After the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man, in the custody of Minneapolis Police, many Democrats, including Joe Biden, have said the police are systematically racist.  San Francisco Democrat Mayor London Breed, Democrat “squad” member Rep. Cori Bush and others have called to defund them.  Their reasoning, so to speak, is that since some police officers rarely kill an unarmed Black man, the entire institution is “systematically racist” (the expression of choice by the Democrat party and their stenographers in what remains of our “news” media), it is necessary to defund the police.  Inferring from a few cases to a conclusion about an entire institution used to be called “the fallacy of hasty generalization” in university critical reasoning courses, but the lack of any good arguments for the Left’s talking point has required their use of this fallacy in recent years.

In fact, many of the stories of police killing unarmed Black men, like the killing of the “gentle giant” Michael Brown in Ferguson, turn out to be false.  Many leftist activists still use the Michael Brown slogan “Hands up don’t shoot!” even though it has been established that 300-pound Michael Brown, who is on videotape robbing and roughing up a diminutive Asian shop owner earlier that evening, did not have his hands up but rather attacked police officer Darren Wilson and tried to take his gun.  Multiple Black witnesses told this to the police because, in what is apparently news to the Left, most Black people do not wish to live in neighborhoods in which 300-pound thugs terrorize ordinary law-abiding people.  Naturally, given the inverted nature of our current “justice” system, Officer Wilson, who correctly acted in self-defense and in defense of the community, lost his job over the affair.

Roland Fryer, Black Harvard university economist and rising star (until he did a detailed empirical study of police shooting statistics) concluded that “On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences either in the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account”. 

Unfortunately, facts do not seem to be penetrating the “woke” brain that has been mesmerized by Marxist scripture, according to which the police are an armed force employed to repress the “proletariat” and protect the evil rich people, which makes it hard to understand why a substantial majority of poor black people want the same or an even greater police presence in their communities.  Of course, our all-knowing “woke” Democrat elites, happily spend campaign money to fund their own police protection, their own pampered lives being much more important than yours. Naturally, these woke elites have assumed the right to speak for all Black people. It may, therefore, in such circumstances, be useful to discuss a particular case of police action in order to remind oneself what they really have to face in their jobs, should this still be permissible in what remains of our country.

In 1992-1993 a serial rapist/killer was stalking Allentown, PA.  Several women, including a young girl, were murdered, but one victim, Denise Sam-Cali, attacked in her own home, managed to get away from the killer and stagger onto her front lawn with the killer in close pursuit.  A neighbor heard the commotion and came outside to see what was going on, causing the rapist/killer to flee. Since she had been the only victim to see the killer and survive, the police thought he might return to eliminate the witness, so they stationed a police officer in her home.

Two weeks went by as young Officer Brian Lewis, who, newly married for a few months, would have preferred to be home with his wife, sat quietly and patiently in the dark in Denise’s home as she slept upstairs, not even able to listen to a radio for fear of alerting the killer, doing his tedious duty.  However, on the last night of the stakeout the killer returned, climbing through a window. Officer Lewis identified himself as a police officer. The killer produced a gun and the two began firing at each other at point blank range in the tiny enclosed space, the officer and the killer only visible to each other in cascade of gun flashes that briefly illumined the darkness. As Officer Lewis reloads his weapon the intruder dives through a kitchen window and runs away.

A man with a gunshot wound to the stomach turned himself in at a local hospital later that night and was arrested. Harvey Miguel Robinson was eventually sentenced to death and both Denise and numerous other women were no doubt saved by the astonishing selfless courage of Officer Lewis.  Of course, most media accounts of this story do not bother to mention Officer Lewis’s name, who they only refer to as “a police officer,” these, apparently, being easily replaceable like toasters and not nearly so important as the professors who churn out thoughtless anti-police propaganda from the safety of their university offices.

We give the police an impossible job and then we put their every split-second decision under a microscope searching from some mistake (or something that can be represented as a mistake by unscrupulous partisan activists), a standard the elites would never apply to themselves. Needless to say, Officer Lewis, being a police officer, not a professor, never sought out the camera or complained about being ignored.  He just did his job.

Unfortunately, the results of the Left’s latest social experiment with people’s lives in the service of their political careers was all too predictable, although none of them predicted it. Crime and homicide rates soared around the country.  Minnesota recorded “185 murders … a dramatic increase of 58 per cent” from the previous year.  FBI Director Wray testified to the House Oversight Committee that 37 police officers were murdered in the first 5 months of 2021, compared with 46 in the whole previous year, almost double the previous year.  The linked article explains that this does not count the police officers who were killed in other ways, drowning during attempted rescues, being hit by cars or “because … law enforcement,” unlike many government school “teachers”, “kept coming to work every day despite the pandemic”.  The carnage got too high even for the always self-congratulatory Left, so that Mayor London Breed had to reverse herself and call for refunding the police.  The “Defund” movement became so unpopular that the Democrats tried to claim that it was actually the Republicans that had called to defund the police, but this was too comical even for the Left and the ruse had to be abandoned.

Typically, our precious elites miss no opportunity, in stirring words about “social justice” delivered from their pulpit, to lecture the deplorables how much they care about “marginalized” people.  However, it might be a useful, although humbling, lesson in what courage in the real world is, as opposed to the posturing produced effortlessly in the idle talk of the classroom or newsroom, if liberals were to accompany a police officer armed with a .38 down a dark alley to face a psychotic killer with an AK-47.  That would be a real education.

Photo credit: Max Braun CC BY-SA 2.0 license