Cop Under Fire

by David Clarke

  Lesson 3. Bad laws make the cops look bad. When police officers were enforcing the pedestrian ordinance in Ferguson, reporters and pundits quipped that apparently “walking the street in Ferguson” is a big crime now. Although it is a shame that Michael Brown ended up dead, just about every city in America has a pedestrian ordinance for a reason. The streets were made for cars; drivers shouldn’t have to dodge pedestrian traffic.

  But even if the pedestrian ordinances were too strict, the cops didn’t pass them. If citizens don’t like a law, they can go to the city council and say, “Rescind this ordinance.” They can pass around petitions and write editorials in the local newspaper. That, however, is not the job of police officers. They are told to enforce the laws with sound judgment and discretion. They enforce the laws even when the laws aren’t good.

  This applies to Eric Garner in a very specific and tragic way. Remember, police stopped him for the very trivial crime of selling “loosies” (untaxed cigarettes) out of their packages. Usually they go for seventy-five cents per cigarette, or two for a dollar, but what created the very high demand for loosies? The smuggled cigarette trade is growing exponentially in New York City because there’s a lot of money to be made and saved.

  In the state of Virginia, cigarettes are taxed at around $0.30 per pack. In New York City, they’re taxed at $5.85. Instead of the market setting the price for a pack, a law on the books sets a minimum price for a pack of premium-brand cigarettes in New York at $10.50. Oh, and the law prohibits coupons from moving the price below that price tag. Most packs even out at $12.50. People who smoke a pack a day can save a couple hundred dollars per month by purchasing out-of-state cigarettes. Plus, it’s not illegal to have a couple of cartons of out-of-state cigarettes. It’s just illegal to sell them in the city. That means there’s a lot of temptation to buy untaxed cigarettes, and a lot of incentive to sell them. This creates an endless game of whack-a-mole for local authorities trying to keep up with the ever-changing set of rules.6 It’s no secret that up to 60 percent of cigarettes sold in the five boroughs are done so illegally.

  Eric Garner died while taking advantage of the large demand for untaxed cigarettes. I think the triviality of that crime hit many Americans hard. All he was doing was selling cigarettes. Why couldn’t the cops just leave him alone?

  Because it’s not the cops’ duty to decide which laws to enforce.

  Jack Dunphy, writing for National Review, put it best: “It’s unfortunate that NYPD officers have been pressed into service as enforcers for the nanny state that New York City has become, but don’t put a law on the books if you don’t want the cops to enforce it, and don’t ask them to enforce it if you’re not willing to accept the fact that violence will sometimes occur when people resist that enforcement.”7

  Bill de Blasio should think about this before he insinuates that police departments are cesspools of racism, especially since the very laws he’s shoving down the throats of New Yorkers contributed more to Eric Garner’s death than that so-called choke hold.

  7

  Black Lives Matter Less to BLM than Lies & Leftist Politics

  AS I WROTE IN CHAPTER 3, Alica Garza was one of the founders of Black LIES Matter, but I think it would be insightful to look at that story more closely. On the night George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing of Trayvon Martin, Garza was drinking with her husband at an Oakland, California, bar.

  “The whole bar went quiet,” she told California Sunday magazine. “It felt like a gut punch, you know?”

  She then went to Facebook to express her frustration. She posted a long “love letter to black people,” which ended with “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

  Her friend Patrisse Cullors saw the post and started using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter under her own posts. The two friends then brought on Opal Tometi, and together, the three of them began the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with the hashtag moving beyond their circle of friends and starting to be used by a broader audience. It didn’t become a movement until after Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson. Over the next few weeks, the slogan trended on social media nationally, uniting many Americans concerned over racial strife.

  And you know the rest of the story. #BlackLivesMatter has been described as the most successful social media turned real-life movement in history. I guess that depends on your definition of successful.

  Garza, Cullors, and Tometi were upset with the verdict in the Martin case, but why would we listen to their outrage instead of the six women jurors who heard all of the evidence and deliberated more than fifteen hours? Suffice it to say that being angry doesn’t mean the snap legal assessment you made while sipping tequila in an Oakland bar is legally accurate. Eventually, the jurors decided Zimmerman was justified in his use of deadly force against Trayvon, which they described as “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm” to himself.

  In the Michael Brown case, a grand jury heard testimony of forty eyewitnesses and then refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson. Turns out, many witnesses had been afraid to come forward with what they saw because the community was so angry. In the calmer courtroom, they were able to fully describe the events that transpired. The jurors also got to hear from forensic experts who showed that Brown wasn’t shot as he was surrendering with his hands up. The DNA bloodstain evidence and witnesses’ accounts didn’t support the entire #HandsUpDontShoot mantra.

