The first anniversary of one of the darkest days in NYPD history — the assassinations of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu — is two weeks away. To mark it, James Coll, a veteran detective with the department’s elite Emergency Service Unit and a history teacher at Hofstra University, writes for The Post about how rhetoric from groups such as Black Lives Matter has deadly consequences — and is still putting officers’ lives at risk.
“What do we want?” the crowd roared while marching in Manhattan last December. Without missing a beat, the protesters answered their own question: “Dead cops.”
Just days later and less than six miles away, the crowd got what it asked for. NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down Dec. 20 in Brooklyn for doing nothing more than being cops at a time when that was a costly and dangerous thing to be.
The rhetoric briefly cooled but soon began anew. On Aug. 28, the evening before a Black Lives Matter demonstration in St. Paul, Minn., Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth was killed pumping gas at a station in Texas by a man who shot him 15 times in the back. The murder didn’t stop participants from chanting, “Pigs in a blanket! Fry ’em like bacon!” the next day while a family grieved and a community searched for answers that never came.
I have been in law enforcement for nearly 20 years. Recent memory reminds me of a time not so long ago when our daily roll-call briefings included information about the threats to the communities we serve. Today, they are littered with threats against us.
All lives matter. But rhetoric matters, too. Or does it? The answer to the question depends on the speaker or, most importantly in contemporary politics, the agenda of the listener.
A select category of political leaders has been unable to make a connection between the caustic oratory of some in the Black Lives Matter movement and recent violence perpetuated against the police. These same individuals have had much less difficulty, however, equating irresponsible words with the death tolls that have followed in other instances where they gain a political advantage.
When US Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) blamed the triple-fatal shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Nov. 27 in Colorado on the “frenzy of hate and anger” in the “Republican Congress,” he was using a familiar tactic of the left.
Salon.com — in an article published in 2013 and titled “How the right plays with murder: The anti-abortion movement’s cycle of violence” — blamed the assaults and deaths that have occurred at abortion facilities squarely on the pro-life movement.
There have been countless other examples because the politics of uninformed rage is an easy tool to employ. Why put forward policy positions or debate a rival’s proposals when you can move your agenda forward by stirring up fear and anger instead?
Some call it unfair to blame the entire Black Lives Matter movement for the relative few who clutch their banner while calling for even more cop funerals. They miss the hypocrisy: There are police critics who paint all officers with the same broad brush. And they miss the point that ignoring the demagoguery has made hatred of the police acceptable to many and violence against officers appear necessary to some.
There is no dialogue about the police in America today. There is, however, no shortage of monologues. Most on either side of the debate want to talk, not listen, expressing more interest in telling what they think rather than hearing what someone else does.
The time is long overdue for a conversation. But who will lead it?
Leadership would reveal those who want a solution instead of continuously hearing from those who benefit from the divide. Rather than bringing two sides together, we are left with the tired, hollow figures who can do nothing more than mimic the failed voices we have already heard.
The conversation about police use of force in America today, when those who claim to want one pretend to actually engage in one, too often becomes an inkblot test: Same image, different conclusions.
How do we have a constructive dialogue when far too often the two sides can’t even agree on the hard truths before them? Facts can be dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as a lie that people desperately want to believe.
Cities have been applying a bandage with the hope that the wound will get better without medicine. Instead of having the discussion we desperately need to have, we keep putting it off as if a better time might present clearer perspectives.
Instead of waiting for the right circumstance or the right timing, we might want to start by considering exactly what we are saying in the often shallow and sometimes dangerous substance of our rhetoric.