Pat Buchanan: What the War on Cops Has Wrought

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?”

That was one of the chants of anti-police protesters in New York City. Another was, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!”

Well, the marchers got their wish Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant when Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, firing into a patrol car, murdered NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

The two were executed by this criminal who had just shot his girlfriend outside Baltimore and used social media to say he was going to Brooklyn to take revenge for Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” said Patrick Lynch of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, “That blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor.”

Echoed Ed Mullins of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, “The blood of 2 executed police officers is on the hands of Mayor de Blasio.”

Ex-Governor George Pataki called the murders “a predictable outcome of the divisive anti-cop rhetoric” of Bill de Blasio and Eric Holder.

When de Blasio arrived at Woodhull Hospital where Ramos and Liu had been taken, scores of cops turned their backs.

Rudy Giuliani dissents. “The blood is not on his hands. … That’s an incorrect and incendiary charge.” But, adds Rudy, “The protesters should not have been allowed to take over streets the way they did.”

Indeed, they should not. And here is where the moral culpability of de Blasio, Holder, Al Sharpton and President Obama lies. They gave aid and comfort to the cop-haters and cop-baiters.

When did any of these four speak up or speak out to denounce the blocking of squares, highways, bridges, tunnels, shops and stores, from New York to the Mall of America?

When did they denounce the protesters for their hateful anti-police rhetoric? When did they demand that these mobs go home and respect the rule of law and decisions of the grand jury, even if they disagreed?

When a Staten Island grand jury voted not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, the mayor did not urge the city to accept it calmly, but expressed astonishment, called it a “very painful day for so many New Yorkers,” and said he had warned his biracial son to be especially careful dealing with cops.

De Blasio was feeding the myth that cops, especially white cops, are what young black males should fear most.

That myth is a big lie.

After the shooting death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, Holder flew to St. Louis, decried racism, which had nothing to do with the shooting, ordered the FBI to conduct it’s own investigation, and declared, “I am the Attorney General … but I am also a black man.”

When a St. Louis County grand jury concluded no crime had been committed in Ferguson, that Wilson acted in self-defense, Holder said his department would look at charging Wilson with violating Brown’s civil rights.

In an increasingly ugly national clash between police and black communities, Holder did not stand squarely for the rule of law; he and the president took sides against the cops and stood with their own.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” said Obama, flashing a signal of racial solidarity in a blazing issue dividing his country and in which his allies, Revs. Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, were stirring up crowds with incendiary rhetoric.

The Wall Street Journal writes today, “Especially in urban America, the police walk that line between civilization and mayhem every day.” Others say that the thin blue line stands between us and anarchy.

True. But what does it say about our country that, if the police took a week off, our cities would descend into mayhem. What does it say about the character of the people upon whom our democracy depends? Would the America of the Founding Fathers have descended into mayhem or anarchy if police were not a huge and visible presence? Would the America of the 1940s or 1950s?

In D.C. last week, an exasperated Police Chief Cathy Lanier said:

“All of these protests that are blocking traffic, it’s pulling police officers out of the neighborhoods that need the police the most. … So how do I prevent homicides and shootings and violent crimes and robberies and burglaries right before the holidays if all my cops are directing traffic around 30 guys that want to be out there at 11 o’clock at night laying in the middle of Chinatown?”

Consider the chief’s statement. Is it police brutality or police violence that worries her? Are cops committing those homicides, shootings, violent crimes, robberies and burglaries? Or does that crime come out of the poor neighborhoods the cops are trying to protect?

That’s the real D.C. That’s the real America. Unfortunately, de Blasio, Sharpton, Holder and Obama are either too blind to see it or will not concede it because they fear speaking truth to their followers. “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.”