The more we learn about the latest assassination of police officers, this time resulting in the deaths of three in Baton Rouge, the more it appears to be the outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile two weeks ago.
“Five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric? No, he doubled down...”
That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.
President Barack Obama bears responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin.
Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer for the same crime. Missing was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to "biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out ... across our criminal justice system."
Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric? No, he doubled down, claiming that black parents were justified in fearing that their children could be killed by a cop whenever they walk "out the door." This rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to this crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other.
The media bear equal responsibility for the ongoing carnage. The press immediately slotted the shootings of Sterling and Castile into the racist-cop paradigm, though the facts about what the officers saw and whether the victims were reaching for their guns were unknown.
Even before this latest attack on the police, officers across the country have been reeling under the prejudice directed against them. A police trainer meeting with officers on July 7, hours before the Dallas carnage, reported to me that the cops were "out of their minds that the default [in the Castile and Sterling shootings] is racism, without one iota of fact."
Officers have already been backing off of proactive policing under the constant charge that they are racist for making pedestrian stops and enforcing public-order laws in black neighborhoods.
In June, I spoke with police officers in Dallas about the city's big spike in homicides this year. The officers chalked it up to de-policing. "Officers are now leery of doing their job," a cop who runs warrants in the high-crime Five Points area in Dallas' Vickery Meadows neighborhood told me. "Why make stops in the first place?"
“Officers have already been backing off of proactive policing under the constant charge that they are racist for making pedestrian stops and enforcing public-order laws in black neighborhoods.”
We are quickly reaching the worst days of the nightmare 1960s, when it seemed that the very foundation of society was breaking apart. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment.
It may be too late to stop this fire from spreading. But Obama has one more chance to try to put it out. He failed that opportunity in his remarks hours after the Baton Rouge carnage, delivering instead an anodyne call to heal "our divisions" and discard "inflammatory rhetoric thrown around to advance an agenda."
Sorry, Mr. President, those who tell the truth about crime and policing are not part of the problem. The killing of cops is furthered exclusively by those peddling a false narrative that cops harbor lethal bias toward blacks.
Obama should call for the Black Lives Matter movement to fold its tent -- and he himself should start telling the truth about inner-city crime.
This piece appeared in The Dallas Morning News under the title "Obama is responsible for fanning flames of racial discord", originally adapted from City Journal Online
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by Sean Gardner / Getty Images
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News