The War on Local Police
Pushing the idea that police departments are venues for systemic racism, radicals are aiming to nationalize police as a step in the process to make our country socialist.
By C. Mitchell Shaw
The past few months since the death of George Floyd while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police have seen increased anti-police sentiment across the United States. As of July 22, ABC reported, police killings were up 28 percent over last year. Hundreds of officers have been seriously injured by rioters attacking them with clubs, cars, frozen water bottles, fireworks, incendiary devices, bricks, sticks, and more. In Minneapolis, nearly 200 officers, out of 850 officers, have filed paperwork to leave the department, with many claiming post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of repeated 12-hour days of having thugs attack them, and not being able to properly respond because they had nearly no support from elected officials or high-ranking police commanders.
Anti-police sentiment has gone hand-in-hand with violent rioting, looting, destruction of property, a rising death toll including civilians, and calls for defunding, disarming, and disbanding police departments. And while the riots have been consistently described by liberal media and politicians as spontaneous, grassroots responses to systemic police violence and abuse, the reality is that they are part of a deliberate plan to reshape America by force and fear.
Law-enforcement officers have a tough job. On the best of days, the job can be draining and challenging. On the worst of days, it can seem overwhelming. The thin blue line is sometimes thin indeed. The portrayal — by the mainstream media and militant groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter — of law enforcement as an arm of an oppressive, evil, racist system only makes that tough job even tougher. And that is deliberate. (Read more about Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and their goals, in the articles on pages 35 and 40.) The war on local police is a war on America. And though it is now coming to a head, it has been being waged for decades.
But before addressing the anti-police players (and their plays), it seems worthwhile to examine the target of their ire: the men and women in blue who daily risk life and limb to serve and protect.
Vilifying and Dismantling Law Enforcement
This writer has personally known dozens of police officers and sheriff’s deputies throughout his lifetime. Like every other group, while it is true that some in law enforcement may be malicious jerks, the vast majority of them are good, decent men and women who discharge their duties with honor and integrity. I have never personally met a cop who abused his or her power. For the September 21, 2015, issue of The New American — a Special Report on police — this writer profiled five law-enforcement officers from across the country. The article comprising those profiles contains stories of bravery, honor, integrity, kindness, and courtesy.
In that article, I wrote of one officer and his perspective of being a police officer:
Officer Ben Sauriol, who has been at Winneconne [Wisconsin] for 12 of his 15 years in law enforcement, says officers in his area often know as friends and neighbors the people they interact with professionally. They see these people during work hours and during the rest of the week. They go to church with them. They see them at the grocery store. Their kids go to school together. It is important to maintain that “neighborliness” both for the job’s sake and for the community’s sake.
The claim that police as a group are racist is so patently untrue that it is astounding that anyone believes it, let alone condones rioting and violence based on the claim. Even as the anti-police protests and riots continue, we regularly find stories destroying the narrative: An officer in Los Angeles saved a black 11-month-old boy from choking to death at a Black Lives Matter protest; officers put out the flames on a rioter who was set on fire by another rioter’s misdirected Molotov cocktail; most minority citizens, including Hispanics and blacks, say they want more police in their neighborhoods, not less; a poor, out-of-work black woman donated prize money to an injured officer because in the past officers had been so kind to her; multiple Miami-Dade police officers risked their lives to save a dark-skinned teen from committing suicide by jumping from an overpass into oncoming traffic; and many more.
Possibly more revealing as evidence that cops are, by and large, not racist are the facts showing the absurdity of the claim that the greatest danger to a young black man is a police officer. As I indicated in a September 2016 article entitled “Making Black Lives Matter,” crime statistics by University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson showed that as of 2012 (the last year for which those statistics were then available), black men killed other black men at a rate 40 times greater than police officers killed black men. Between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2012, an average of 4,472 black men were killed by other black men every year. (Using the Left’s logic, this means blacks hate other blacks and are racist against them.) In that same time frame, an average of 112 black men were killed by police officers — the vast majority of whom were shot while perpetrating violence against an officer or someone else.
And those numbers have not changed for the better in the ensuing years. In June of this year, Heather Mac Donald — author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe — addressed up-to-date crime statistics in an interview with Tucker Carlson of FOX News. She said that “a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be murdered by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be murdered by a cop.” In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Mac Donald wrote that the Washington Post’s database on police shootings shows that “police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019.” And those numbers are “down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015.” In total, as Mac Donald points out in the brief PragerU video entitled “Police Go Where the Crime Is,” in 2019, police killed 235 blacks, out of a total 1,004 police shootings — an astoundingly low total, considering there are 27 deadly-weapons attacks on police per day, nearly 10,000 per year.
