’s not the kids.
@Greg:
Yet another leftist meme destroyed by the facts:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/06/08/the-mckinney-texas-pool-party-the-rest-of-the-story/
As is characteristic of the left, the truth does not matter – only the leftist propaganda value of their twisted lies matters.
How many will have the courage to refuse to say “2+2=5”?
@Pete, #5:
Horse hockey. An undersize cop—who possibly has the same self image issues as Officer Levitt on the Barney Miller show—ran amock. His far-more-responsible fellow officers actually had to intervene when he pulled his sidearm. The guy needs counseling, if not reassignment to a desk job. Judging from what I saw on the video, he’s a danger to the public as well as the officers he works with.
@Greg:
I guess you also have selective vision. Otherwise, if you really paid attention to the video, you would have seen that two guys were starting to bum rush the cop, and it was at them he aimed his service weapon, not the girl, and the two guys then ran off. I guess you think a single cop trying to enforce order should have allowed those two guys to bum rush him.
Do you ever embarrass yourself, Gullible Greggie? Or do you like being shown for the idiot you are?
@Greg:
So you know better than the black man who lives in the neighborhood who was there and saw more than your selective interpretation of a video of only a partial period of time of the entire event?
@Pete, #8:
Apparently, yes. There’s nothing that excuses Officer Levitt’s poor judgement and unprofessional behavior.
@retire05, #7:
He shouldn’t have been so roughly manhandling a young girl who clearly represented no threat to anything but his ego. I would have been tempted to intervene myself. The guy was behaving like a total a-hole. His was the sort of improper behavior that escalates situations. Any objective observer would likely come to the same conclusion. I’m guessing that opinion might be shared by quite a few responsible law enforcement professionals. It’s not really a political opinion or a political issue.
@Greg:
He would not have had the opportunity to “so roughly manhandling a young girl”, a girl who is only 14 years old, if she had parents that gave a damn about where she was and what she was doing. As a matter of fact, there would have been no pool fence jumping, no drug use, no fights among the kids, if they had parents that gave a damn about what their minor children were doing.
Don’t blame the cop because that girl is a young delinquent. Blame her parents.
@retire05, #11:
You haven’t got any more of a clue about the girl’s parents than I do. Nor do you know any more about supposed drug use and fights than the allegations you’ve read in Breitbart and other right wing news outlets.
What I saw on the video was a cop behaving irresponsibly and dangerously. That seems to be the police department’s own assessment of the situation. The fact that there might have been an entirely legitimate reason for them to appear on the scene isn’t the issue.
The pool party backstory: Texas teen who shot pool party video says cop was ‘going crazy’. It was a social media situation. People had invited friends to come using Twitter. Too many showed up. That doesn’t mean they were delinquents. The kid who shot the video has sized things up well enough, and he’s only 15.
@Greg:
Here’s what I do know:
there were at least 100 kids there that should not have been as they did not live in the subdivision or were invited by a resident of that subdivision
the residents who were legally at the pool claim that the kids were doing drugs, being rude and abusive toward residents, scaring young children and getting into fights
the “pool party” was promoted on Twitter by not only the girl who hired the DJ, but the DJ himself. The girl and her mother set up on the common grounds, not a place for use by those who do not get HOA permission
the girl the cop “manhandled” is 14. Do you see her parents anywhere?
Sure it is. It shows that there are kids that are out of control and that is because they don’t have parental supervision. Make all the excuses you want (that’s what you left wingers do when there is unacceptable behavior on the part of one minority or another) but those kids had no right to be there and should have been charged with trespassing.
Are you under the impression that 14-year-old children these days are all under 24-hour parental supervision? Parents sometimes have jobs that continue even when their kids are out of school during the summer.
What would the cop have done if her parents had been there? Do you suppose they would have objected to seeing their daughter being treated in such a way?