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In an otherwise straightforward piece about Loretta Lynch titled, Nominee’s Past Offers Insight On Race Issues, Pulitzer Prize winner Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times writes:
She would be taking over the Justice Department just as it has begun a nationwide effort to improve police relations in minority neighborhoods in the aftermath of violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer.
But her remarks could put her at odds with some law enforcement groups, who say the Obama administration has unfairly tarnished police officers in its comments about the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Cops sticking up for cops is nothing new, but blaming the President for "tarnishing" their reputation is not something I'm used to seeing, and it's the sort of escapist flight-of-fancy that speaks volumes about cops today. There are no doubt hundreds of thousands of good cops in our streets and communities, but there are countless rotten ones too who pillage and murder and often get away with it or
get rich quick doing so. When the good cops and good police unions are unwilling to stand with their communities against the
bad cops and their defenders, all cops lose their credibility and our trust. Don't blame Obama for doing something you've done to yourselves. Obama's not the one
arresting black men for walking with their hands in their pockets, or
shooting twenty-three year-old fathers in the back on train station platforms, or
firing bullets into defenseless twelve year-old boys at playgrounds within seconds of arriving, or
choking gentle giant forty-somethings with heart conditions on sidewalks. Cowards.
Obama's not the one macing young college students in the face for standing up to corporations, or bringing riot gear and military tanks and combat-zone weapons of war to neighborhoods falling apart with pain. It's police unions and their precincts and their macho mayors who are doing that, treating our communities like Cold War theaters worthy of a police arms race.
People in cities across the country aren't protesting due to urban myths created by Obama; they do so because so many cops brutalize, repress, and criminalize them that they don't feel safe around the very people tasked with the legal power of life and death and the duty to serve. It isn't fair, it isn't imaginary, and it most certainly isn't Obama's fault.
The article continues:
“Whatever has happened in America to cause these feelings of resentment, it’s not a failure of law enforcement,” Jeff Roorda, the business manager of the St. Louis Police Officers Association told CBS on Monday. He added that the police should not be asked to change tactics to address larger societal problems. “It’s decades of racial disparity, and economic disparity. It’s not a problem with the police.”
It's not a problem with the police?
It's not a problem with the police? Old men hold signs with the words, "Stop killing us" precisely because of a problem meted out by the police. American police kill people--black people and poor people especially--67 times more often than the runner-up, Australia. The question,
Why Do U.S. Police Kill So Many People? isn't one asked by posh business magazines because there's nothing better to ask. The FBI estimates that 400-500 people per year are killed by police. FiveThirtyEight estimates the real number to be
1,000 people annually. To put that in perspective,
more Americans have been killed by police than American soldiers killed in Iraq in the same amount of time.
A thousand Americans each year. Not at the hands of racial disparity, or economic disparity, or Obama, but at the hands of the very people Loretta Lynch said many Americans fear:
When people say they fear the police, as bad as that is, they are also expressing an underlying fear, that when they are confronted with the criminal element in our society, they will have no one to call upon to protect them. And that feeling of vulnerability and utter helplessness is the worst feeling that we can inflict upon fellow members of our society.”
Loretty Lynch didn't say those words last week after the Ferguson verdict.
She said those words fourteen years ago. That her words are even truer today than they were at the turn of the 21st century tells you everything you need to know about the real source of the tarnish.