And, if anything, the facts show that police are more likely to shoot whites than blacks, though blacks commit more than half the murders in the country and most of the robberies, despite making up only about 13 percent of the population. And since the number of police shootings directly correlates with how often police interact with violent suspects, police do shoot more blacks per capita.
In contrast to left-wing anti-cop pronouncements, the data actually show that cops are a black man’s best friend if he doesn’t want to die. Consider the “Ferguson Effect,” named after the place where young black man Michael Brown was shot and killed while attacking a police officer, leading to riots. Mac Donald pointed out that in the wake of the onset of this effect — when police are hesitant to engage in proactive policing because they are afraid they will be scapegoated for some supposed injustice — “2,000 additional black males [have been since Ferguson] killed because cops backed off of policing.” The single greatest threat to the life of a healthy black man is another healthy black man. And police have been the ones to keep those black-on-black deaths from rising — until now.
As Mac Donald points out in the PragerU video, the main reason that it seems as if police inordinately target minorities for questioning and harassment is because police go where the crime is. For many years, New York City increased welfare spending in that city — as liberals are calling for now to deter black criminals, while also calling for police defunding — but crime rates did not go down. Only when police there began using data-driven policing, going where criminals were most often criminalizing innocent victims — which happened to be in mainly black neighborhoods (where there are mainly black crime victims) — did crime levels in New York drop.
Yet police are commonly vilified, especially in Democrat-controlled cities where mayors and police commissioners have for decades claimed that one of their main law-enforcement functions is focusing on social justice for minorities — ironic. The bad actions of a few rogue police officers have been dubbed typical of behavior of police as a group. Since many officers are minorities and women, such stereotyping cannot be labeled either racist or sexist, but it is definitely hateful, inaccurate, and intentionally negative — the same types of injustice the rioters claim to be against. An example of the blanket labeling is the trending graffiti and social-media hashtag “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bast*rds).
The anti-police accusations continue despite the tallies of police activities that call out the anti-police lies.
Most cops are definitely not racist. The reality is that the only thing all cops have in common is that they are all someone’s father or mother or brother or sister or uncle or aunt, someone’s neighbor, friend, husband, or wife — in short, they are human beings. And wearing a badge does nothing to change that.
Reasons for Rioting
In actuality, increased anti-police sentiment is not meant to stop racism; it is aimed at undoing the very fabric of American society by removing law and order to allow the forced shifting of America into a socialist/communist nation — although a direct consequence of hamstringing the police in their efforts to protect black people is an increase in black deaths, the opposite of what rioters claim.
How do we know this?
First, as we’ve already shown, data, anecdotal stories, and statistics show that police racism and injustice are not the reasons for the riots, so the cause must be something else.
Second, the apparent goal of the riots has been to break the relationship between local police and their communities, which till now has usually been a relationship based on mutual trust. Once a large enough section of the people believed the lie that police are the enforcement arm of a racist system, attacks on police and others accused of benefiting from “systemic racism” were to be completely expected and could be expected to be divisive, and the logical reason for causing such a break would be to institute a globalist/socialist agenda.
Consider this: America does do policing differently than the rest of the world. America — unlike most nations — has local police departments, independent from federal or even state control. Police departments and their officers are accountable locally. This is a hallmark of the American principles of government and is one of the main safeguards of individual freedom and states’ autonomy. Without the existence of strong, local police forces independent of outside influence — especially influence that is either political or federal — the chance that real, protective individual rights will survive is virtually zero. Local police are one of the things that distinguish the United States from other nations, where citizens don’t have real rights; they have privileges given and taken by government.
In other parts of the world, the police do the bidding of the national government, without heed to the wishes of the people they supposedly serve. By way of contrast to our country, the nationalized police force of the Soviet Union was not subordinate to the law; it decided what could be done, and not be done, and to whom something could be done. The Soviet police agency’s main duty was to ensure the survival of the Communist Party, not dispense law and order fairly and equally. Likewise, in present-day China, the People’s Armed Police is federalized and its responsibilities include ensuring correct political thinking by every person in each community nationwide.
Even the limited extent to which the federal government already intrudes in local policing in the United States should discourage continuing in that direction. Take, for instance, “civil asset forfeiture,” which is the process whereby the police seize properties and goods that were alleged to be used in a crime — without the need to arrest, charge, and convict someone of a crime in order to keep the property. The police either simply keep what they take for themselves, or they sell it for the cash. It was once estimated that the police seize/steal more dollars worth of goods than criminals on the streets steal each year. As the unjustness of civil asset forfeiture over time became more evident and 11 states eliminated civil asset forfeiture altogether (as of 2018, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures), the federal government usually encouraged its use, sharing monies obtained by seizing goods with local authorities through its Equitable Sharing Program.
