Lies about cops fuel their killers
POLITICALLY-FUELED cop hatred has taken another victim. Convicted felon Alexander Bonds, who had already assaulted an officer with brass knuckles, wrote on Facebook last September, “Police is f----ts, and this ain’t no gimmick. That’s where your taxpayer money be going, to pay off your own people being murdered. N----s ain’t taking it no more, Mr. Officer.”
Bonds chose just after the Fourth of July to act on his hatred, walking up to an NYPD mobile command post in The Bronx at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday to pump a bullet into the head of Officer Miosotis Familia, a 12-year veteran of the force. She died several hours later in the hospital.
The assassination of the 48-year-old mother of three comes as gun murders of officers continue to rise nationwide: up 9 percent this year, on top of last year’s 53 percent increase. Last Thursday in San Antonio, Police Officer Miguel Moreno was deliberately shot in the head while investigating a car break-in. The San Antonio police chief responded, “I’m sick of the police haters. We protect them. We defend them. And they give us a big F.U.”
Alexander Bonds’ anti-cop rhetoric echoes the Black Lives Matter-inspired vitriol spewed by previous cop assassins over the last three years.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who assassinated NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on Dec. 20, 2014, had posted on Instagram: “I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours . . . . .Let’s Take 2 of Theirs.” Gavin Long, who assassinated a sheriff ’s deputy and two police officers in Baton Rouge on July 17, 2016, declared in a suicide note: “I must bring the same destruction that bad cops continue to inflict upon my people, upon bad cops as well as good cops.” Micah Johnson, a supporter of the New Black Panther Party and other black-nationalist groups, said he wanted to kill white people and white cops in particular before assassinating five Dallas officers on July 7, 2016.
Those assassinations were followed by gloating on social media. “That n---a that shot the cops is a legend,” read a typical Twitter message after Brinsley’s murder of Officers Liu and Ramos.
On Wednesday, a commenter on The New York Times Web page claimed that Alexander Bonds’ assassination of Officer Familia is an understandable response to racist cop violence: “Cops kill Blacks and always get away with it. Is it any wonder that this is going to happen as well? They know they have no chance in the courts. While I would never encourage something like this, it’s easy to understand his motivation.”
Actually, it is tragically easy to understand, though certainly not condone, the motivation, given the drumbeat of lies about the police that have been amplified by the media and the political establishment during the Black Lives Matter era.
At the memorial service for the five assassinated Dallas officers last July, President Barack Obama had the temerity to repeat his usual charge that policing was lethally and systemically racist. Black parents were right, Obama said, to fear that their child could be killed by a cop every time he goes onto the street just for doing “something stupid.”
Obama’s preposterous charge recalled Mayor de Blasio’s statement that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his son may face from “officers who are paid to protect him,” after no cop was indicted for the July 2014 death of Eric Garner.
These claims were ignorant. There is no government agency that has saved more black lives over the last two decades than the police. In fact, Officer Familia was manning the mobile command unit because shootings in the 46th Precinct are up over 29 percent through June 25, compared with the same period last year. It’s not the cops who have shot those victims, but other young minority males.
Yet again this month, The Washington Post spun its database of fatal officer-involved shootings as proof of racially biased policing, even though blacks are killed at a rate lower than their violent crime rate would predict, including their violent-crime rate against police officers.
Black males, 42 percent of all cop-killers in the last decade, are 6 percent of the nation’s population. A cop is 18¹/2 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a cop.
The White House is no longer occupied by a supporter of the mendacious Black Lives Matter movement. And following the assassination of Officers Ramos and Liu, Mayor de Blasio has thankfully ditched the anti-cop rhetoric. But the lethal anger fomented by Black Lives Matter lives on, making criminals more likely to shoot at officers and increasing tensions on the streets. The only long-term solution is for political and police leaders to stand up and start telling the truth about crime and about the power of proactive policing to save lives.