Sunday was a bloody one for police officers just doing their job to keep us safe. One police officer in San Antonio, Texas, Detective Benjamin Marconi, a father of three, was murdered at point blank range as he was writing a traffic ticket in his car. Three other officers were wounded in unprovoked attacks on Sunday — two in Missouri and one in Sanibel, Florida. All four attacks occurred within a twelve hour period. These attacks, while said to be unconnected with each other, continue this year’s alarming pattern of escalation of hate crimes targeting the police. As San Antonio’s police chief said in trying to explain the likely motive of Detective Marconi’s alleged killer, “I think the uniform was the target and the first person who happened along was the person he targeted.” On Tuesday, yet another police officer was shot in the head in Detroit. The motive of the shooter has not yet been released by authorities.
According to data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, an organization that tracks police fatalities, the number of police officers killed by ambush this year (with a month still to go) has already surpassed the number killed by ambush in any of the last ten years. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund has reported that “the number of officers shot and killed in ambush attacks this year now totals 20, which is the highest total since 1995.” The number of officers fatally shot altogether between January 1stand November 22nd is sixty, up by 67 percent from last year. These include the killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas on July 7th and the three officers killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana ten days later.
Killings of police officers are sadly becoming the new normal. And, as Daniel Greenfield wrote on FrontPage Magazine, President Obama “normalized the war on police. The pro-crime lobby took over. Black Lives Matter harassment and terror became routine. Criminals were freed and police officers persecuted.”
Obama’s presumption is that in any controversial incident involving a confrontation between the police and African-Americans, the police are guilty before being proven innocent. For example, before he knew all the facts, he said that the Cambridge, Massachusetts police officers had “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama also criticized the police in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown, for which Obama blamed the police. “Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness,” Obama commented before there was any independent review of the circumstances surrounding the Ferguson shooting. His own Justice Department ultimately exonerated the police officer involved in the shooting after an exhaustive investigation. Obama had also criticized the Ferguson police for their handling of what Obama wrongly described as “peaceful protests” following the shooting. There is nothing peaceful about looting, throwing Molotov cocktails at police, or shooting at a police helicopter.
Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police in Ferguson, gave President Obama some advice which he has failed to heed: “I think what he has to do as president and as a constitutional lawyer is remember that there is a process in the United States and the process is being followed, for good or for ill, by the police and by the county and by the city and by the prosecutors’ office.”
Instead, Obama has doubled down in siding with hate mongering activists against the police. He invited Black Lives Matter leaders to the White House for meetings. He heaped praised on the anti-police organization’s leaders in attendance, claiming they have “made history” and done “outstanding work.” In one such meeting last February, Obama lauded Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson, who had led protests against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore that turned violent. The protests in Baltimore, like those in Ferguson, were sparked by incidents involving the death of an African-American male for which the police were initially blamed but ultimately cleared of wrong-doing. And just like in Ferguson, Obama, in concert with Black Lives Matter, was quick to blame the police: “We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now.”
President Obama did decry the killing of the five police officers in Dallas last July and acknowledged the important role the police play in maintaining the rule of law. Around the same time, however, when asked about the Dallas shooting, Obama’s White House guest McKesson said,” the movement didn’t cause anything, the police killing people is what caused all of this.” Just a few days later, McKesson was Obama’s guest in the White House again. That says volumes about where Barack Obama’s true sympathies lie.
The story of the war on the police would not be complete without mentioning the role of illegal immigrants in some of the attacks that have led to police fatalities. In Houston, for example, where the former police chief was reported to have been a supporter of “sanctuary city” policies and adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to the handling of illegal immigrants in police custody, an illegal alien shot and killed an undercover policeman in June 2009. According to the Houston Chronicle, he had at least four previous encounters with the Houston Police Department since 2002.
The previous month in 2009, according to Judicial Watch, “another Houston officer was shot in the face by an illegal immigrant drug lord while attempting to serve a narcotics warrant at a house. The illegal alien from El Salvador had been arrested five times for possession or delivery of drugs, including three times after an immigration judge granted him voluntary departure in 2001.”
In 2006, a Mexican illegal immigrant, who had been deported three years earlier for molesting a child, shot and killed a Houston police officer with four bullets to the head. Imagine how the widow of the slain police officerfelt when she learned that Houston’s former “sanctuary cities” police chief had been offered a top immigration job in the Obama administration.
California is for all intents and purposes a sanctuary state. In October 2014, two police officers were killed in California allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been deported twice previously.
The Obama administration has given cover to the sanctuaries for illegal immigrants. The politicians running these sanctuary havens have paid no price for defying federal immigration law, which the Obama administration has not vigorously enforced anyway. Obama’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has released thousands of criminal illegal aliens from its custody, including some who had homicide-related convictions. Police officers, as well as civilians such as Kate Steinle, murdered on a San Francisco pier last year allegedly by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions who had been deported five times from the United States, have paid the ultimate price.
All this will hopefully change with the Trump administration. Anti-police activists will no longer have a sympathetic ear in the White House. Those state and local officials who try to emulate the segregationists of yesteryear by defying federal law may end up being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, particularly if they are found to be harboring previously deported illegal immigrants with criminal convictions on their record.
The police risk life and limb every day they perform their duty to keep us safe. At long last they will have a federal government that watches their back rather than stabs them in the back.
