Have you noticed how, no matter how many ways the Left hobbles police departments, they still manage to come up with new, more destructive ways of doing it?
First, they created all these oversight commissariats to stymie cops from doing their jobs, by subjecting them to never-ending scrutiny, irrational bureaucracy and unattainable mandates. (cf. Robert Warshaw) They can’t defend themselves if they’re attacked, at the risk of losing their jobs. They can’t pursue violent criminals who try to escape in their cars. They can’t arrest people, like shoplifters, who are caught red-handed stealing stuff. They can’t use physical force against violent perps, and if they do, they’ll be sued civilly. They get criticized for using surveillance cameras and license plate readers. If a perp says a cop was disrespectful, there will be an internal investigation, with the cop put on administrative leave. And, of course, the disreputable cop-hater, Pamela Price, looms over them constantly, like a hungry vulture. All this results in under-policing. “Officers are more timid now,” says Chuck Canterbury, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police. “They’re not scared to do their job. They’re scared of being prosecuted for a false narrative.”
Now, the anti-cop brigade is agitating for an end to inaccurately-named “pretext stops.” Those are instances where cops stop a car for some infraction, like not having a license plate or brake light, or driving erratically (like on the sidewalk, or the wrong way on a freeway). Those things are illegal, of course, so cops have every right and a duty to stop such drivers. But the anti-cop brigade is spreading the falsehood that these stops are “pretext” stops, meaning that cops aren’t stopping the cars for, say, weaving in and out of traffic, but only because they’re driven by Black people. And this, according to the anti-cop brigade, is the essence of racism.
The anti-cop brigade hauls out their favorite weapon, statistical disparities, to prove their allegation. Last Sunday’s op-ed in the S.F. Chronicle provides a good example: “Black people are stopped at nearly seven times the rate as White people, searched at almost 11 times more and subjected to use of force at more than 12 times the rate.” As I have pointed out more times than I care to remember, no context is ever provided by the anti-cop brigade for these allegedly disparate numbers. What if Black people resist being stopped at 12 times the rate of White people? What if Black drivers are seven times more likely than White people to drive suspiciously, especially in high-crime areas like Fruitvale and West Oakland? If that’s the case, then the disparity in stops makes sense—which is why the anti-cop brigade never bothers to provide the context of such stops. They don’t want context; they want to reinforce anti-cop hysteria among leftist activists.
So, to prove we’re not racists, I guess we now have to stop cops from stopping suspicious drivers. Is there anything else we can do to stop cops from fighting/preventing crime? Maybe we can disarm them entirely; after all, police in the United Kingdom are, for the most part, unarmed. But then, so is the general public.
I’m sure that de-arming OPD would please the anti-cop brigade immensely. Cat Brooks would love to take guns away from the police, thereby ensuring that only the criminals she represents are permitted to own them. After all, she wants to abolish the police entirely—not just stymie them, not just make it impossible for them to enforce public safety, not just take their guns away, but actually fire all cops! Why? “Policing as an institution does not work for communities of color across the country,” she alleges.
I would rephrase that slightly: “Policing does not work for people who break the law.” Of course it doesn’t, nor do we want it to. We want police to work for us, the law-abiding citizens of America, not for criminals. If police are bad for criminals, then we want more police—and we want them to have all the tools they need to fight and prevent crime. This assertion is shared across all demographic groups in Oakland. The one exception is, of course, the anti-cop brigade, and their enablers in the woke media.
Steve Heimoff