As well, it largely has been federal government monetary incentives and gear giveaways that have led to the militarizing of many police departments nationwide.
A third way that we know that the riots are meant to bring about global socialism is because globalists tell us so.
One of the leading globalist groups in the United States, which has an inordinate amount of influence over our government, is the Council on Foreign Relations. In its main publication, Foreign Affairs, it regularly touts the pro-globalist line of thinking when commenting on nearly every subject, and that certainly holds true in reference to the rioting.
In its September/October 2020 issue, Foreign Affairs published an article by Laurence Ralph, professor of anthropology and director of the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton University, entitled “To Protect and to Serve: Global Lessons in Police Reform.” That article begins:
Public outcry over the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd earlier this year has ignited mass demonstrations against structural racism and police violence in the United States. The protests have reached every American state and spread to countries around the world; they arguably constitute the most broad-based civil rights movement in American history. Protests against the brutalization of communities of color by the U.S. criminal justice system have been growing for years, but the explosive scale of the uprising this spring and summer makes it clear that the United States has reached a national reckoning.
Most Americans now understand that their country needs a radical transformation: polls conducted in early June found that a majority of U.S. citizens support sweeping national law enforcement reforms. But as Americans embark on an urgent public conversation about policing, bias, and the use of force, they should remember that theirs is not the first or the only country to grapple with these policy questions. Many reform advocates and researchers have already begun to look overseas, pointing to countries where police training looks vastly different than it does in the United States: countries where police departments take far different approaches to the use of force or have even disarmed entirely, where criminal justice systems have adopted alternative sentencing programs, and where authorities have experimented with innovative approaches to de-escalation.
Some of these ideas could be adapted for use in the United States. For too long, a culture of American exceptionalism has been a barrier to the implementation of policies that have improved public safety around the globe. Now, the United States’ capacity to heal as a nation could very well depend on its willingness to listen and learn from the rest of the world.
In short, the article — hence the CFR itself — not only regurgitates the falsehoods about systemic racism, it dubs the riots a “civil rights movement” that’s necessary to redeem our nation’s policing and the country’s racist white privilege. Ralph and the CFR, simply put, are race-baiting.
To start, “structural racism” in this country is a myth. Though there are obviously individuals of every race who are racist, there is no outright holding back of blacks. Logic points to the truth: It’s not logical that a racist nation elects black mayors, governors, representatives, senators, and — for two terms — a president. Furthermore, a racist nation doesn’t make a black woman (Oprah Winfrey) one of the most popular, wealthiest television talk-show hosts in the world, or a black man (Bill Cosby) one of the most famous and wealthy actors in the world. As to Cosby, his infamous fall from grace was so profound because he had such a great height from which to fall. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Cosby was known as “America’s dad.” This happened though the black population in America has hovered around 13 percent for decades. Let that sink in for a moment. Now ask yourself, does 13 percent of the population elect a black president or drive high enough ratings to make Winfrey and Cosby household names? No. Without many millions of white voters and viewers, those things would never have happened. “Structural” or “systemic” racism is a myth perpetuated by those who would divide Americans along racial lines for their own purposes.
Then, of the three “murders” of blacks called out by Ralph and supposedly signs of systemically racist whites and police — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd — none have as yet been shown to be caused by racism.
Though three civilians — Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and their friend William “Roddie” Bryan — were charged with murdering Ahmaud Arbery, there is plenty of evidence that the father, son, and friend were attempting to apprehend Arbery. Arbery was shown on security video burglarizing a house under construction in the neighborhood where he was shot. It also appears that Arbery tried to wrestle the shotgun away from Travis McMichael when he was shot. His death is tragic, but it is not necessarily murder or a result of racism. A jury will have to decide that.
And while Breonna Taylor was a black innocent bystander shot by police, there was no intention to shoot her. She was simply caught in the crossfire when her boyfriend Kenneth Walker — suspected of using her apartment as a base of operations for his drug-dealing enterprise — opened fire on police as they entered the residence to serve a warrant. Only after Walker fired, hitting Louisville (Kentucky) Metro Police Department Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly in the femoral artery, did police return fire. Taylor was struck and killed. Again, tragic, but not murder and not racism.
Even the George Floyd case lacks the racism angle: While Officer Derek Chauvin did callously kneel on Floyd’s neck during an arrest, endangering his life, an autopsy showed that Floyd had very high levels of both Fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death. Either of those dangerous drugs taken alone — much less together — could have caused respiratory and cardiac distress, leading to death. Moreover, Floyd’s body did not show evidence of suffocation. That is, of course, not a justification for Chauvin’s actions, but it does indicate that his actions may not have caused the death of Floyd. Too, of the four officers involved in the Floyd arrest, one was black, one was Asian, and Chauvin was married to a Hmong woman. (For a more in-depth look at police brutality in America, see the article on page 18.)
