The police-free protest zones popping up across the United States are built upon a vicious lie — namely, the claim that most police departments by their very nature are thoroughly corrupt and racist and beyond the reach of reform and repair.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
And in the upcropping of these free-for-all protest zones, we are witnessing an embrace of lawlessness and anarchy that can only produce the bitter fruits of death and destruction.
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Atlanta appears to be the most recent city in which protesters are attempting to establish such a lawless zone.
On Tuesday night, three men with guns told Fox News that police were unwelcome in the Atlanta neighborhood surrounding the Wendy’s restaurant where a police officer fatally shot Rayshard Brooks on June 12 after the man resisted arrest and pointed a stun gun at police.
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This development, of course, follows the establishment in Seattle of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone and a ripple effect across the country of several similar attempts by imitators in other cities.
In Seattle, the CHOP zone on Saturday experienced a shooting that left one person dead and another with life-threatening injuries. Where’s a cop when you need one? Oh yeah, they don’t want one.
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No one denies that individual police officers sometimes make grave mistakes and even commit horrible crimes, including murder. The whole nation has now watched in horror the footage of the tragic and preventable death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers.
And no one denies the idea that reforms might help police agencies better weed out bad officers and generally improve outcomes of encounters with suspects.
But bad actors represent the tiniest minority of police officers.
Obviously, even one unjustified killing by a police officer of another human being is horrendous and unacceptable.
And we all must demand fair investigations and accountability in such cases.
The four Minneapolis officers involved in Floyd’s death have all been fired and charged criminally, and justice requires that we now await final verdicts.
The same is true of the officer who fatally shot Brooks in Atlanta.
Police officers endure daily threats to their own lives in order to create a safer world for you and me — for people of every color, race and background.
But let’s not lose sight of the larger facts.
In a June 22 letter to congressional leaders, 10 of my fellow attorneys general and I recently sought to put things in perspective.
“Last year in the United States, a country with a population of 330 million people, 1,004 civilians were fatally shot by police officers,” our letter stated. “The vast majority of these officer-involved shootings were justifiable, and most involved an armed or dangerous individual.”
Our letter acknowledged that in 2019 there were nine fatal shootings of unarmed blacks (down from 38 in 2015) and 19 fatal shootings of unarmed whites (down from 32 in 2015). Those deaths represented 0.1 percent of all black homicide victims and 0.3 percent of all white homicide victims.
Consider these statistics in light of the challenges faced by officers every day on the streets.
As noted in our letter: “Over 58,000 officers were assaulted while performing their duties in 2018, according to FBI data collected from only two-thirds of law-enforcement agencies. That is an assault rate of 10.8 per 100 officers. Moreover, assaults with deadly weapons against the police occurred 33 times per day.”
Police officers endure these daily threats to their own lives in order to create a safer world for you and me — for people of every color, race and background.
Let anyone agitating for cop-free zones be careful lest their wishes be granted.
“Law and order,” after all, is more than a catchphrase. It’s an absolutely essential ingredient for any civilized society.
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America’s founding document speaks boldly of establishing justice, ensuring tranquility and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
The brave men and women serving as police officers remain the indispensable part of preserving a nation that upholds these priorities. Let us give them our gratitude and support as we all work toward achieving our most sacrosanct ideals.
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