Abolitionist Claim: Police Reform is Necessary Due to a Lack of Officers Being Charged in Officer Involved Shootings
Top cops need to stop associating with politicians and organizations who lie to further police abolition campaigns.
There’s always room for improvement. This is true of every discipline including policing, education, engineering, governing and healthcare. If we are sincerely concerned with morbidity and mortality, we would prioritize the healthcare system. As far as unnecessary deaths, everything else pales in comparison.
The Focus on Officer Involved Shootings
Liberal and leftist mainstream media sources are very concerned about the lack of police prosecutions. This is a key argument in every wire service article and virtually every op-ed that challenges the philosophies of policing. What should be great news is twisted into a falsehood that questions the integrity of the entire profession. What they describe as troubling and problematic should be cause for a celebration.
The NAACP discusses in their fact sheet that it is exceptional that following a year where 1,025 people are shot and killed by the police in a year, that “since 2005, only 98 non-federal law enforcement officers have been arrested in connection with fatal, on-duty shootings. To date, only 35 of these officers have been convicted of a crime, often a lesser offense such as manslaughter or negligent homicide, rather than murder.”
When Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of We the Protesters, Mapping Police Violence and previously Campaign Zero, gave his (audience free, literally called Unseen) TEDx talk, a lynchpin in his short form lecture was how few on-duty officers were charged with murder, or any similar charge when an officer involved shooting death occurs.
Topsy Turvy Logic
This logical fallacy keeps being presented as proof.
A lack of evidence of wrongdoing, is proof of a crime?
White police shooting deaths perennially surpass black shooting deaths in officer involved deadly force encounters. Percentage-wise, blacks die at a higher rate than whites when measured against population data, but that is the most misleading method of determining outcomes. When compared to crime rate statistical models, including the National Crime Victimization Survey, black offender officer involved deaths correlate to the crime rate, and most years, slightly lower.
The loudest black voices segregate their complaints of perceived officer shooting injustice to black lives. It is reasonable to assume, considering the lack of outcry, there is either the presumption that a white life lost either was a justified shooting or the white criminal shot had committed a crime so heinous that justice in that death is well deserved regardless of whether the officer acted properly or not.
The One is Too Many Club
Despite the odds, and regardless of race, I’m a member of the ‘one is too many’ club. But life is truly a game of risk. The risk of being a black man being shot and killed by the police is 0.6:1,000,000 in the United States and hovering near zero if you are not committing a crime and disobeying police commands. When the nation of Honduras had the highest rate of homicides, the annual rate was 1:299. In other words, your chance as a black male in the United States of being both shot and killed by the police is statistically proven to be significantly lower than one in a million. Both white and black communities enhance their risk by adding factors of fleeing, resisting violently, fighting, assaulting officers, and attempting to murder officers.
Cops commit crimes and successful prosecutions should unite us
Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Aronberg mentioned at a meeting that he was the first prosecutor to get a murder conviction on a law enforcement officer in Florida in a three decades. I looked up the case and it was hardly a slam dunk. In 2015, the officer pulled up behind the stopped car on I-95 in Palm Beach Gardens in an unmarked car. The driver of the disabled vehicle, a CCW permit holder, drew his .380 pistol on the officer, and the officer shot and killed him. The deceased was a black male, and the officer was Muslim-American male. With Ben Crump representing the family of the decedent, the race card was played from the bottom of the deck, and the Palm Beach Gardens officer was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
My experience with corrupt or criminal cops has been rare but significant. One officer, whose reputation was so questionable other officers made a rhyme of his name that sounded like his dirty behavior. He substituted at an extra-duty job at a nightclub and molested a lady. He lost his job and was criminally convicted.
Another officer, responding to an officer involved shooting on the top floor of a parking garage, met the fleeing vehicle on the first floor, with gates closed and nowhere to go, and while experiencing no threat or reason to fear for his life, lit the car up with about 20 rounds from his patrol rifle. Fortunately for the officer and the suspect, no one was hurt despite being less than 15 yards away. He lost his career and was convicted.
The key takeaway: fellow cops recognize dirty and incompetent cops and want nothing to do with them.
The murder of Walter Scott on April 4, 2015, by North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager, and his subsequent conviction, should be the moment of unity and consensus between the ‘Defund the Police’ activists and the law enforcement community.
Unfortunately, it is not. It is a moment where the system worked but it is considered by the police abolitionists to be the single war crime uncovered serendipitously by a nearby iPhone user and proof of a greater mechanization of corruption in law enforcement agencies. The assertion is that without the cell phone video, this would have been just another justified killing of a black man by a white police officer. That argument fails to recognize that OIS investigations are intense and thorough and most often conducted by an outside agency. It also discounts the fact that law enforcement has solved and continues to solve murders without the benefit of video for decades.
The police abolitionists and police replacement movement despise how effectively the ‘system’ brought justice for Walter Scott and his family. The murderer is behind bars for decades. Scott is never mentioned as martyr of the ‘ending police violence’ movement. His story is omitted and cancelled by race hustlers who move on to greener fields.
The true enemies of law enforcement are the police abolitionists who pretend to advocate for reform. They make noise and complain about mistreatment and unequal justice. When police leadership associate themselves with activists and organizers to ‘have a conversation’ they have failed the most basic principle of diplomacy. No conversation can take place without ground rules and concessions in writing.
NYC Council Speaker Adrianne Adams this week issued a statement regarding the finding that an officer involved shooting from years ago resulted in no discipline to cops involved. She is insisting that the police commissioner hold the officers accountable for misconduct. Speaker Adams does not allow her position as a police abolitionist and defund advocate to be any secret. She and the public advocate have an agenda, currently on hold, to demand (in some cases illegally) documentation of all non-criminal contacts officers have with the public, to essentially make the job nearly impossible. But we are going to see her, Mayor Adams and the Commissioner Caban at public events during the upcoming seasons. And this isn’t just happening in New York City but around the country.
If you betray Gen Z officers, you’ll lose them
Our serving cops deserve better. Our new officers won’t tolerate these circumstances and will find another career where overtime is optional. The time has come and it is vital that courageous police leaders put abolitionists and police replacement advocates last and let their officers know that they come first!
Please keep all of our officers in your prayers.
References:
https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet
https://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-officer-nouman-raja-sentenced-25-years-killing/story?id=62626285
https://nypost.com/2020/12/08/video-shows-fatal-police-shooting-of-kawaski-trawick/