It appears that the only things Professor Ralph’s three examples have in common — besides being dead — is that they were all black, yet he deems them to be examples of structural racism and evidence that our police system should be changed.
And the answers to our problems, according to Ralph and the CFR, lie within the nationalized police forces abroad. Police in America should be modeled after police in other nations. Perhaps America should even disarm her police.
As an aside, the idea of disarming local police is intricately tied to the idea of disarming the American people. An armed populace — including local police — is a natural preventative to mass tyranny. Local, independent police (along with the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms) are a prerequisite for a free society, just as a nationalized police force and a monopoly of power (disarmed citizenry) are prerequisites for enforcing tyranny. Period.
The CFR wants to see local police disbanded in favor of national (and eventually international) police. By putting America first, claims the good professor, Americans have failed to help — and have actually hurt — the rest of the world. The penance Ralph assigns for the sin of American exceptionalism is to “listen and learn from the rest of the world.”
However, the result of following such recommendations ends up being tyranny. If America should ever adopt the model practiced by “the rest of the world,” she would only be one election away from national police enforcing the dictates of a dictator.
And the CFR’s globalist message isn’t limited to areas inside the walls of academia and Congress: As The New American has reported in multiple past articles, members of the CFR hold a near-total monopoly on news media in the United States. Nearly every big-name media outlet one can think of — including CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many more that space does not allow this writer to list — has within its leadership at least one CFR member. Hence the nearly nonstop major-media repetition of anti-police lies, with virtually no attempts to get the truth out there.
Considering the lockstep major-media reporting about the rioting, the justifications of the rioting and looting as “protests,” and the repeating of false claims about systemic racism, to assume that the leaders of the major media are not colluding with the CFR in their riot coverage would be to essentially assert that there are no real journalists in major media — people with the capacity to do research and use critical thinking to find out the truth. While it’s possible that’s true, it is unlikely. It makes more sense to assume that the companies hire reporters with a pro-globalist bent who are willing to ignore truth to accomplish what they see as a greater good: global socialism.
In truth, the war on police is nothing new. In the 1960s, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, inspector general of the CIA, testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary. In his sworn testimony, Kirkpatrick said that on an international scale, communists were attacking the very idea of police as a means of keeping law and order and that these attacks were “planned and directed by the strategists of international communism.” The purpose of these attacks was to weaken the ability of police in any given nation to prevent “international communism” from taking over that nation. He said, “The communists will exert every effort to prevent the development of a strong police force.” He pointed out that at the time, “Their slogan today is ‘Struggle for Peace’ while they make any area of their choosing into bloody battlefields, turning neighbor against neighbor, and brother against brother.” The mantra we hear in 2020 is “No Justice, No Peace.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
Black Lives Matter and Antifa are funded by globalists/socialists such as George Soros and employed as “useful idiots” to burn and pillage while their globalist masters work on “police reform” and other policies designed to change the very nature of America. Evidence of this is legion.
The Solution: “Support Your Local Police — and Keep Them Independent”
It is very apparent that since the goal of the riots is to dismantle the local police in order to take a large step on the road to a globalist/socialist nation, the way to fight the rioters is to make sure that police departments remain local, beholden to local citizenry. And any efforts to empower anti-police groups or federal departments to have control over local police should be fought — with no acceptance of compromise.
This is as true now as it was when Robert Welch, who founded The John Birch Society (this magazine’s parent organization), launched a program in 1963 to create both awareness and effective activism called Support Your Local Police (SYLP), a program that is still going strong.
It is noteworthy that when Welch launched the SYLP program, many wondered why such an effort was needed. After all, except for the occurrence of a few small-scale riots, police at the time were highly respected, and supporting police was as American as supporting motherhood or apple pie. But Welch forecast the strategy of demonizing police, which he described in the future tense: “The police will be ‘crucified’ by the Liberals.”
Then the major rioting and attacks on police began (back then), making obvious the need for the campaign.
All that is needed now (as then) is men and women of strong moral fiber to join or form SYLP committees. Those committees spread the message in their neighborhoods that police are a necessary good and are worthy of the support of the people they serve and protect. They also show the police departments that they can operate without state or federal outside influence.
Contact The John Birch Society. Find out whether there is a local SYLP committee near you. If there is, join it. If not, form one. The war on police is a war on America. We need them and they need us.
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