  Wilson was exonerated of criminal wrongdoing later when the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released an extensive analysis of the shooting’s ballistic, crime-scene, and eyewitness accounts. Investigators even went to the trouble of canvassing an additional three hundred homes in the neighborhood, trying to locate and interview more witnesses. Ultimately, the DOJ cleared the officer of violating Brown’s civil rights, and—once again—deduced that his use of force was defensible. Eric H. Holder described the report as “fair and rigorous from the start.” He said, “The facts do not support the filing of criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in this case.” Perhaps anticipating the inevitable protests, he told doubters, “I urge you to read this report in full.”1

  I tell you the story of the origins of the movement because I want you to see how Martin’s and Brown’s deaths catalyzed it, especially now that we know what we know about how those court proceedings turned out.

  So how did this exoneration affect Officer Wilson? Did America embrace him with open arms? Did Black LIES Matter condemn all of the racist, vile threats against him? Not quite. Racial tension and violent threats followed him no matter where he went. Some police-supporting Americans raised money for the officer so that he could pay his legal bills and buy a house on a dead-end street outside St. Louis, but he didn’t put his name on the deed. Now he so fears for his safety that most of his friends don’t know where he lives. When his wife got pregnant, people threatened to harm his unborn baby. She didn’t check into the hospital under her own name when it was time to deliver the baby. Plus, Wilson is basically unemployable. The Ferguson Police Department told him that allowing him back on the force would endanger their current officers. Other police departments told him the same thing. With no other options, he resorted to selling boots at a retail store. But soon enough, reporters found him. After they kept calling the store, he left the job after only two weeks.2

  It’s sobering for people who wear the uniform to see Officer Wilson’s life now. Here’s a guy who had committed himself to serving the poorest communities, broke no laws, and was exonerated of all wrongdoing. Yet his life has been forever marred by an interaction that lasted less than two minutes. Remember when America wasn’t led by mob rule or emotional rhetoric, but by the rule of law?

  Here’s the truth. Police aren’t afraid of walking the streets or being shot by random criminals. They’re afraid of being involved in an incident that would label them forever as trigger-happy racists. Wouldn’t it be nice if police officers were judged not by social media and ham-fisted politicians, but by
the laws they try so hard to enforce?

  Black LIES Matter is not your grandfather’s civil rights movement. It’s the illegitimate child of these debunked racial incidents and the spawn of radical leftist activists. The founders of this movement have more in common with David Duke than Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, I mean that.

  The organization is based on radical ideology and run by radical ideologues. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi were activists long before they took advantage of racial strife to propel themselves onto the national stage. Let’s first take a look at the founders.

  Garza is a queer woman who met and married a biracial transgendered man. (I’m too old school to understand how that works, so don’t ask me.) Garza met Cullors on a dance floor in Rhode Island when they were attending a political “organizing” conference. Cullors came out of the closet when she was a teenager.

  I point out their sexuality not because gay or transpeople can’t have good ideas. Rather, I believe their radical ideology goes much deeper than seeking so-called justice for black Americans. These women are not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill people who are sick and tired of the way the world is. They’re radical activists who hold values that most Americans don’t share—that most black Americans don’t share. It should come as no surprise to you that they are opposed to the nuclear family. Instead, they propose raising children through a black “village.”

  From the Black LIES Matter website:

  We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.3

  Note that they don’t mention “fathers” in that utopian village. Only “mothers” and “parents” exist in their fantasy.

  But wait, wasn’t this whole thing based on outrage over the deaths of black men? Martin and Brown? Haven’t they accused the American police officer of devaluing the lives of black men? Then, why are black men so marginalized on their website and in their visions for a better nation?

  Because celebrating, promoting, and valuing the black lives of men were never their goal. Their goal is to spread radical leftist racism and hatred. The founders were involved in radical political activism long before Black LIES Matter. Garza was a political activist for “fair housing,” “transgendered rights,” and other leftist causes. She openly admires Marxist revolutionary Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and convicted cop killer.4 (In 1979, she escaped to Cuba with the help of the Black Liberation Army and radical Weather Underground Organization.)

  Cullors promotes “social justice” in inner cities, fights incarceration, and engages in LBGTQ activism. She calls herself a “freedom fighter” and wants to so radically reduce the law enforcement budget that some departments would be entirely “disbanded or abolished.”5

  Tometi is a student of black liberation theology and an immigration activist who has said that “the racist structures that have long oppressed Black people” propagate a “cycle of oppression [that] is often ignored or dismissed by broader US society” and that “allows law enforcement to kill Black people at nearly the same rate as Jim Crow lynchings.”6

  It should surprise exactly no one that the founders’ radicalism is also the cornerstone of the movement. This was most obvious when a group of sixty Black LIES Matter organizations served Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—the two presidential candidates in 2016—a list of demands.

