Tragedy of the War on Cops

‘Wearing the badge shouldn’t make you a target,” FBI chief Christopher Wray warned Sunday — yet it clearly has. Murders of US police officers rose 59% in 2021, to 73 killed in the line of duty, even as the general murder rate was up less than half as much. Worse, Wray noted, all too many cops died from “being ambushed or shot while out on patrol.”

It’s all because of greater disorder on our streets, the outlawing of proactive policing and a hatred for cops fueled by shameful progressive politicians.

Yet the whole anti-police narrative is fundamentally a lie. Minority Americans benefited most from the country’s success in driving down crime. This city alone saw murders drop from 2,262 in 1990 to 292 in 2017 — which translates to tens of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic lives saved.

And plummeting crime also led to sharp drops in the jail and prison populations.

But the courts, electeds and the media still embraced claims of racist excess. That gave us not just the no-bail law and other overdone “reforms”: Manhattan elected a district attorney who flat-out promised not to enforce the law, while the City Council removed officers’ traditional immunity from being individually sued over their lifesaving work.

And much of the public turned sour, so that any arrest can draw a crowd harassing the police, even actively interfering.

Add in a rising risk of death in the line of duty, and more officers will retire early, potential recruits will seek another calling and the cops who remain will hang back more often.

Crime will be a huge issue this November, likely driving a huge wave that should start turning the tide. It can’t happen soon enough.