Or America’s embattled guardians will lower their shields.
Those who guard America are under fire from all directions. From police officers to CIA agents, the brave men and women who keep this country and its people safe are enduring withering criticism, disrespect, and suspicion. As their morale crashes through the floor, don’t be surprised when domestic and national security suffer.
Most police officers are tough people. But it must hurt to hear protesters repeatedly chant: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” This repulsive battle cry was captured on video as a large group marched in Manhattan on December 13.
Meanwhile, demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge brutalized NYPD officers that evening, breaking the nose of one of them. Police say that Baruch College poetry professor Eric “F*** the Police” Linsker tried to throw a heavy garbage can from the bridge onto cops below. After Linsker fled, officers discovered three hammers and a black ski mask in his abandoned backpack. Police arrested him the next day.
Placards at these gatherings denounce “Racist killer cops.” New York mayor Bill de Blasio echoed this theme when he discussed his biracial son. “I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face” because of possibly prejudiced NYPD officers. De Blasio further stoked the ethnic fires by saying, “We are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day.”
Gotham’s cops are enraged by such remarks and the sense that de Blasio has run the NYPD over with a squad car. Some even have signed individual requests that de Blasio “refrain from attending my funeral services in the event that I am killed in the line of duty.”
These and other insults by agitators and politicians — as well as the Justice Department’s racial “de-biasing” training of police in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, and elsewhere — are sending cops a clear message: Back off.
And back off they will.
Rather than practice the robust “broken windows” policing that prevents crime, beleaguered cops will think thrice before confronting people, especially black men, who jump subway turnstiles, spray graffiti, or snatch purses.
Once police officers return to the pre-Giuliani practice of observing smaller offenses and leaving them unenforced, lawbreakers will advance to armed robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders. These crimes will not rattle the Sunset Strip, Lake Shore Drive, or Park Avenue. They will plague Compton, the South Side, and the Bronx.
Demonizing the police also will intimidate at least some law-abiding blacks into not reporting crimes. If they see something, they might not say something. Decent blacks increasingly will avoid looking like “snitches” who cooperate with the KKKops. This will make life easier for criminals in their midst.
Despite yelling “Black lives matter,” activists and anarchists alike will hinder the police and, ironically, boost the number of black citizens abused and killed by black hoodlums.
In a jaw-dropping article in the December 7 New York Post, Paul Sperry examines the Justice Department’s race-fueled, politically correct brainwashing of cops supposedly propelled by “unconscious bias.” Here’s what happened after these Seattle officers learned to identify and neutralize their alleged inner racists: “Since [Eric] Holder stepped in, crime is up 13 percent overall in Seattle,” Sperry wrote. “But it’s not just minor infractions. It’s the biggies — aggravated assaults up 14 percent, car theft up a whopping 44 percent, and murders up 21 percent.”
Similarly, Senate Democrats’ “torture” report has waterboarded the CIA’s morale. After September 11, intelligence officers hammered al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups, just as Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California demanded. Now these same Democrats claim that the CIA’s tough interrogations yielded nothing of value and were, as Feinstein now sobs, “a stain on our values and our history.”
Dismissed as useless sadists, and fearful that today’s honorable service will become tomorrow’s “serious and significant violations” (as Feinstein’s report claims), CIA officers will tread lightly in the War on Terror. Of course, Muslim radicals reject such self-restraint. ISIS recently beheaded four Iraqi Christian children for refusing to convert to Islam. The Taliban on Tuesday gunned down 132 Pakistani school children in Peshawar. Grinning terrorists burned one teacher alive and forced her students to watch.
Washington’s self-flagellation and blabbing of secrets also will discourage foreign officials from sharing intelligence and resources with America’s dangerously logorrheic government.
Cops and spies are not perfect, and rogues in their ranks should be corrected. But these broadsides against those who protect this country will jeopardize Americans at home and abroad.
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.