Dallas and the Slander Against America's Police
Matthew Hennessey
July 8, 2016
Last night, in Dallas, 11 police officers were shot by a sniper team in the heart of the city following what the media has described as a peaceful protest against police brutality. So far, five of the officers have died and seven others are hospitalized. The massacre in Dallas seems like a new front in what Heather Mac Donald has dubbed the war on cops—this time, a shooting war. A group called The Black Power Political Organization has taken credit for the assassinations on Facebook and promised more to come. It’s not clear whether these claims are legitimate.
With three years of persistent slander directed against the nation’s cops, murderous violence such as occurred on the streets of Dallas last night was all but inevitable. A similar spasm of anti-cop rhetoric around Christmas 2014 resulted in the killing of two NYPD officers as they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street. The anti-cop rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, of course, hasn’t developed in a vacuum. Widely circulated videos of black men being killed by cops have turned up the heat, and BLM has delighted in fanning the flames. Many of our elected leaders have joined in, all but accusing the nation’s police of preying on people of color. Obama himself weighed in this week, as he so often does, before all the facts on these deadly incidents have come in. “[T]hese fatal shootings are not isolated incidents,” he said. “They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.” As has often been the case during his presidency, Obama’s measured and reasonable tone obscures his radical claims—the cops are racist, and everybody knows it.
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