A war on cops is brewing across the country, and the Democrat Party is directly responsible for aiding and abetting it. They can deny it all they want, but they have blood on their hands.
Following George Floyd’s death in 2020, calls by Democrat politicians to defund or “reimagine” the police, in conjunction with soft-on-crime district attorneys, have led to a massive increase in homicides as well as an all-out assault on police officers.
According to the National Fraternal Order of Police, 2021 was one of the deadliest years for police officers. A total of 346 officers were shot last year, resulting in 63 deaths, a 55 percent increase from 2020. The number of officers involved in ambush-style attacks also increased by 115 percent in 2021 compared to 2020. In total, 130 officers were shot in 103 ambush attacks last year.
If the first month of 2022 is any indication, these trends show no sign of improving. At least 24 police officers were shot in January.
Two NYPD officers, Jason Rivera, 22, and Wilbert Mora, 27, were killed in January when a deranged man fired at them with a stolen Glock 45 after they responded to a 911 call in Harlem.
Just two days later, an officer was shot in Washington, D.C., and four days after that, three more officers were shot in Houston. Fortunately, none of those officers’ injuries appear to be life-threatening.
Thousands of NYPD officers and citizens flooded the streets of 5th Avenue to pay their respects to Rivera, a rookie cop who was honored with a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and posthumously promoted to Detective First Grade.
In an emotional tribute, Rivera’s high-school sweetheart, Dominique Luzuriaga, made it clear that she believed radical progressive policies were directly responsible for her husband’s murder.
“Although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me. This system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service,” Luzuriaga said. “I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA. I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now.”
Luzuriaga was referring to Alvin Bragg, New York County’s first black district attorney, who is now facing backlash for his infamous “Day One” memo, in which he wrote a letter to his staff stating that his new policies “reflect both the need for fundamental reforms in the criminal legal system and the need for community safety. The two goals of justice and safety are not opposed to each other. They are inextricably linked. We deserve and demand both.”
But Bragg seems to have an interesting understanding of what he considers to be “justice.” Apparently, he means “community safety” for criminals but not for victims.
In his memo, Bragg promised to appoint an executive DA who would oversee new policies related to “alternatives to incarceration, reentry, and restorative justice.” He also promised to completely dissolve Manhattan’s Conviction Integrity Unit and replace it with a “Free the Wrongfully Convicted Unit.” He also pledged to disband the sex crimes unit entirely and replace it with a “survivor-centered, trauma informed” unit.
Sensing a trend here? In Bragg’s warped reality, criminals are the victims of a supposedly unjust system.
Bragg’s memo also stated that in almost all instances, fare evasion, trespassing, driving with a suspended license, traffic violations, prostitution, and resisting arrest should no longer be prosecuted. It remains unclear how exactly an officer is supposed to arrest a violent criminal who steals hundreds of dollars of merchandise from a store if resisting arrest is no longer a prosecutable offense. But apparently, Bragg seems to think that officers only enjoy arresting people for no apparent reason.
Bragg also noted in the memo to his assistant DAs that they “must recognize that most gun violence is driven by a small number of people in a small geographic area, and not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence.”
By Bragg’s brazen standard, there would have no been need to classify the lunatic who shot and murdered two NYPD officers with a gun he obtained illegally as a “driver of violence.”
Finally, Bragg noted in the memo that his office will “seek dispositions that avoid immigration consequences for all misdemeanors, and all felonies for which non-incarceratory outcomes are the presumptive outcome.” In other words, if a migrant illegally crosses our border and hops a turnstile to ride the subway while in possession of an illegal firearm, not only will they almost certainly not be deported, but there won’t be consequences of any kind.
How’s that for justice?
Bragg’s profoundly stupid policies are by no means an outlier. Los Angeles County’s radical district attorney, George Gascón, has made eliminating cash bail his top priority, resulting in a 160 percent year-over-year increase in stolen freight train packages from Amazon, FedEx, and UPS. And in Philadelphia, the district attorney, Larry Krasner, is already on schedule to surpass last year’s record 559 homicides, with at least 38 murders already occurring this year.
Will anything improve?
Last week, Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams released a 15-page “Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” which entails bringing back the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime unit which the previous soft-on-crime mayor, Bill de Blasio, disbanded in 2020. That’s a good start, but it will take more than photo ops and platitudes for New Yorkers to actually feel safe again.
The violent crime, lawlessness, and looting we’re seeing across the country is the direct result of the policies of far-left politicians who have repeatedly peddled the lie that police officers and our criminal justice system are systematically racist.
No amount of revisionist history can change that fact.
David Keltz is the author of The Campaign of His Life and Media Bias in the Trump Presidency and the Extinction of the Conservative Millennial. His writing has been published in The American Spectator, the Federalist, American Greatness, RealClearPolitics, the American Thinker, and the New York Daily News, among others. Follow him on Twitter @David_Keltz.