  They demanded that the government should:

  1. Get Rid of the Death Penalty

  Their website, “The Movement for Black Lives,” described this demand:

  The death penalty is morally repugnant. The death penalty in the U.S. was designed to bring lynching into the courtroom and has targeted Blacks and other people of color and poor people throughout its history. The death penalty devalues Black lives—statistically those convicted of killing white people are at least three to four times more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of anyone else. The death penalty is also geographically discriminatory (about 1 percent of U.S. counties produce more than half of the death sentences), expensive (even more costly than life in prison without parole), and has resulted in innocent people being sentenced to death (156 people and counting are confirmed to date) and some even executed. It is randomly and arbitrarily sought by prosecutors who have the sole discretion to seek or not seek death, upwards of 95 percent of whom are white. The death penalty requires a high level of counsel, skill and resources not available to most defendants. We do not believe the death penalty was designed to be fair nor can it be fairly applied.7

  2. Offer Free College Tuition and Living Expenses to Blacks

  “The Movement for Black Lives” described why this is fair:

  Reparations for the systemic denial of access to high quality educational opportunities in the form of full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education including: free access and open admissions to public community colleges and universities, technical education (technology, trade and agricultural), educational support programs, retroactive forgiveness of student loans, and support for lifetime learning programs.8

  3. Pass Legislation to Acknowledge the Systemic Effects of Slavery

  Slavery ended in 1865. The Jim Crow laws ended separate but equal discrimination with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an act possible only by support of the majority of Republicans in Congress as President Lyndon Johnson had to contend with the majority of Democrats trying to defeat it. Remember that most of the members of Black LIES Matter movement weren’t born in the 1960s, let alone the 1860s. They haven’t experienced the harsh racism that pervaded the culture in real ways in either era.

  These activists have no real grievance with our nation, but it didn’t stop them from asking for this:

  Legislation at the federal and state level that requires the United States to acknowledge the lasting impacts of slavery, establish and execute a plan to address those impacts. This includes the immediate passage of H. R. 40, the “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act” or subsequent versions which call for reparations remedies.9

  Nothing more than a movement of extortion. They want something they did not earn.

  4. Give Black People Education Initiatives

  The cradle-to-college pipeline has been systematically cut off for Black communities. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 23 states spend more per pupil in affluent districts than in high-poverty districts that contain a high concentrations of Black students; and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights shows persistent and glaring opportunity gaps and racial inequities for Black students. Black students are less likely to attend schools that offer advanced coursework, less likely to be placed in gifted and talented programs, more likely to attend schools with less qualified educators, and employ law enforcement officers but no counselors. Public universities, colleges, and technical education remain out of reach for most in the United States and policies to help students cover costs continue to shift towards benefiting more affluent families.10

  5. Provide Free Mental Health Counseling

  That’s not all. The Black LIES Matter crowd believes that it is so hard to live in America that they need counseling to deal with their day-today trauma:

  Reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized capitalism in the form of corporate and government reparations focused on healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land.

  Reparations for the cultural and educational exploitation, erasure, and extraction of our communities in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, an
d social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs.11

  Their reparation demands also point out that Chicago passed legislation providing “free city college tuition and job training to victims [of police torture], their immediate family members and their grandchildren; and funded psychological, family, substance abuse, and other counseling services to victims and their immediate family members.”

  You can see how Black LIES Matter is now just a propaganda and get-out-the-vote arm of the Democratic Party. I know the Democratic Party did not found the group, but don’t you know those political “leaders” are looking at this as an opportunity to enrage and energize black people to come out and vote. Their ultimate goal is to try to extract perks from the government that they haven’t earned. They want political power, money, and other coddling by the nanny state, and they’re trying to do it by force, threats, rioting, and other tawdry tactics.

  Here’s the truth. Black LIES Matters is nothing more than an AstroTurf operation, a shallowly disguised confederation of community organizers and leftists who specialize in fostering rebellion in ghettos and other struggling areas throughout the United States of America.

  It doesn’t care any more about the lives of black people than the Ku Klux Klan does. Want proof? Turn the page. But only if you have the guts to read the truth.

  8

  A Hate Group’s Battle Cry: #BlackLivesMatter

  IN MAY 1999, a fifty-five-year-old black man named Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was driving a stolen Ford Explorer around the outskirts of Atlanta when he was stopped by police. The officers approached his vehicle, but he flashed a police badge from a small town in Alabama. They let him go but soon realized they’d been had. Because Al-Amin’s badge wasn’t authentic, he was later indicted on charges of driving without proof of insurance, theft, and impersonating an officer.